Ruth Marcus is standing by with a straight-jacket.
The news out of House Speaker John Boehner’s speech to the New York Economic Club was his demand for “cuts of trillions, not just billions” before the debt ceiling can be raised. Not just broad deficit-reduction targets, the Ohio Republican insisted, but “actual cuts and program reforms.”
That’s alarming enough. It is all but impossible to get this done in the available time. It certainly can’t be accomplished on Boehner’s unbending, no-new-taxes terms. And if the speaker truly believes that it would be “more irresponsible” to raise the debt ceiling without instituting deficit-reduction measures than not to raise it at all, we’re in a heap of trouble.
Even more alarming, because it has consequences beyond the debt-ceiling debate, is the incoherent, impervious-to-facts economic philosophy undergirding Boehner’s remarks.
Marcus acknowledges her disagreements with Boehner's economic and political beliefs. Boehner is a Republican and therefore (as far as we on the left are concerned) out of sync with reality and history. But this isn't about ideology.
No, Marcus is questioning Boehner's "facts." She finds him to be wrong too much of the time. Liar or fool or simply deluded, Boehner's statements "are simply false," says Marcus.
Here are some of Boehner's, well, lies. They may have begun as delusions but they have become deliberate lies. The House Speaker has plenty of access to facts. He just chooses to ignore them.
“The recent stimulus spending binge hurt our economy and hampered private-sector job creation in America.”
And Marcus responds:
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the stimulus added, on average, about one percentage point annually to economic growth and reduced the unemployment rate by half a point between 2009 and 2011. And that’s the low-end estimate. The high-end numbers show the stimulus spending adding more than 2 percentage points annually to economic growth and cutting the unemployment rate by more than 1 percentage point.
Another:
“A tax hike would wreak havoc not only on our economy’s ability to create private-sector jobs, but also on our ability to tackle the national debt.”
Aw, c'mon Tanman. It has been shown, repeatedly, that the wreck starts with inappropriate tax cuts every time.
During the early 1980s, taxes were cut and public debt ballooned, from 26 percent of GDP in 1980 to 40 percent by 1986. In 1993, taxes were increased (and spending cut); debt as a share of the economy fell, from 49 percent to 33 percent. In 2001 and 2003, taxes were cut. By the time President Obama took office, debt had climbed to 40 percent of GDP.
Marcus lays out the real problem, the diabolical absence of reality in just about everything the right is doing.
Listening to Boehner, I began to think the country suffers from two deficits: the gap between spending and revenue, and the one between reality and ideology. The first cannot be solved unless we find some way of at least narrowing the second.
