A little more than four years ago, Roy Blunt of Missouri and John Boehner of Ohio were elbowing each another in the Republican leadership race in the U.S. House of Representatives to succeed Tom DeLay of Texas as House majority leader.
Today, from very different political positions, they find themselves trying to defeat Democrats this fall by capitalizing on voters’ unhappiness with the state of the economy. Last week, Mr. Boehner gave a widely publicized speech calling for the resignations of President Barack Obama’s entire economic team.
And Mr. Blunt, running for the Senate here in Missouri, released his own “jobs plan,” strikingly similar to the plan Mr. Boehner announced; both would redistribute more wealth from the working poor and middle classes to the rich. Are voters’ attention spans really that short?
Mr. Boehner won the 2006 House leadership race, in large part because he hadn’t been part of Mr. DeLay’s leadership team, as Mr. Blunt had and, thus, escaped being tainted by the Jack Abramoff-K Street Project scandals that led to Mr. DeLay’s resignation.
Mr. Blunt, with his House leadership career ended, got a lifeboat when Sen. Christopher S. Bond, R-Mo., announced he wouldn’t seek re-election in 2010. Now Mr. Blunt is running for Mr. Bond’s seat, hoping voters remember Mr. DeLay only as a contestant on “Dancing with the Stars.”
Meanwhile, when Democrats took control of the House in November 2006, Mr. Boehner became “Dr. No,” the glowering, well-tanned minority leader. But with political winds blowing against the Democrats, Mr. Boehner thinks the GOP could pick up enough seats this fall to make him House speaker.
Last week he laid out his economic vision: $700 billion more in spending reductions than the Democrats have proposed.
On the other hand, he also wants to extend the 2001 Bush tax cuts for American families earning more than $250,000 a year, which would wipe out all of those savings. The end result of the Boehner plan: Richer rich people and deeper deficits over the next 10 years.
Here in Missouri, Mr. Blunt also is proposing a zero-sum economic plan. His 21-page “jobs plan” pretends to locate “$2 trillion in spending cuts.”
But as Dave Helling of The Kansas City Star points out, a trillion of that would come from repealing the Affordable Health Care Act. And because doing that also would eliminate $1 trillion in tax and fee increases and Medicare reductions, Mr. Blunt’s plan would take the net gain back to zero.
Except for this: The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the health care bill will decrease the deficit by $143 billion over the next 10 years by slowing down the cost of health care spending. So Mr. Blunt’s plan would have the effect of increasing the deficit by $143 billion.
Mr. Blunt also wants to save the $289 billion in stimulus funds that haven’t yet been paid, including $65 billion in tax benefits for middle-class Americans. He also would eliminate a “wasteful welfare program,” probably the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families emergency fund.
TANF is what remains of the government’s welfare program. It supports “welfare to work” programs that often are cited as one of the major successes of “compassionate conservatism.”
To sum up: Boehner/Blunt 2010: More for the rich. Less for the poor and middle classes. No savings. Higher deficits. Smoke. Mirrors. Buzzwords.
