In the past week, House Republicans unveiled their fiscal year 2011 Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the operations of the federal government while President Obama announced his 2012 budget request.

Both of the economic plans contained within these documents take aim at the budget deficit in different ways. The House GOP’s CR has far deeper cuts to public investments and social services, including terminating $5 billion in high speed rail funding, $86 million in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and $40 million from the Green Jobs Investment Fund.

While the Obama budget does far more to maintain public investment and does endorse some progressive means of deficit reduction — like ending billions of dollars of taxpayer support for the oil industry — it also includes a number of cuts to social services that assist working class and low-income Americans. Included among these cuts is a $100 billion reduction in the Pell Grant program that involves ending grants for summer classes and terminating federal subsidies “that pay the interest on graduate students’ federal loans while they’re in school” and cutting billions of dollars from the LIHEAP program, which funds energy assistance for low-income Americans.

Yet there are a number of progressive ways to reduce the deficit that both President Obama and the House Republicans failed to endorse. These policies, unlike deep cuts to public investment, education, and social services, would have a minimal impact on employment and job growth, and would go much further in actually closing the budget deficit. Here are five such ideas:

1. Rein In The Military Budget: Neither the president’s budget or the House CR cuts the overall level of defense spending. In fact, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s request for the Pentagon budget is a whopping $553 billion — “the largest request ever” by the Pentagon and the largest adjusted for inflation since World War II. CAP Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb has laid out $1 trillion in defense reductions that can be made over the next 10 years by phasing out outdated programs and resizing our military. This comes out to roughly $100 billion a year, which is approximately how much funding is being proposed to be cut from the Pell Grant program.

2. Reduce Or Eliminate Subsidies To Big Agribusiness: The federal government “paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.” “Just ten percent of America’s largest and richest farms collect almost three-fourths” of these subsidies. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has proposed — as a part of her progressive deficit reduction plan — a fifty percent cut in federal direct support for agriculture, which would save $7.5 billion in 2015.

3. Reduce Or Eliminate Wasteful Tax Expenditures: The CAP paper “Cracking the Code: A Closer Look at Tax Expenditure Spending” notes that “special credits, deductions, exclusions, exemptions, and preferential tax rates provide more than $1 trillion in subsidies intended to support public objectives,” yet are ineffective and should be reduced or eliminated. Eliminating this tax expenditure could save $100 billion, for example.

4. Enact A Financial Transactions Tax: A “0.25 percent tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other Wall Street financial instruments” would do little to nothing to reduce commerce or productivity but would generate “between $50 billion and $150 billion annually,” according to a CAP analysis.

5. Empower Medicare To Negotiate For Lower Drug Prices: One of the main drivers of the growing U.S. budget deficit is health care costs. While there are a number of things that can be done to streamline the efficiency of our health care system, like introducing a public option or even moving towards a Medicare-for-all system, one policy option that would be very simple to enact and would not require any sort of increased spending or expansion of government would be to simply allow Medicare to use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate with drugmakers for lower prices. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) estimates that doing this could save as much as $156 billion over 10 years.

While gradually reducing the U.S. budget deficit over time is a worthwhile goal, it’s important to remember that the deficit was not caused by funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, students taking summer Pell Grants, or the LIHEAP program. Rather, the U.S. budget deficit is largely a result of massive tax cuts for the wealthy, two prolonged wars, an ever-expanding Pentagon budget, and a recession caused by Wall Street. It is only fair that those who caused the problem are those who have to pay to fix it.

Missouri State Sen. Jane Cunningham (R) is pushing a bill which would dramatically claw back state child labor protections. As the bill’s official summary explains:

This act modifies the child labor laws. It eliminates the prohibition on employment of children under age fourteen. Restrictions on the number of hours and restrictions on when a child may work during the day are also removed. It also repeals the requirement that a child ages fourteen or fifteen obtain a work certificate or work permit in order to be employed. Children under sixteen will also be allowed to work in any capacity in a motel, resort or hotel where sleeping accommodations are furnished. It also removes the authority of the director of the Division of Labor Standards to inspect employers who employ children and to require them to keep certain records for children they employ. It also repeals the presumption that the presence of a child in a workplace is evidence of employment.

To be fair, children in Missouri would still enjoy robust protections against exploitation even if Cunningham succeeded in repealing all child labor laws in her state, thanks to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. But far right lawmakers have declared war on federal child labor laws as well. In a lengthy lecture delivered before his election to the U.S. Senate, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) praises a discredited 1918 Supreme Court decision declaring child labor laws unconstitutional. That decision, which Lee holds out a model for his tenther vision of the Constitution, was unanimously overruled by the Supreme Court in 1941.

As recently as the day before President Obama moved into the White House, it was difficult to imagine even the most conservative lawmakers breaking with the 70 year-old consensus surrounding child labor laws. Welcome to the post-Tea Party era, where even the most bizarre and disastrous mistakes from America’s past are part of the right-wing’s agenda.

For a party that places a premium on message discipline, the Republican ranks are beginning to fray on the issue of a possible government shutdown.

Over the past few months, over a half-dozen Republicans have stepped out to publicly support a potential shutdown. Some GOP veterans are calling to shut down the federal government, including Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Steve King (R-IA). But it’s the freshmen in Congress, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Reps. Alan Nunnelee (R-MS), Tim Walberg (R-MI), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), and Steve Womack (R-AR), who are chomping at the bit for a government closure.

Now, with Congress gearing up for a major budget showdown that could result in a shutdown if a funding agreement is not reached by March 4, the GOP is struggling to settle on its strategy. Many Tea Party congressmen and other conservative ideologues won’t be satisfied with anything less than draconian spending cuts. Rep. Gohmert summed up their position: “If it takes a shutdown of government to stop the runaway spending, we owe that to our children and our grandchildren.” However, cooler heads on the right remember the 1995 shutdown and recognize a government closure will cause great harm to the nation.

The congressman whose job it is to corral these divergent views in the Republican caucus is House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA). When pressed, an “exasperated” Cantor finally sided with Republican realists, telling Fox News yesterday that “we ought to get [a government shutdown] off the table.”

However, Cantor’s proclamation hasn’t persuaded his entire caucus. During last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, ThinkProgress spoke with House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA), the number five in GOP congressional leadership. We asked Price about whether the GOP would be willing to shut down the federal government over the budget fight, particularly defunding health care reform. Despite Cantor’s insistence that a shutdown was “off the table,” Price told us that “everything ought to be on the table”:

KEYES: And if [defunding health care reform] comes to a head, do you think shutdown should be off the table?

PRICE: Everything ought to be on the table. But I don’t think the president is going to go there. I don’t think he wants to shut down the government based on this law.

Watch it:

Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who led a seminar for dozens of freshmen members of Congress, argued that freshmen GOPers are eager to shut down the government in order to prove their conservative mettle. Indeed, they are already flexing their muscles against the GOP leadership in a number of areas, including the size of proposed budget cuts and defeating an extension of the PATRIOT Act.

Now, as the budget fight draws closer to a head, Republican infighting is likely to continue, even among the GOP leadership.