Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) gave an error-riddled address on his economic policy vision. Today — as a prebuttal to President Obama’s prime time address on Iraq this evening — Boehner tried his hand at national security policy.

Leaving his perpetual confusion about foreign affairs aside, Boehner also used the speech to take another whack at Obama’s economic program, saying that the steps the Obama team took to pull the economy back from the cliff, including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, actively made things worse for military veterans:

Today, as thousands of our warriors come home seeking to provide for their families and realize the American Dream they have volunteered to defend, they confront an economy that affords neither opportunities nor jobs. Veterans’ unemployment is now at 11 percent. That is why I have called on my colleagues in the Congress and the president to join me in supporting a series of immediate actions to end the ongoing economic uncertainty and help more Americans find an honest day’s work. ‘Stimulus’ spending sprees, permanent bailouts, federal mandates and government takeovers have failed this nation and have failed our veterans.

It’s nothing new for Boehner to criticize the stimulus, despite it having helped save or create millions of American jobs and been a key factor in the U.S. avoiding another Depression. But it is something for him to place his criticism in the veterans affairs context, as his professed desire to repeal unspent stimulus funds would have a noticeably negative effect on veterans.

The Department of Veterans Affairs was granted $1.8 billion in stimulus funding, all of which has been committed, and $916 million of which has been paid out. So canceling the unspent money would rescind nearly one billion in funds already designated to serve veterans.

The projects funded by this money include renovating, repairing, and upgrading veterans’ hospitals across the country, including one in Boehner’s home state of Ohio. The money is also being used to improve claims processing units for veteran health benefits (by hiring more workers and upgrading equipment).

The stimulus also provided $250 payments to disabled veterans and gave private sector employers a tax credit for hiring unemployed vets. Is Boehner willing to say that none of these steps were worthwhile, or to pull the plug on projects improving veterans’ facilities that are already planned and underway?

Sadly, veterans affairs was one of the areas that came under the cutting knife, as those crafting the stimulus sought to get it under an arbitrary $800 billion to swing a few Republican votes. In fact, $2 billion for VA construction was thrown out entirely during the negotiations. And if he had his way, Boehner would take away the funding that is left.

Dino Rossi, the Republican Senate nominee in Washington, has already made his penchant for economic voodoo apparent by falsely claiming that the estate tax will affect huge numbers of small businesses and inflating his state’s wealthy population by 24 times in an attempt to fearmonger about the effects of the expiring Bush tax cuts. And Rossi doesn’t seem to have it any more together when it comes to deficit reduction, as evidenced by some of his rhetoric on the campaign trail yesterday:

Rossi said the nation is on a “fiscal cliff,” and accused [Sen. Patty] Murray of being one of the people who brought the economy to the brink with deficit spending and industry bailouts. He said he would extend tax cuts made by Congress in 2001 and 2003, repeal the health reform law and work to reduce burdensome regulations on business if elected.

Of course, if one is truly concerned about a “fiscal cliff,” one would probably want to avoid implementing budget-busting tax cuts or repealing measures that actually reduce the deficit. But Rossi here is advocating for both.

Extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich — rather than letting them expire as the Obama administration has proposed — will add $830 billion to the deficit over the next ten years, all to the benefit of the richest two percent of Americans. Repealing the Affordable Care Act, meanwhile, would actually add $143 billion to the deficit, according to the latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

The deficit reduction plan Rossi listed on his website isn’t any more inspiring. His first idea — canceling the remaining TARP and Recovery Act funds — goes after two short-term programs that have no effect on the structural deficit. His two other ideas are a constitutional balanced budget amendment (which is a pipe dream that even conservatives realize would be an economic disaster) and cutting government pay.

The real drivers of the deficit — health care spending, huge tax cuts, and defense spending — don’t warrant a mention. But that’s because Rossi is far more interested in using the deficit to score political points than he is in making any serious decisions about getting that deficit under control.

Much like Kentucky GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul was forced to stop talking about his longstanding opposition to the ban on whites-only lunch counters after this neanderthanish position threatened his poll numbers, the GOP’s likely standard bearer in Alaska, Joe Miller, is now trying to clarify his radical statement that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional.  In an interview with Fox News, Miller tried to reassure viewers that he believes Medicare and Social Security are a “contract that we have with our seniors,” but he then outlined a plan that would bring both programs to a slow and painful end:

VAN SUSTEREN: All right, in the event that you are the candidate for the general election, what’s the story on Social Security and Medicare? Are you for it or against it? [...]

MILLER: If you look at, for example, the inlays coming in to Social Security, as of April this year, they’re outstripped by the payments. That’s the first time in a while that that’s happened. It’s projected to continue for several years.

And if we don’t get a grip on that now, if we don’t come up with solutions, you know, whether it be privatization, personalization or some other solution, which, frankly, you know, it’s our preference that that be a transferred power to the states. That’s really what the constitutional basis of our platform has been, that we need to get back to transferring many of the powers of the federal government to the states. We believe that that’s what the Tenth Amendment provides.

Watch it:

First of all, Miller’s suggestion that privatizing Social Security could help balance the budget is flat wrong.  Privatization imposes significant new risks on seniors, while creating new administrative costs and forcing benefit reductions.  Yet despite being a riskier, less beneficial program for seniors, it also will cost more money than the present system.

Miller’s plan to transfer programs like Medicare and Social Security to the states is even more radical.  Indeed, it is an economically impossible plan.

Under our current system, Americans can live in any state they choose.  An American who begins their career in Ohio, moves to Virginia to accept a better job offer, and then retires in Florida pays the same federal taxes regardless of their residence.  These taxes fund programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Now imagine that we lived in Joe Miller’s America, and that each state was responsible for setting up its own retirement system.  Under this system, the person described above would pay Ohio taxes while they worked in Ohio, Virginia taxes while they lived in Virginia, and would draw benefits from the state of Florida during their retirement.  The state which benefited from their taxes would not be the same state that was required to fund their retirement.

States like Florida, which attract an unusually large number of retirees, would simply collapse under the weight of their retirement programs.  Florida would be forced to jack up taxes on its own workers to pay for the influx of retirees, but these higher taxes would drive workers out of the state, forcing Florida to jack up taxes even more.  Eventually, this “death spiral” would lead Florida to insolvency, leaving its senior residents without any benefits whatsoever.  Nor could Florida prevent this death spiral by simply limiting retirement benefits to seniors who spent their working career in Florida — the Constitution forbids states from denying benefits to their residents based on length of residence.

Simply put, Joe Miller’s grasp of economics is even worse than his grasp of constitutional law.  His “tenther” plan to turn seniors’ fates over to the states cannot work so long as Americans are allowed to live wherever they choose.

Now that disgraced former health care executive Rick Scott has officially won his Republican gubernatorial primary in Florida, he is turning his attention to his general election campaign against the Democratic nominee, Florida CFO Alex Sink. And part of that campaign is evidently leaving no doubt as to where he stands regarding the Bush tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire at the end of the year — Scott very clearly wants them all extended, even for the richest two percent of Americans, per his campaign spokesperson:

Floridians want an answer: Will Alex Sink stand with Obama and let the Bush tax cuts expire, thereby increasing Floridians’ taxes, or will she stand with taxpayers and demand Obama work to extend the Bush tax cuts?

Scott has also touted his opposition to the Bush tax cuts on both national and local television. Watch it:

This tactic is puzzling because, as governor, Scott wouldn’t have any say over whether or not the Bush tax cuts get extended. Neither would Alex Sink. Sure, he could advise Florida’s congressional delegation, but at the end of the day, federal tax policy is not within the purview of the nation’s governors.

However, Scott would be able to influence Florida’s tax system, which at the moment is one of the nation’s most regressive, with no personal income tax and a high reliance on sales taxes. Florida’s poorest 20 percent currently pay 13.5 percent of their income in taxes, while the richest one percent of Floridians pay just 2.6 percent. In fact, Washington is the only state in the nation where a poor family can expect to pay higher taxes than in Florida, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

So what does Scott propose to do about this? He wants to completely eliminate the state’s corporate income tax, reduce property taxes, and leave the rest of the tax code as it is. Of course, he’ll then have to balance the budget with less revenue coming in, cutting services to the same poor families who are bearing the brunt of the tax burden and to whom he won’t even pay lip service.

Clearly, Scott thinks tying himself to an anti-Obama stance will pay off, but his state has some serious tax problems of its own that he doesn’t deign to mention, and which his economic plan will only make worse.

One of the favorite Republican talking points regarding the economy is that small businesses aren’t hiring because they’re paralyzed by “uncertainty” when it comes to tax and budget policy. “America’s employers are afraid to invest in an economy stalled by ‘stimulus’ spending and hamstrung by uncertainty,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) last week. “The prospect of higher taxes, stricter rules, and more regulations has employers sitting on their hands.”

According to the latest small business survey from the National Federation of Independent Business (which is a very conservative organization), about half of small businesses cite economic conditions or lack of sales prospects as their reason for not hiring, while just 12 percent say “political conditions.” However, business owners are holding back while Congress endlessly debates a small business lending bill, as USA Today reported:

“I’m still waiting for Congress to sign off on the bill,” says Amarjit Kaur, who runs a convenience store and gas station in Wood Village, Ore. She leases her property but has a chance to buy it. With the waived-fee provision, Kaur says she could save about $35,000 on her pending loan. Kaur’s is among about 1,000 other small businesses that “have their bank papers all done and will be funded in the days — moments — after the bill passes,” says U.S. Small Business Administration Administrator Karen Mills.. [...]

Many other businesses have paused expansion as they wait for the outcome of the bill, says Bob Coleman, publisher of the Coleman Report, which provides information on small-business lending.

“Some businesses can save thousands of dollars on the waived loan-fee provision alone, and they are thinking, ‘I might as well hold off and save the money,’” Coleman said.

And it’s Republicans who have refused to allow the small business bill to go forward, first bogging it down in committee by threatening to attach an unrelated tax cut for multi-millionaires to it, and then filibustering it on the Senate floor. In fact, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) referred to the bill as simply “another expensive and bureaucratic government program.”

The credit crunch affecting small businesses is very real and this bill could help alleviate it, getting those businesses loans to expand and hire. But Republicans have been tying it up in procedural knots for months, while simultaneously complaining that the Obama administration is not doing enough to aid small businesses. That’s a convenient political game to play, but it leaves actual small businesses out to dry.

One of the more enduring myths regarding the estate tax is that it forces family farmers to sell their entire farm when the owner dies, thus depriving them of their sole way to make a living. And Illinois’ Republican Senate candidate Mark Kirk took full advantage of this fear during an appearance before the Illinois Agricultural Legislative Roundtable this week:

We do not want it to be a catastrophic event in the economy of that family’s life, so that the kids who worked on that farm or in that business their whole life suddenly lose it because they can’t meet a 55 percent estate tax that’s just jumped back to life.

Regarding the estate tax, Kirk has said “my preferred rate is zero.”

Before we even get to the unfounded fears that Kirk is playing up to score political points, it should be noted that Kirk is suggesting the currently expired estate tax will come back next year at 55 percent, as current law stipulates. But President Obama and congressional Democrats have proposed permanently reinstating the tax at the 2009 level (45 percent with a $3.5 million exemption), only to be stymied by Republicans in the Senate. If the 55 percent rate does come back, it’ll be due to GOP obstruction.

But back to Kirk’s insistence on scaring farmers. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 1.6 percent of all farm estates in the country would be subject to the estate tax at the 2009 level. And a Congressional Budget Office study found that “all but a handful of the farm estates that would owe any tax under the 2009 parameters would have sufficient liquid assets on hand (such as bank accounts, stocks, and bonds) to pay the tax without having to touch the farm or business.”

Those exceedingly few farms that might have a cash-crunch problem “would have other options — such as spreading their payments over a 14-year period — that would allow them to pay the tax without selling off any of the business or farm assets.” In fact, in 2001 — when the estate tax actually was at 55 percent — the American Farm Bureau “could not cite a single example of a farm lost because of estate taxes.”

Iowa State University Economist Neil Harl “said he had searched far and wide but had never found a case in which a farm was lost because of estate taxes.” “It’s a myth,” he said. But it’s a myth that persists, and Kirk is exploiting it to push repealing a tax that overwhelmingly affects the super-rich. Incidentally, repealing the estate tax would cost $784 billion over ten years.

Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich is banking on a package of tax cuts to revive Ohio’s moribund economy. “Ohio’s high tax burden is hurting families, strangling businesses and stunting our ability to create jobs and revive our economy,” he claims.

Kasich’s plan is to entirely eliminate his state’s income and estate taxes, and he freely admits that he has no idea how much his plan is going to cost. “People want to know the details of my plan. I don’t have the revenues,” he said.

Not only will Kasich’s plan more than double Ohio’s budget deficit next year, but if history is any indication, that new budget hole will not by accompanied by any significant job creation. Policy Matters Ohio examined the effect of a 2005 cut in both the personal income tax and some of Ohio’s business taxes, finding that the result was billions of dollars of revenue loss and not very many jobs:

The premise of the tax overhaul was that it would spark Ohio’s economy. This was an unlikely claim to begin with, since taxes are not a key determinant of state economic performance…Sure enough, the tax cuts have not proven to be the magic potion for Ohio’s economy. Key measures of economic performance show the opposite: Ohio’s economy has produced relatively fewer jobs, fewer manufacturing jobs, less overall output and lower personal income growth than the country as a whole since the tax overhaul was approved in June 2005. Ohio’s share of the nation’s jobs has shrunk since then from 4.06 percent to 3.87 percent.

Plus, “Ohio’s real per capita Gross State Product stagnated when U.S. real per capita GDP rose.”

The tax cuts were not responsible for Ohio’s economic decline but, much like the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 at the federal level, they did not usher in the era of strong economic growth that their proponents suggested they would. This makes sense, as at the national level, job growth was stronger following President Clinton’s tax increase of 1993 than after either President Bush’s or President Reagan’s tax cuts.

So if history is any indication, Kasich’s job plan will be a dud, and simply bury Ohio in even more red ink, at which point Kasich will likely say that he has to cut services in order to balance the budget.

Former President George W. Bush, after keeping a mostly low-profile since leaving office, “is about to step into the public arena again” ahead of the release of his memoir, which is scheduled to be published the week after the November midterm elections. The book will reportedly include discussions of Bush’s economic decision-making, including his views on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that bear his name and the 2008 bailout of the financial system.

Bush pushed back the publication of the memoir, so that it wouldn’t impair the GOP’s performance in the midterm elections. But lately, some Republicans have been looking back on the Bush years with some nostalgia. “I think a lot of people are looking back with a little more — with more fondness on President Bush’s administration,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

And according to one of Bush’s cabinet secretaries, the memoir will give the public a chance for “serious debate” over whether Bush’s economic policies helped push the country into an economic meltdown:

Former Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, a close family friend, said the publicity would give the public a chance to reassess Mr. Bush’s record. “Did we head into a tough period in the last six months in office? Sure,” Mr. Evans said. “Was it a result of policies in his administration? I think there will be serious debate about that. We’ll be debating about it a long time.”

Calling it a “tough period” is underselling how bad the Great Recession was (and still is) for millions of Americans. And Bush’s policies most certainly contributed to the collapse.

Remember, it was the Bush administration that ignored “remarkably prescient warnings” regarding problems in the housing market, while actively pulling strings out of the regulatory framework and appointing regulators fundamentally disinterested in reining in Wall Street. The Bush administration actually “backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages,” even though consumer advocates were ringing alarm bells.

Financial firms thus ran wild, buildings up a huge amount of systemic risk that eventually toppled the system, putting more than 8 million Americans out of work.

But even before the financial crisis, the economy under Bush wasn’t doing well. Bush’s policies “fostered the weakest jobs and income growth in more than six decades,” along with “sluggish business investment and weak gross domestic product growth.” Poverty (including child poverty) increased under his watch, erasing some of the significant gains made by the Clinton administration, and of course, Bush turned record surpluses into record deficits.

Bush’s tax cuts also exacerbated already high income inequality, and there is new research showing that such inequality can actually increase the likelihood of a financial meltdown. So while there is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to culpability for the economic freefall, “serious debate” can’t erase the role that Bush and his economic team played.

This week, Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate candidate, has experienced a bit of selective amnesia regarding his often full-throated support for privatizing Social Security. However, on the campaign trail Wednesday he was not at all coy about his support for deregulating derivatives on Wall Street, the very instruments that helped bring down the financial system.

In 2000, former Sen. Phil “mental recession” Gramm (R-TX) attached the Commodity Futures Modernization Act to an unrelated, 11,000 appropriations bill which was passed “on a Friday evening two days after the Supreme Court handed down its Bush v. Gore ruling and as Congress was rushing home for Christmas.” The bill ensured that the growing market in over-the-counter derivatives, including credit default swaps, stayed entirely unregulated, against the advice of people like former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Brooksley Born (who accurately predicted the havoc derivatives would cause).

Toomey — then a member of the House of Representatives — voted for that bill, and said that he would do it again, as “that bill did absolutely nothing to cause the financial crisis”:

“That bill did absolutely nothing to cause the financial crisis, and no credible person has tried to make that argument,” Toomey said…Asked whether he’d vote for it again, he said: “Yes. I think all 377 (House members) would vote for it again.”

Of course, plenty of credible people — including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz — have pointed to the destruction wrought by the lack of derivatives oversight. By keeping regulators away from the OTC derivatives market — which is several times the size of the entire U.S. economy — the Commodity Futures Modernization Act set the stage for the financial crisis and huge government bailouts of 2008, particularly that of the insurance giant/hedge fund American International Group, as David Min and I explained:

Lehman Brothers Inc. and insurance giant American International Group’s inability to honor their many billions of dollars in credit default swap derivative obligations caused investors to question the value of the many financial instruments tied to credit default swaps, causing a classic run on the bank situation for the unregulated parts of the financial system. It was this run on the so-called “shadow banking system” — which performs the functions of banking but outside the regulatory safeguards in place for banks — that led to the bailout of AIG.

Because of the bill that Toomey backed, this huge market grew and grew entirely out of the view of regulators, and was so opaque that even the financial institutions involved in it were unclear as to what was going on.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that was signed into law this year brings the derivatives market out of the dark and sets up a mechanism for ensuring that financial firms trading derivatives have adequate collateral backing them up. So would Toomey advocate that we dismantle these common sense safeguards?

Last week, I pointed out that the “jobs plan” proposed by Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), who is running for his state’s open Senate seat, includes a provision permanently guaranteeing taxpayer giveaways to the real estate industry, which calls into question Blunt’s commitment to deficit reduction. But that’s not the only part of his plan that proves Blunt is fundamentally disinterested in addressing government spending.

Blunt included in the plan what he has claimed is $2 trillion in spending cuts, which would presumably be used to either reduce the deficit or to fund some of the massive tax cuts that he’s embraced. “In this plan, Roy identified over two trillion dollars in cuts right off the bat that can be taken out of government,” said former Missouri treasurer Sarah Steelman, who has endorsed Blunt’s campaign.

But in what he charitably calls an “accounting error,” the Kansas City Star’s Dave Helling notes that fully one half of Blunt’s spending cuts aren’t actually spending cuts at all:

A look at that plan shows half of those savings — $1 trillion — would come from Blunt’s proposal to repeal the health care reform package…Repealing health care reform would eliminate $1 trillion in spending, but it would also eliminate the $1 trillion in tax and fee increases and Medicare reductions that are in the law as well. The net effect of health care repeal on the federal deficit is, roughly, zero.

Actually, contrary to Helling’s assertion, repealing the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t have zero effect on the deficit: it would actively increase it. According to the Congressional Budget Office, repealing the bill would increase the deficit by $143 billion over the next ten years.

But the point remains that the only way Blunt’s push for repeal works as a deficit reduction measure is if he plans to keep all of the tax increases and Medicare savings, without actually giving anyone any additional health care.

Plenty of other spending cuts that Blunt suggests are equally ill-informed. He proposes repealing the remaining stimulus funds, including those dedicated to middle class tax cuts. He also says he’d cut an unidentified “wasteful welfare program,” which is presumably the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Fund that House Republicans like to cite all the time. But it’s actually a successful work program that is supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country, including 4,600 in Blunt’s own state.

Of course, Blunt is far from the only one who thinks that repealing the Affordable Care Act is a legitimate deficit reduction strategy. For instance, New Hampshire’s Republican Senate candidate, Kelly Ayotte, has made it the centerpiece of her deficit reduction plan.

Republicans have been trying very hard to blame President Obama for the nation’s deficit (which he largely inherited from his predecessor), but former Gov. George Pataki (R-NY) today may have gone to the most absurd lengths yet. On MSNBC, Pataki said that the health care reform bill that became law this year is “one of the reasons we have this deficit”:

You just said that Boehner indicated Obamacare as one of the reasons we have this deficit, one of the reasons we have failed to create private sector jobs and he’s absolutely right.

Watch it:

Pataki made no attempt to explain how a law that was passed this year and has yet to be implemented could have possibly caused this year’s deficit. Here’s a handy chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explaining where the deficit actually comes from:

See health care on there anywhere? No. The deficit was caused by the economic downturn (and the drop in tax revenue that came along with it), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush-era tax cuts that turned a record surplus into a deficit.

The Affordable Care Act not only adds nothing to the deficit this year, but is entirely deficit neutral. As Igor Volsky pointed out earlier, the Congressional Budget Office released a letter this week stating that the Affordable Care Act “will produce $143 billion in net budgetary savings over the 2010-2019 period.” Repealing the parts of the law that Republicans love to gripe about would cause an increase in deficits of $455 billion. Let’s repeat: repealing health care reform would increase, not decrease, the deficit.

Throughout the health care reform debate, Obama was very clear that he wasn’t interested in a bill that added to the deficit, and Democrats went to great lengths — having the CBO score and then re-score the legislation over and over — until they were certain that it had no deficit impact. In fact, it had to be deficit neutral to pass via reconciliation. Pataki’s claim is simply absurd and has no basis in reality (which hasn’t stopped other Republicans from making it as well).

Of course, Pataki seems to believe that Americans don’t actually deserve to hear policy details at all, at least from any Republicans. “Do the Republicans need to be more specific? Do the American people need to hear the ABC’s, how and then why [the Republican agenda] will work?” MSNBC’s Chris Jansing asked him. “No, I don’t think so,” Pataki replied.

Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) has been playing up his budgetary bona-fides recently, crafting an image of fiscal responsibility at a time when many states are staring at large deficits for the next few years. But like other Republican governors, he’s having trouble squaring taking advantage of relief provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus) with his desire to appeal to the conservative base.

Yesterday, Daniels met with the editorial boards of Indiana’s Evening News and Tribune, where he blasted the stimulus as something only “a blind zealot” believes has been successful:

“I’ve always said I didn’t think the way they were doing it was any good,” he said. “Now a year-and-a-half has gone by. It hasn’t worked. You have to be a blind zealot to say that this thing has done any good. It’s trickle down government is the best way I can describe it.”

I guess Daniels considers himself one of the faithful, as he signed a letter in February requesting an extension of Medicaid funding provided by the stimulus. He also has an entire page on his state’s website extolling the investments made with stimulus money that is subtitled “jobs, speed, long-term value.” When the stimulus first passed, Daniels didn’t seem to mind the funds, saying “our goal is to be out of the gate as fast as any state to obligate the funds and get projects started.”

According to the latest report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus boosted gross domestic product by as much as 4.5 percent and created or saved up to 3.3 million jobs, which could reach 3.6 million by the end of September.

Also, Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi — who advised Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) during his presidential run — concluded in a study that the benefits of the stimulus are “substantial, raising the GDP by about 2%, holding the unemployment rate about 1 1/2 percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls,” estimates which are “broadly consistent with those made by the CBO and the Obama Administration.”

There are plenty of projects in Indiana that are only occurring because of the stimulus, ranging from highway work and bridge construction to scientific research and home weatherization. “We will need to bring on 2,000 contractors statewide just to meet the demand [for home weatherizing],” said Paul Krievins of the Indiana Housing Authority. Then again, maybe all the people working on and organizing these projects are just blind zealots too.

Last week, Pennsylvania’s Republican candidate for Senate, Pat Toomey, touted his plan for privatizing Social Security, without actually using the word privatization. “I’ve got a whole chapter in a book that I wrote that deals with how I think, one of the ways I think we could reform Social Security to make it viable,” Toomey said. “That would be a very important start.”

A section of the chapter which Toomey referenced is called “Personal Accounts Lead to Personal Prosperity.” And when President Bush released his plan for privatizing Social Security, Toomey said, “I have been arguing for many years in favor of Social Security personal retirement accounts. “I’m thrilled that the President is taking up this critical issue,” Toomey added.

But when directly asked at the Pennsylvania Press Club yesterday whether he still favors privatization, Toomey actually replied, “I’ve never said I favor privatizing Social Security”:

Q: Do you continue to favor privatizing Social Security?

A: I’ve never said I favor privatizing Social Security. It’s a very misleading — it’s an intentionally misleading term. And it is used by those who try to use it as a pejorative to scare people…[T]hat doesn’t mean that we must perpetuate exactly this structure for future workers and for very young workers. So I’ve advocated that we consider offering young workers an alternative — a reform within Social Security that would give them the opportunity to take a portion of their payroll tax and actually save that and own that and allow that to accumulate over the course of their working years and for that to provide a portion of their retirement benefit. I think that’d be a very constructive reform, and that’s what I’m going to advocate.

Watch it:

Toomey seems to be under the impression that if you aren’t in favor of privatizing all of the Social Security system then you aren’t in favor of privatizing, period. But make no mistake, Toomey absolutely favors privatizing a portion of the program, as he makes painfully clear through his advocating that young workers “own” an account. Such privatized accounts would have experienced sharp negative returns in the market turmoil of 2008.

As Josh Dorner noted, a recent CNN poll “found that 59 percent oppose privatizing Social Security and Medicare.” 46 percent of voters said such a plan would make them “very uncomfortable” and a further 21 percent had reservations about it. Toomey tries to dress this up by not calling it privatization, but his formula is the same one that was roundly rejected when President Bush tried it in 2005.

Today, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) is delivering what’s being billed as a “major economic address” at the City Club of Cleveland. In the speech, Boehner calls on President Obama to fire both Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council Chairman Larry Summers, and lays out his vision of the Republican economic agenda.

“I have had enough – and the American people have had enough – of Washington politicians talking about wanting to create jobs as a ploy to get themselves re-elected while doing everything possible to prevent jobs from being created,” Boehner said. But as the Washington Post noted, the speech “does not expand the GOP’s existing economic proposals in any significant way.”

Instead, Boehner relies on tired, false arguments to push the standard GOP agenda of tax cuts for the rich and corporations and fewer regulations that protect workers and consumers. Here’s a rundown of Boehner’s attempt to bamboozle people with his economic double-talk. Read the entire speech transcript here.

BOEHNER: “When I met with the president last month at The White House, I conveyed my belief – shared by many economists – that this ongoing uncertainty is hurting small businesses and preventing the creation of private sector jobs.”

FACT: As Stan Collender notes, this point about “uncertainty” is “nothing but spin.” According to the latest National Federation of Independent Business small business survey, nearly half of small business cite economic conditions and lack of sales prospects as their reasons for not hiring: just 12 percent cite “political conditions.”

BOEHNER: “Not long after we spoke, he signed a 26 billion dollar ‘stimulus’ spending bill that funnels money to state governments in order to protect government jobs. Even worse, the bill is funded by a new tax hike that makes it more expensive to create jobs in the United States and less expensive to create jobs overseas.”

FACT: Does Boehner still think that the employees — including 4,900 teachers in his state — that are still working because of this bill are “special interests”? Also, the “new tax hike” that Boehner references is actually a provision that prevents multinational corporations from claiming domestic tax credits on profits they earned overseas, and thus reduces the incentive to outsource jobs. That bill also reduced the deficit.

BOEHNER: “According to an analysis by the non-partisan Joint Tax Committee, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, half of small business income in America – half – would face higher taxes under the president’s plan.”

FACT: Obama’s plan to allow rates on the top two income tax brackets to reset to where they were under President Clinton would capture half of all net business income claimed on personal tax returns, not small business income. Just three percent of people with any business income at all — from a business large or small — will be affected if these tax rates increase.

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Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens made headlines late last year as he openly advocated to members of Congress that the United States seize the oil fields of Iraq and use them for its own benefit, arguing that our country is “entitled” to the oil.

Speaking at the American Renewable Energy Day conference in Aspen, Colorado, last week, Pickens once again lamented the fact that the United States failed to take Iraq’s oil, and even revealed that he personally lobbied former President George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama to seize the country’s natural resources. The oil baron explained that President Bush, though interested in how such a plan would be structured, ultimately failed to agree to enact Pickens’ scheme, fearing that it would make people “think we’re there for the oil.” Pickens also said he told Obama to stay in Iraq to appropriate the country’s oil fields, but failed to convince the president of the merits of his idea:

“I’ve heard people accuse President Bush of going to Iraq for their oil,” he began, in a public conversation with CNN founder Ted Turner and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “That didn’t happen. We didn’t get the oil.”

Pickens argued that the American blood shed in the war was reason enough to take the oil. But, he said, Bush was too concerned about his image and appearing as if the war were a ploy to get the oil to follow Pickens’ plan. [...]

The 82-year-old Texan recalled a conversation with President Bush as his days in office waned, in which Bush asked about how they could bring the oil to market and battle the public perception that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a war for oil.

“He said, ‘People will think we’re there for the oil.’ And I said, ‘That was eight years ago, a lot’s happened since then — a lot of money spent, a lot of lives lost.’ And he said, ‘How would you price it?’ I said, ‘Price it on the market every day.’”

Bush then asked more detailed questions about the pricing structure, and Pickens recalled pushing those concerns aside and telling the president, “That’s a high-class problem. We can figure out how to get it in the hands where it’d do best for America.” He made a similar plea to Obama, Pickens said, with similar results. “I went to Obama and said, ‘Don’t leave Iraq.’ Look where we are now.”

It is difficult to understand how Pickens squares his view that the United States should have continued to indefinitely occupy Iraq to take its oil with his much-touted “Pickens Plan” designed to “break America’s addiction to foreign oil.” If what Pickens says about his lobbying of two American presidents to try to seize Iraq’s oil is true, it calls into question his sincerity in pursuing his stated goal of energy independence.