Boehner’s Economy Views Contradicted by Studies
By James Rowley and Mike Dorning
May 11, 2011
House Speaker John Boehner, giving Wall Street leaders his prescriptions for growing the U.S. economy and reducing the nation’s debt, built his case on several assertions that are contradicted by market indicators and government reports.
Boehner said in his May 9 speech to the Economic Club of New York that government borrowing was crowding out private investment, the 2009 economic-stimulus package hurt job creation, and a Republican plan to privatize Medicare will give future recipients the “same kinds of options” lawmakers have.
With Democrats and Republicans sparring over legislation to extend the government’s $14.29 trillion debt limit and trim budget deficits, negotiations are being complicated by disputes over basic economic facts.
“We’re in this Alice-in-Wonderland world around government-shutdown conversations, the debt-ceiling conversations,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, said yesterday at a breakfast at the Bloomberg News Washington bureau. The debate “has not established a shared understanding of the facts” about the nation’s economic problems, he said.
Boehner’s spokesman, Michael Steel, rejected the premise that the speaker’s economic analysis was incorrect, saying in an e-mail that “reality” doesn’t support the criticism.
Boehner’s statement in his Wall Street speech that government spending “is crowding out private investment and threatening the availability of capital” runs counter to the behavior of credit markets...
For the full article, go to:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-11/boehner-s-views-on-economy-contradicted-by-indicators-studies.html
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