And Everybody Would Get A Pony Too...

I am pretty sure that nobody was buying John Boehner's bullshit about the GOP economic proposal creating twice as many jobs for half the money as the Democratic plan. But just in case anybody was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has some news for you:

But where did the Republicans get that number? By drawing some fuzzy conclusions from a 2007 paper by Dr. Christina Romer, chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers

snip

In fact, a year before being tapped to serve as the Chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, Romer co-authored a report echoing the view that tax cuts can have a very large economic stimulus effect. As the authors noted at the time, 'tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects.' ... Using different assumptions and different sample periods, they estimated that a change in taxes equal to 1 percent of GDP resulted in a 2.2 percent to 3 percent change in GDP, with tax cuts increasing GDP.

We find Dr. Romer's previous conclusions on the economic impact of change in tax policy as an appropriate multiplier for examining the impact of stimulus proposals.

Except that the Romer analysis used by the GOP (linked to in the third paragraph of this page) never examined the effects of tax cuts on a deflationary economy -- it looked at the effects of tax increases on the economy as a whole and found a negative effect of 2.2% - 3% on GDP.

The Republican analysis simply flipped those numbers to positive and applied them to the GOP-backed tax cuts, then multiplied the result by a broad job creation estimate used in a recent paper from Romer and Jared Bernstein, an economic adviser to the vice president.

Like my Momma always told me, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Especially if its a Wing Nut's voice you are hearing.