President Elect Obama gave a speech today on the necessity of a fast-track passage of his proposed economic stimulus package. Boehner and McConnell responded for the Republicans.

You can watch the speech and their responses here: h/t to twolf1

Boehner starts off by whining about the trillion-plus size of the existing deficit this year (gee I wonder how that happened?) and claiming that we have to be really careful not to spend too much because we will be leaving this debt for our children to pay. Whuh? Where were you for the last eight years while Bushco and YOU were running this thing up, gutting all the regulations, cheering for endless wars, and shoveling money at the MIC and Halliburton?

But it gets worse.

McConnell announces that he has decided that the federal government should not give grants of money to the states, but instead help them out with LOANS! Yes, you heard right, loans. His rationale is that there are apparently a couple of states that don’t need any extra money and so they wouldn’t ask and if they gave grants they would have to give these states money too even though they supposedly don’t need any. Also, he claims that if it was a loan, the states would be ‘more responsible’ about what they spend it on. The loan terms would be 5% interest for the first five years and if it wasn’t paid off by then the interest would jump up to 9%.

I’m no economist but this is how I see this:

1) The taxpayers (who all live in the states) are putting up the money in the first place for these ‘loans’.
2) The states don’t have any ability to ‘make money’ like a bank or other business. If they have to pay more money – they have to raise taxes. On those exact same taxpayers.
3) So, the taxpayers are taking money out of one of their pockets to give to the feds to loan to the states. Then they take money out of their other pocket to give to the states to pay it back to the feds. Except they have to pay more because they are paying interest on the money that they put up for the loan in the first place.

WTF????? Does this make any sense to anyone else out there?

I hereby nominate Boehner for "Dumb" of the year and McConnell for "Dumber".