FL-18: Ros-Lehtinen's economic knowledge leaves out Great Depression

Thanks to the Miami Beach Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club we have some better understanding of how poor our representation in Congress is. My representative, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, now over 20 years in the US House, spoke to us last Tuesday and put out a ton of verbiage revealing how little she and her Republican colleagues understand of economics.

Her main theme was the deficit, and if you look at these clips you’ll see that she wants to freeze spending, and to do it now. She apparently hasn’t heard that the Great Depression of the 1930s was on the road to recovery in FDR’s first term until he was nagged to distraction by criticism of his spending, and so his administration put on the brakes and then came the double-dip of 1937, I believe. I’m not even looking it up -- it’s such common knowledge. But not among today’s Republicans. Their mantra is stop deficits now. NOW!

OK, we know that the family budget should be balanced. But that’s not really applicable to running the world’s biggest economy, and families, too, have to borrow for major expenditures. Ros-Lehtinen led off her  speech with the stop-deficit talking point, and then in the Q-and-A she was given two chances to modify it, but instead she mischaracterized economic thought.

No, Congresswoman, no economists think that deficits are OK, as you say. They may say that deficits are necessary to help end a recession, but then you’re supposed to get to a balance of income and outgo.

Anyway, check out this clip. Note that she’s reading from a paper but still says clearly false things about the national debt and the size of President Obama’s budget proposal in relation to the national debt.




It has taken me forever to process this, and I apologize. New computer gear slowed me down, plus winter visitors from the frozen North.

Inspiration to finish came Saturday evening as C-Span replayed another Republican member of the US House, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, the deputy whip of her party. She had done the Friday morning call-in program, and my, was she an eloquent spouter of the party line, leading with the deficit. I was struck by the way her message was identical to what Ros-Lehtinen had said on Tuesday in Miami Beach.

The Republicans all have been told what to say. This is the balky line we will hear until the Obama administration brings out the hammers of logic and a disciplined majority.

Blackburn was asked what should happen in the summit President Obama has called for Feb. 25, and I was stunned to hear her say that the Tennessee governor should be called in to explain how health care should be run. Yes -- she wants to go back to Year Zero and start from scratch.

I think this is going to be one heck of a year in the US Congress, and we should gear up to let even our Republican members of Congress know what we think of their no-knothing, er, know-nothing way of representation.

Blackburn said there would be town halls during this break for Presidents Day. We should find out where the Republicans are appearing and let them know their knowledge of economics gets an F.

Thanks, by the way, to Ros-Lehtinen for coming out and speaking to the general public in Miami Beach. There are more good clips of her talk that I’ll try to grind out. She has been in the US House since 1988, and my member of Congress since 2002, and this is the first appearance I know of outside her usual friendly circle.

The first question to her was about her husband Dexter Lehtinen and his legal work for the Miccosukee Indian tribe, which does a lot of business with the federal government, and whether that might be a conflict of interest.

“It’s about ethics,” the questioner, Mike Burke, cried when she didn’t know what he was asking about. Ethics? She didn’t know, just like her economics. I’ll try to get this clip up, too.

Final note: While the rest of you were glued to the screen watching the snow games, your blogger was editing his crude video and looking at C-Span. Such is devotion.