David Koch, one half of the pair of billionaire brothers who have pumped millions into the Republican infrastructure, admitted today that even he thinks that the Republican Party has strayed too far too the right:

Koch said he thinks the U.S. military should withdraw from the Middle East and said the government should consider defense spending cuts, as well as possible tax increases to get its fiscal house in order – a stance anathema to many in the Republican Party.

“I think it’s essential to be able to achieve spending reductions and maybe it’s going to require some tax increases,” he said. “We got to come close to balancing the budget, otherwise we’re in a terrible deep problem.”

Koch’s disagreement with the GOP’s hard right turn must not be too serious, however. According to Politico, Koch-backed groups still play to spend $400 million this election cycle to buy control of the federal government for Republicans.

Mitt Romney will officially accept the Republican nomination for president at the party’s national convention tonight, and in his speech, he will undoubtedly talk about the economy and his supposed plan to spur growth and speed up the recovery. Romney’s plan is notorious for its lack of specifics, but through the few details he has provided, ThinkProgress compiled seven facts about his economic policies that he likely won’t mention in his speech tonight:

1) It gives the rich and corporations a massive tax cut. Romney’s proposal to give every American a tax cut is a giveaway to the rich that is four-times larger than the Bush tax cuts. Half the benefit would go to the richest five percent of Americans, and each member of the top 0.1 percent would get at least a $264,000 cut. Romney says he will balance the cuts with the closure of tax loopholes, but he can’t name which ones he’d close and even if he did, the plan wouldn’t generate enough revenue to offset revenue lost to tax reductions. His corporate tax plan, meanwhile, results in more than $1 trillion in tax cuts.

2) It raises taxes on the middle class. A Tax Policy Center analysis found that Romney’s plan would raise taxes on middle class families by up to $2,000 if he were to keep his promise to maintain the current level of revenue. A later analysis that added in the cost of Romney’s corporate tax cuts nearly doubled the size of the tax hike on the middle class to as much as $4,000 for a family of four.

3) It won’t balance the budget. Romney’s tax plan would add more than $10 trillion to the national debt if he doesn’t balance it with tax increases on the middle class or with spending cuts that are too impossibly large to fathom. Even if Romney closed every loophole for the rich, as he has promised to do, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for five years to avoid adding to the debt. The economy hasn’t grown that fast over a five-year period since the early 1960s.

4) It won’t lead to economic growth. The last Republican president promised that supply-side policies like tax cuts for the rich would boost the economy and lead to job growth. They didn’t. Romney is trying the same policies (Bush, “just updated,” as one RNC official put it), despite overwhelming evidence that they don’t work.

5) It will make it easier for corporations to dodge taxes and outsource jobs: Romney’s plan to switch to a territorial tax system will make it easier for corporations to stash their profits in off-shore tax havens. It would also make it easier for corporations to outsource American jobs. In all, economists estimate the plan could cost America 800,000 jobs.

6) It would put bankers between you and your student loans. Obamacare included a provision in the law that removed bankers from the federal student loan process, eliminating a middle-man and allowing borrowers to deal directly with the government. That reduced costs, saving students $100 billion. By repealing the healthcare law, Romney would put those bankers back in between students and government lenders, handing big banks billions of dollars in the process.

7) It won’t address the housing crisis. Romney’s economic plan had 59 points, but it failed to detail a plan to help America’s struggling homeowners. Instead, Romney says we should let the housing market “run its course and hit the bottom,” and that America shouldn’t “try to stop the foreclosure process.” His plan wouldn’t help the millions of Americans who are facing foreclosure or are underwater on their mortgages. It also ignores simple steps the government could take to help housing, and it has been criticized by Republicans in high-foreclosure states. Romney has since tried to reverse course, but he still offers no specifics.

Today marks the beginning of competition for the London 2012 Paralympics, after the games’ opening ceremony last night. But at the same time, disabled citizens of the United Kingdom are facing huge cuts to their aid programs, as the Washington Post detailed:

Hundreds of thousands of disabled Britons are seeing their benefits cut or facing the prospect of diminished or eliminated aid. More than 15,000 unemployed disabled people a week are being reassessed by a contractor to determine whether they are fit to work. New, stricter guidelines mean that Britons who can roll themselves more than 200 yards in a wheelchair or read Braille could be considered able-bodied enough to find a job.

At the same time, the government is sending letters to nearly all disability beneficiaries, including those gainfully employed, warning that they will also soon need reassessments for other types of aid that help them cover a variety of costs, including home health-care workers and wheelchair-accessible cars.

By 2015, the government anticipates a 500,000-person reduction in those receiving Britain’s primary disability benefit. The number of claimants now stands at 3.4 million, up threefold since 1992.

“I would argue this is not about trying to get disabled people back into employment or off aid,” said former Paralympics gold medalist Tara Flood. “This is simply about going after a group of people the government has now decided is too expensive in these times. They are using the kind of ‘burden on society’ argument that is dehumanizing us.”

The UK, of course, has engaged in austerity in response to the economic crisis, following the same course as many of Europe’s major economies. The results, however, have been just the opposite of those austerity’s advocates predicted: the countries cutting the most are growing the least. The UK has even entered a double-dip recession, with an economy that is smaller than it was before the conservative government took power. That Britain’s government is cutting aid to the disabled in the midst of the Paralympics simply adds insult to injury.