There are some major problems with the Boehner plan.
- It is a joke. We have over 25 million people unemployed, with an economy that is slowing. The Boehner response is to keep tax rates where they are for the rich, and cut all recovery spending, slashing 25% from domestic discretionary spending. We know two things about this program: It will kill more jobs than it creates; and it will add to, not subtract, from projected deficits.
- It's half-baked. It is as if Boehner hasn't noticed what is going on in this country over the last decades of conservative domination. Instead he would exacerbate the worst ruinous trends. For example:
We suffer from the worst inequality ever. The top 1% pockets about 20% of all income, and has captured two-thirds of all income growth in the Bush years before the recession. Boehner's extension of the Bush top-end tax cuts will simply add to that in after-tax income.
We suffer a costly and growing public investment deficit—in everything from sewers and roads, to education and training, to research and development—areas vital to sustaining a competitive private economy. Slashing non-defense discretionary spending —which includes spending on education, on energy, on the environment, on everything the government does outside of defense and entitlements like Social Security and Medicare -- will only worsen that.
(And the hints Boehner offers about future plans aren't reassuring: more of the trade treaties that led to the ruinous trade deficits that force us to borrow $2 billion a day, largely from Chinese and Japanese central bankers; less regulation in the face of what deregulation of the big banks did to the economy, to the citizens in the Gulf, in the coal mines, and most recently to egg buyers in grocery stores; turning Medicare into a private insurance voucher, and more.) ...
[A]s a plan to get the country going, a plan to put people to work, a plan even to "break the ongoing economic uncertainty," this is just silly. The time would have been better spent working on his tan. |