House Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) May 9 speech to the Economic Club of New York was greeted with a brief flurry of pieces debunking his false claims: Bloomberg, the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus and The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, among others, took the time to correct several of the speaker's falsehoods. The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen cut to the chase, declaring Boehner "functionally illiterate on economic policy."
But it's important to understand that Boehner's know-nothingism is a feature, not a bug: Republicans didn't choose an economically illiterate Speaker of the House by accident, and they aren't embarrassed by him. Instead, Boehner's rapid-fire foolishness represents a decades-long embrace by the Republican Party and the conservative movement of economic positions that have a purely adversarial relationship with reality — but that, conveniently enough, benefit the super-wealthy and large corporations at the expense of the other 98 percent of the country.
http://politicalcorrection.org/blog/201105160016
I should note here that I don't have any reason to believe that any of this reflects Boehner's personal dishonesty. The problem is that the conservative movement holds as its highest principle the belief that it's unfair to charge higher tax rates to the rich. But since that principle is highly unpopular, they need to devise other rationales to sell this policy -- rationales that bear no relationship to their actual reasons, and which are usually nonsensical or simply false. Dishonesty of some form or another is common in politics, but Republican economic policymaking is characterized by massive, systematic dishonesty or rank ignorance that permeates every element of the process, from intellectual entrepreneurs to elected officials. The good news is that it keeps me in business.
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/88110/john-boehners-tax-gibberish
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) appears to have made a terrible error in his speech to the Economic Club of New York on Monday. His mistake was sharing with the audience his actual beliefs, which upon even cursory examination, are so conspicuously unintelligent, it’s rather alarming.
Bloomberg News examined Boehner’s assessment of existing U.S. economic policies and found that the House Speaker “built his case on several assertions that are contradicted by market indicators and government reports.” Jonathan Chait took a closer look at Boehner’s remarks on tax policy and discovered they were “gibberish.”
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_05/boehners_functionally_illitera029492.php
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-11/boehner-s-views-on-economy-contradicted-by-indicators-studies.html
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