John Boehner, as you might suspect, doesn’t much like President Obama‘s stimulus package. John Boehner, as you might further suspect, is unable to offer any coherent reason for his opposition. So the poor man does the best he can, pushing all the usual thoroughly-discredited economic claptrap of the Bush administration:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Saturday that tax cuts, more than “slow-moving government programs,” were the best way to restart the economy.

Speaking in response to President Obama, who used his first weekly radio address in office as a call for action on his $825 billion recovery plan, Boehner said the GOP proposal would provide an average of $3,200 in tax relief for families. The plan would grant a tax credit for home buyers, “to help bring the housing market back to life,” it would end the “unfair taxation of unemployment benefits” and includes credits for small businesses, he added.

“Our plan is rooted in the philosophy that we cannot borrow and spend our way back to prosperity,” Boehner stated.

Tax cuts, more than “slow-moving government programs,” are the best way to restart the economy? Sure, if you ignore all the evidence, they are.

And it must be because the tax-cut stimulus package worked so well the last time around that Boehner thinks all we need is another dose of it.

But it’s the borrow-and-spend stuff that had me rolling in the aisles.

In what passes for Boehner’s mind, borrowing and spending doesn’t help to get you back to prosperity. So the right and proper use of the borrowing-and-spending economic strategy is when you’re already in a state of prosperity, and looking to nose-dive out of it. Which must be why Boehner was just fine with borrowing- and-spending when Bush proposed it back in 2001. At that point, borrowing-and-spending deserved (and therefore received) his enthusiastic, full-throated support.

It’s now, when borrowing-and-spending is proposed as the way back to prosperity, that it needs to be firmly opposed. Especially since every serious economist — including an impressive array of Nobel laureates — believes that borrowing-and-spending is the only possible way to stop the recession from growing into a crippling depression.

Can’t ever be seen listening to economists, especially not now. For one thing, they’re too much like scientists. For another, start listening to them, and next thing you know, the economy might turn the corner. And if Barack Obama restores prosperity to America, Republicans can write off any serious hope of regaining even a modicum of power for years to come.

So there’s only one thing a man of economic principles like John Boehner can do. Not just hope (like Rush Limbaugh) that Barack Obama fails, but actively work to ensure failure. Obstruct and oppose everything that might work. And then try to steal the credit, ex post, for everything that couldn’t be opposed and ended up working.