Boehner’s One Liner

I love John Boehner. He is so funny. Maybe he didn’t mean to be, but I laughed nonetheless. I just caught his comments at The Economic Club of New York. Hilarious. And he spits out those one-liners with such a straight face. How does he do it? I know I couldn’t.

Like the one about the Ryan plan and the debt limit.

It goes like this: the Republicans are stalwart in their determination to make lifting the debt limit a line in the sand. They are absolutely determined to extract spending cuts in return for raising that limit. We are almost bumping up against that limit, so this discussion has a sense of urgency. And the Republicans are determined to hold fast and show the world that our government has genuinely turned a corner and become thrifty. Only that way will businesses unload all those hoards of cash in their vaults, invest, and hire. Yes, the Republicans are determined in their fiscal rectitude. Determined I tell you.

You get the picture.

Serious people will take this seriously. We will be fed a diet of serious discussions. Something might even get done. Seriously.

What the serious folks miss is that Boehner was trying out his latest funny lines. He was trying to get a laugh.

Or, I assume he was.

You see, just a few short weeks ago he voted for the very serious Ryan budget plan. Yes that plan. The one that wowed all the serious people.

Here’s the punch line: depending how you cut it the Ryan plan will require the debt limit to be raised by anywhere between $6 trillion and $9 trillion.

File this one under: “whoops”.

So here we have the Republicans determined to stand fast on the debt limit, while advocating a budget plan that doesn’t actually fit under that limit. The Ryan plan is a debt limit buster if ever there was one.

Darn.

Who knew arithmetic was so difficult?

I wonder which part of the grand scheme they are making up on the fly, and which part is where they are just winging it? Surely even they don’t expect us to keep a straight face. No wonder the Democrats have a hard time negotiating – they’re probably as confused as I am. But evidently not as confused as Boehner.

Oh. That wide gap in the debt limit damage that the Ryan plan does arises from the fact that they are talking about the wrong limit. The simple one is the accumulation of all the debt held by the public. But the one subject to the debt limitation rule they’re discussing includes the debt the government owes itself. This latter debt is basically the debt to the public plus the bonds the Social Security Trust Fund generates with its excess cash: it lends that cash to the government and gets debt back. So there is a difference between the debt held by outsiders and the total debt issued by the Treasury. It is the total debt that needs fitting under the limit.

And here’s where it gets complicated: even if the government gets to a budget surplus and thus starts to reduce its debt to the public, the debt that needs fitting under the limit could continue to go up because Social Security is still generating a surplus. It will lend that surplus to the Treasury and thus add to the Treasury’s debt total.

I wonder whether Boehner knows all this?

Meanwhile he tells a good joke. Like the one about the Ryan plan and the debt limit. That one brings tears to my eyes.