When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) recently released his Roadmap for America’s Future — a plan which purports to balance the federal budget over the next few decades without tax increases — conservatives leapt to embrace it. “I think it’s fabulous, it’s a great template for everyone that’s not just relying on smoke and mirrors,” said former Congressional Budget Office Director and McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin. “Halting America’s slide into bankruptcy and economic stagnation will require bold solutions like Rep. Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future,” added Rep. Tom Price (R-GA).

The plan relies on essentially privatizing Social Security and Medicare, while at the same time repealing the estate and corporate taxes and instituting a national sales tax (akin to a value-added-tax) of 8.5 percent. And while no marginal tax rates would be increased, according to a new report, the design of the plan and the taxes that Ryan leans on would shift the tax burden down the income scale, resulting in an overwhelming majority of Americans ultimately paying more in taxes than they do would under President Obama’s plans. Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) ran the numbers and found that under Ryan’s proposal:

– Federal taxes would be lower for the richest 10 percent, and higher for all other income groups, than they would be if President Obama’s proposals were enacted.

– The bottom 80 percent of taxpayers would pay about $1,700 more, on average, than they would if President Obama’s proposals were enacted.

– The richest one percent would pay about $211,300 less on average than they would if President Obama’s proposals were enacted.

– The poorest 20 percent would pay 12.3 percent of their income more than what they would pay under the President’s proposal, while the richest one percent would pay 15 percent of their income less than they would pay under the President’s proposal.

This shift in tax burden not only would force the middle- and lower-classes to pony up far more than the rich, but it would also result in the government collecting $2 trillion less over a decade than it otherwise would have. “It’s difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more. But Congressman Ryan has met that daunting challenge,” CTJ wrote.

We’re already in an era in which the difference in tax burden between the wealthy and the middle class is smaller than at any time in history. Plus, as recently released IRS data shows, at the peak of the last economic cycle (2007) incomes for the top 400 households were at a record high while the taxes that they paid fell to a record low. (Of course, we would have known this earlier if the Bush administration hadn’t blocked access to the data on the top 400 taxpayers, which Obama once again opened up.) Ryan’s plan would exacerbate these trends.

To his credit, Ryan does try to grapple with long-term deficits (unlike most Republicans) and the Roadmap is a terrifyingly honest assessment of conservative priorities. But to take an already inequitable system and shift the burden further down is completely unacceptable, and it shows what passes for “fabulous” and “bold” in conservatives circles.

According to The Hill, Senate Democrats are likely to pair the health care reform provisions that they are moving through the budget reconciliation process with the student loan reform bill that passed the House last year. The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 (SAFRA), which would cut federal subsidies to private lenders, has been stuck in the quagmire of the Senate and is the subject of a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign led by Sallie Mae. Including it in the reconciliation package would prevent the measure from being filibustered.

Reconciliation instructions for student loan reform were part of the last budget resolution, so the necessary pieces to take this step have been in place for a while. But of course, Republicans and the lenders are crying foul:

– “Let’s assume the Senate bill does mirror the House bill in eliminating all private lending — that’s a nonstarter for a lot of Republicans,” said Craig Orfield, Republican spokesman on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

– “We don’t like that this is rampaging through the Senate without the benefit of one hearing,” said an industry lobbyist.

It’s quite remarkable how adamant Republicans are about protecting billions of dollars per year in direct government subsidies to a private industry. But let’s look at the crux of the argument against reform, which is that it constitutes a “Washington takeover” of the lending industry and that the bill will cause student lenders to shed jobs.

The first charge is pretty silly, as billions in subsidies and assumption of nearly all the loan risk makes lending practically a government program already. And as the Washington Monthly’s Daniel Luzer pointed out, since private companies will still be servicing the loans, “it looks like direct lending might actually bring more jobs to America.”

Of course, it’s not really fair to pin all of the blame for stalling SAFRA on the Republicans, as there are a bunch of Democrats from states that the lenders call home who have expressed hesitation about the bill. The investment research firm Height Analytics predicts that seven Democrats will oppose the bill, and that they will come from Pennsylvania, Indiana, Florida, Nebraska, Virginia, and Delaware.

Those wavering Democrats might ultimately prevent SAFRA from being included in the reconciliation package, as the Democratic leadership doesn’t want to risk losing yea votes for health care. But that would mean SAFRA would either face a filibuster, or have to wait until next year’s budget resolution to move forward. And with student debt at a record high of $23,200 per student, and the nation facing budget deficits for the next decade, there’s really no excuse for continuing to waste taxpayer dollars on lenders that are the unnecessary middlemen between students and their education.

The LA Times reports today on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s growing “large-scale grass-roots political operation” that is being “funded by record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealthy individuals.” In 2009, the Chamber spent $144 million on lobbying and grassroots organizing, “well beyond the spending of individual labor unions or the Democratic or Republican national committees.” Some more details on its new initiative:

The chamber has signed up some 6 million individuals who are not chamber members and has begun asking them to help with lobbying and, soon, with get-out-the-vote efforts in upcoming congressional campaigns. [...]

The new grass-roots program, the brainchild of chamber political director Bill Miller, is concentrating on 22 states. Among them are Colorado, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is vulnerable; Arkansas, where Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln faces an uphill reelection battle; and Ohio, where the chamber sees opportunities in numerous House races and an open Senate seat.

The network, called Friends of the U.S. Chamber, has been used to generate more than a million letters and e-mails to members of Congress, 700,000 of them in opposition to the Democratic healthcare plan. That is an increase from 40,000 congressional contacts generated in 2008.

According to the LA Times, the Chamber’s “expanding influence” is “worrisome” to top White House officials, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett. This frustration was echoed yesterday in a meeting with top Treasury Department officials, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, that ThinkProgress attended.

When asked by ThinkProgress what they think of the Chamber, officials agreed that the association — along with some other groups in the business community — are deliberately distorting the administration’s positions to the American public. They expressed particular dissatisfaction with the the Chamber’s ad campaign fear-mongering against the administration’s push for a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency. In January, the Chamber arranged to “fly-in” some representatives from small businesses to Capitol Hill and “lead” them to a pre-arranged series of anti-CFPA meetings. The association’s ad campaign contains the ludicrous claims that the CFPA would regulate bakeries and grocery stores.

As many federal lawmakers and the Obama administration push for cap-and-trade legislation, health care reform, regulatory reform, and corporate tax reform, the U.S. Chamber stands as the most well-funded opposition to progressive change. The group spent $10-$20 million of insurance-industry-provided cash on fighting reform. After Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, the Chamber was quick to congratulate itself for running television ads in support of the candidate.

A few members of the ThinkProgress team (along with a group of other bloggers) went over to the Treasury Department yesterday for a chat with some senior administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Predictably, a lot of time was spent on the issue of regulatory reform, as the Senate Banking Committee grinds its way to some sort of compromise and hopefully unveils a bill this week.

At least according to reporting in the press, the administration’s regulatory reform vision is being compromised away, with the independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) turning into a consumer protection division within the Federal Reserve, and the “Volcker rule” to rein in risky trading failing to gain even a foothold. The officials reiterated Obama’s commitment from the State of the Union that a bill that does not meet an acceptable (but unidentified) threshold in terms of real reform will be vetoed, but they also spoke in terms of principles, rather than specifics, which seemed to open the door to compromises.

Interestingly, they seem to be very actively considering how the bill can be improved both on the floor of the Senate and then in conference committee, where whatever the Senate passes will have to be reconciled with the bill that the House passed last year. At least in terms of the CFPA, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) has said that he is going to try and amend the bill on the floor if the Banking Committee drops an independent agency. House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) has also said that he won’t bring a bill without a strong CFPA to the house floor.

So maybe the House will be where the CFPA and the Volcker rule ultimately survive the legislative meat-grinder? This makes me slightly nervous, considering that the CFPA barely survived in the House the first time around (with Republicans joining a cohort of conservative Democrats to propose an amendment forming a toothless consumer protection council instead).

The officials spent a lot of time emphasizing that the steps they took to rescue the financial system, while politically unpopular, were necessary to prevent a bigger mess, and how financial reforms are tough to push through because their benefits are fairly broad and non-specific, while reform adversely affects the very concentrated, powerful banking and investment industry. So I was moderately heartened to hear that the administration is looking at ways to reduce mortgage principal for homeowners who are underwater, as FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair is trying to do (although Treasury Spokesman Andrew Williams clarified later that Treasury “is not poised to roll out a major principal write-down program”). As I’ve pointed out before, this is a good way to take on the banks and give people a tangible result that will lend credibility to the wider financial reform fight.