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.