Yesterday morning, in Cleveland, OH, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) slammed President Obama’s economic policies and called for the resignation of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Here’s the video, and here are his prepared remarks. He railed against “job-killing tax hikes,” stimulus spending that “has gotten us nowhere,” and “government run amok.” Boehner is right on about ending economic uncertainty, particularly about future tax rates and unsupportable levels of future public debt. However, he sounded as if all of our problems began when President Obama was sworn in as president on January 20, 2009. Our current suffering mostly arose from the Iraq War, Medicare Part D, and the very lax regulatory environment that allowed the financial crisis and the Gulf oil spill to occur, all courtesy of President George W. Bush and the Republicans. In my opinion, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernanke are all to be commended for their Herculean efforts to keep us from falling into a Depression. Today, the Congressional Budget Office estimated how much worse off we would have been without the stimulus bill. Mr. Boehner also forgot the mention that his tax and spending policies would make the rich a lot richer and the rest of us worse off. The main advantage of being in the minority is that you get to blame the majority for everything that is wrong in the world. We’ll see how the American voters feel on November 2, when Mr. Boehner hopes to find himself on his way to becoming Speaker of the House next January.
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