House Republican Leader John Boehner on Tuesday called on President Obama to fire his economic team. According to Boehner, Obama should start with getting rid of Treasury Secretary Geithner and Larry Summers, the head of the National Economic Council. Boehner added that their firing is not a substitute for a referendum on the president’s job-killing agenda, as that question would be put to the American people in due course.
“But we do not have the luxury of waiting months for the president to pick scapegoats for his failing “stimulus policies”, Boehner said.
Vice President Joe Biden was quick to react to Boehner’s proposal saying sarcastically that it was “very constructive advice” and reminded how the Republican Party ran “the economy and middle class into the ground”.
“They took the $237 billion surplus they inherited from the Clinton Administration and left us with a $1.3 trillion deficit, and, in the process, quadrupled the national debt – all before we had turned on the lights in the West Wing”, Biden said.
Biden added:
“They gave free rein to the special interests to write their own rules at the expense of everybody else. And the sum total of it was the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression—a crisis that wreaked havoc on families and businesses across this country–a crisis from which we are still digging out.”
Speaking at a Recovery Act Innovation Report Event, Biden then went on to explain the implications of the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent of Americans, which is set to expire at the end of the year, and which the Republicans support.
Biden said that President Obama proposes to extend tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans who are bearing the brunt of the recession.
The cost to extend the cuts to the top 2 percent of Americans would cost $700 billion, which would have to be borrowed.
“This is a tax cut they (the top 2 percent of Americans) don’t need, and they won’t use to create jobs or economic growth”, said Biden. “So to justify that, he has created this myth that a tax cut for millionaires is actually a tax cut for small business.”
Biden added:
“There aren’t three percent of small businesses in America that would qualify for that tax cut. It’s a Wall Street tax cut, not a Main Street tax cut. At the same time, they’re blocking the genuine $12 billion tax cut for small businesses we proposed.”
See Video of John Boehner calling on President Obama to fire Geithner, Summers
