Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) isn't an economist. She isn't a foreign policy expert or a historian or a constitutional scholar, either. Actually, she frequently embarrasses herself and Minnesota in these four areas.
But she knows her talking points most of the time. So in her mind when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says that failing to raise the debt ceiling will cause economic chaos, he must be lying. Right? Right.
“It’s Congress giving permission to the federal government to borrow more money that we don’t have, and we borrow it for the purpose of spending it,” Bachmann tells Newsmax. “So we need to know what this is about: President Obama wants the Congress to go to other countries and borrow $2 trillion that we don’t have, and that our children will have to pay back some day, and to use that to spend right now.”
According to Bachmann, Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who has said not raising the debt ceiling could cause a massive default, has greatly exaggerated its impact.
According to Bachmann, Geithner “unfortunately resorted not only to scare tactics, [but] in my opinion it was outright blatant lies when he said that we would see the collapse of various things if we didn’t allow the government to continue to borrow money, and spend money, that we don’t have.
So who are you going to believe?
An actual economist or a woman who...