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.

More after the jump. Read more

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.