Over the past two months, many Republican pundits and members of Congress have been calling for the end of unemployment benefit extensions for the millions of Americans who can’t find work. Meanwhile, GOP Senators held the unemployment insurance (UI) extension bill hostage for weeks as 2.5 million Americans were left without the “desperately needed lifeline” of UI benefits. Even as five workers fight for every one job opening, Republicans are still calling the unemployed “spoiled” and suggesting that blocking benefits is fine because it only affects a “small amount of people.”

Last week at a fundraiser for Michigan GOP congressional candidate Rocky Raczowski, conservative pundit Phyllis Schlafly added her voice to the chorus crying out against government assistance for the poor or unemployed:

One of the things Obama’s been doing is deliberately trying to increase the percentage of our population that is dependent on government for your living. For example, do you know what was the second biggest demographic group that voted for Obama? Obviously the blacks were the biggest demographic, y’all know what was the second biggest? Unmarried women. 70% of unmarried women voted for Obama. And this is because when you kick your husband out, you’ve got to have Big Brother Government to be your provider. And they know that. They’ve admitted it. And they have all kinds of bills to continue to subsidize illegitimacy…

The Obama administration wants to continue to subsidize this group because they know they are Democratic votes.

Listen:

Schlafly’s argument is specious. She talks about “subsidizing illegitimacy,” but not all single women are mothers. Less than 20 percent are mothers to young children. The rest include millions of widows, millions of young never-married women, and plenty in between — some of whom have kids, but most of whom do not.

The fact that programs like UI and food stamps help unmarried women is only a byproduct of the system designed to help everyone in need – men and women alike. In fact, men are receiving more UI benefits than women – the unemployment rate for men is a full 2.2 points higher than it is for women.

That didn’t stop Schlafly from doubling down on her falsehoods in an interview with TPM yesterday. “All welfare goes to unmarried moms,” she claimed. “They are trying to line up their constituency for Obama and Democrats against Republican candidates.”

Of course, government assistance goes to both genders. But moreover, considering that 84 percent of custodial single parents are mothers and a quarter of American children are being raised by unmarried mothers, supporting single women is critical for supporting children. As the Center for American Progress’ Liz Weiss puts it, “When single mothers lose their home, suffer from hunger, or can’t find a job, their children also lose their home, go hungry, or suffer from greatly reduced household resources.”

– Charlie Eisenhood

Our guest blogger is Roneal Desai, Economic Policy Intern at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Republicans have recently spent a lot of time complaining about the budget deficit. But rather than make any attempt to address the causes of the structural deficit, they have chosen to obstruct short-term spending aimed at helping those still feeling the effects of the Great Recession.

For instance, leaders of the GOP wanted to cut the TANF Emergency Assistance Fund (which is on pace to create 240,000 jobs by September), repeatedly stalled an extension of unemployment benefits to help millions of jobless Americans, and filibustered a bill that provided tax credits to small businesses. At the same time, Republicans have been unwilling to allow the expiration Bush tax cuts for the rich, giving the wealthiest two percent of Americans, those most unlikely to be out of a job, an easy break.

And despite all the concern Republicans have voiced over the deficit, they have failed to even mention a section of spending which will make up nearly 25 percent of the federal budget this year: tax expenditures. Martin Feldstein, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and professor of economics at Harvard, has noted that tax expenditures impact the government’s bottom line in the same way as spending, and as a result are “equivalent to direct government expenditures.”

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates that tax expenditures will increase the federal budget by $1.2 trillion this year. And tax expenditures have been increasing at an exponential rate for decades now.

The amount the government spends on tax expenditures in real dollars has grown from $294 billion in 1977 to $981 billion in 2009 — an increase of more than 230 percent since 1977. And even though tax expenditures are double the amount of non-military discretionary spending, they face far less scrutiny.

Conservatives can’t even say that they didn’t see this coming, as the most radical changes have been during the years 1980 and 1985, when the country was led by conservative leader Ronald Reagan, and between 1996 and 2001, an era which began with the Senate and House both being led by Republicans for the first time since the 1950’s.

President Obama has proposed scaling back tax expenditures given to oil and gas companies, which would save $45 billion over ten years. If Republicans are serious about lowering the deficit, they’d be wise to follow his lead, and start targeting an area of spending they won’t be able to ignore for much longer.

Recently, a spate of Republicans (and a few Democrats) have been complaining about the deficit while simultaneously advocating a budget-busting extension of the Bush tax cuts, which will add more than $800 billion to the deficit once all the debt servicing costs are factored in. Republicans have even created a fantasy world in which tax cuts increase government revenues, in order to justify their two irreconcilable positions.

Last night, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) appeared on CNBC to promote his new “deficit reduction” plan, which creates a new congressional committee tasked with reducing the deficit, only on the spending side, by 10 percent every year. After spending the first portion of the segment griping about the deficit, Thune then turned to tax policy, where he emphasized that, in his view, the Bush tax all need to be extended or we will “imperil our economy’s ability to recover”:

I hope that we can get a vote before the election on extending those tax cuts from 2001 and 2003. If we don’t do that, I think it’s going to really imperil our economy’s ability to recover and our small businesses and investors opportunities to create jobs.

Watch it:

Neither Thune nor CNBC’s Larry Kudlow noted how much such an extension will cost, of course. In fact, Kudlow called Thune’s plan “a roadmap for recovery.” But extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, according to the Congressional Budget office, is the least effective step that Congress could take in terms of boosting the economy with tax or spending policy.

Plus, it’s clear that Thune really doesn’t understand the ramifications of his own deficit plan. After all, he told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that reducing the deficit by ten percent a year will lead to the deficit being eliminated in ten years. But as TPM’s Brian Beutler pointed out, “because the deficit would decrease yearly, the actual returns on 10 percent annual savings would diminish over time, such that it would take decades to reduce the deficit to one percent of its current level.” And, technically, the deficit would never be fully eliminated.

In the meantime, Thune’s favored tax policy would blow a hole in the budget, requiring even more draconian spending cuts if his deficit reduction plan were ever put into place. But we shouldn’t be expecting anything more coherent from Thune, considering that he doesn’t grasp how marginal tax rates work and measures economic initiatives in terms of how many times the required money could be wrapped around the Earth.

Our guest blogger is Heather Boushey, Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Economist Paul Krugman highlights Raghuram Rajan arguing in today’s Financial Times that the Federal Reserve should begin raising interest rates because “the US had far too much productive capacity devoted to houses and cars, because consumers could obtain financing for them easily.” Essentially, Rajan is arguing that monetary tightening is necessary to shift resources out of the too-large housing and car sectors. Krugman points out that this makes no sense because most of the job losses during the Great Recession haven’t been in the construction sector:

OK, I actually haven’t taken cars into account; someone with more time can do that. But let’s look at the role of job losses in construction versus other sectors, since December 2007. It looks like this:

If high unemployment were largely about shifting workers out of an overblown construction sector, wouldn’t you expect job losses to be concentrated in that sector? Wouldn’t you expect employment elsewhere to be, if anything, rising? In fact, however, the vast majority of job losses have occurred in parts of the economy with little direct connection to the housing bubble. Yes, as a percentage job losses have been much larger in construction; but nothing in Rajan’s argument explains why we shouldn’t be using policy in an attempt to prevent vast job losses in parts of the economy that aren’t overblown.

Let me add a bit more meat to this story. In fact, the Great Recession has been more of an “equal opportunity” recession than other recent recessions (click here for a larger image):

Certainly, construction has lost a significant chunk of jobs, but other industries — manufacturing, professional and business services, transportation and warehousing, financial activities, leisure and hospitality, and information services — have all lost a larger share. Much of financial activities could be considered tied to the run-up and bust of the housing market, but all the others? This Great Recession has had fairly broad, widespread job losses across industry, which contradicts the idea that there’s one or two sectors that U.S. workers need to transition out of.

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times today have articles on Democrats and Republicans vying for to be seen as more supportive of small businesses. “At the core of some of the major policy fights in Washington these days is a ferocious competition between Republicans and Democrats over which party is the champion of America’s small businesses,” the Times wrote.

Republicans loudly claim that Democrats have “hit small business with a sledgehammer,” but when given the opportunity to provide tax credits and lending capacity to small businesses today, they instead chose obstruction. The Senate failed to invoke cloture on a bill creating a lending fund for small businesses and providing those businesses with a series of tax credits, on a 58-42 vote. All Republicans voted against the bill (and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) switched his vote at the last moment as a procedural matter, which allows him to bring the bill up again later).

For months, Republicans in the Senate have been bogging down this particular bill by threatening to attach a cut in the estate tax to it, which would benefit just the richest 0.25 percent of households in the country. And at the same time, the GOP has been waging an intense campaign to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, because they falsely claim that a failure to do so would be a blow to small businesses.

But as Dylan Matthews pointed out, IRS data shows that “the filers reporting small business income who would be affected by letting the tax cuts expire come disproportionately from the ranks of the super-rich.” In fact, the Tax Policy Center has made the case that the Bush tax cuts actually harm small businesses, because their cost of capital goes up as the deficit increases, and the cuts made the tax code more corporation-friendly:

While the 2001-2003 tax cuts were described as “pro-entrepreneur,” a recent study found that the majority of taxpayers would see their tax burden rise, once the eventual financing of the cuts was taken into account. Specifically, the study found that 72 percent of taxpayers with business income would be worse off if the tax cuts were eventually paid for by proportional financing, and that 58 percent of filers with business income would be worse off if the cuts were eventually paid for with equal-dollar financing.

Even those Republicans who supported the small business lending bill — like Sen. George LeMieux (R-FL) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — voted against it today, claiming that they didn’t have ample opportunity to attach amendments. So in the end, Senate Republicans had the chance to do something helpful for small businesses, but decided obstruction was the more productive route.

According to the latest data from RealtyTrac, “foreclosures rose in three of every four large U.S. metro areas in this year’s first half,” providing yet another piece of proof that the foreclosure crisis is far from over. “More than 3 million households are seen getting at least one foreclosure notice this year, and this record will be surpassed slightly at the peak of next year,” RealtryTrac estimated.

The slow but consistently mounting number of foreclosures is, sadly, warranting little attention from lawmakers. And the Obama administration’s signature foreclosure prevention program, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), has fallen flat on its face. The latest report shows that fewer than 400,000 homeowners have received permanent modifications. In fact, more homeowners (520,814) have fallen out of the program than have had their mortgage modified.

HAMP has suffered from a series of design flaws, but one of the biggest is that there’s simply no incentive for banks to make a wide effort at implementing modifications, as the program contains no stick to force a bank’s hand. In fact, at this point, Democratic lawmakers have been reduced to asking banks if they would deign to pick up the pace of modifications on their own:

In a letter Tuesday, [Sen. Sherrod] Brown (D-OH) stated that a number of constituents have contacted his office saying banks are offering limited assistance in helping them restructure their home loans. The senator used the letter to call on banks to do more to help these individuals. “It is in the best interest of your banks to work with responsible borrowers to help them stay in their homes or find other alternatives to foreclosure,” Brown wrote.

As Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the TARP Oversight Panel, said, “for every family that Treasury has helped into a sustainable mortgage modification, ten other families have lost their homes to foreclosure. Foreclosures show no clear signs of abating.” Atrios added, “HAMP was announced with great fanfare, a big budget, and a promise that the program could help millions of homeowners. Instead it’s mostly gouged desperate people, extracting a few more mortgage payments out of them while doing little to help them.”

Treasury has been reluctant to implement substantial changes to the HAMP program, but states across the country are trying other approaches to stem the foreclosure tide, including mediation programs that compel banks to meet with a homeowner before finalizing a foreclosure. And it remains the case that the failure to get a handle on the housing crisis will impair an economic recovery.

Academy Award-winning actress and New Orleans resident Sandra Bullock has severed her involvement in a campaign to call attention to the BP spill, after learning from ThinkProgress that it was a greenwashing effort by the oil industry. Bullock is prominently featured in the Restore the Gulf campaign, run by Women of the Storm and sponsored by America’s Wetland Foundation.

In an online video with other major celebrities, Bullock called for American people to “speak up” and “sign the petition” for Congress and President Obama at the campaign website, which demands that “a plan to restore America’s Gulf be fully funded and implemented for me and future generations.” The YouTube video makes her the face of the campaign:

Unbeknownst to Bullock, America’s Wetland Foundation is a front group established by Shell Oil in 2002 and funded by the American Petroleum Institute, BP, and a host of other oil companies. Women of the Storm was established after Hurricane Katrina by Anne Milling, the wife of America’s Wetland chairman R. King Milling, who is part of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R-LA) team to lift the offshore drilling moratorium. This greenwashing campaign, first uncovered by DeSmogBlog.com’s Brendan Demelle, subtly includes mentions of “safe domestic energy” and oil industry factoids, while implying that American taxpayers, not the unmentioned oil industry, should pay for restoring the region BP has poisoned.

Sandra Bullock’s publicist tells ThinkProgress the actress was never informed of the campaign’s big oil ties. In a statement issued to ThinkProgress, Bullock’s representatives indicated they would immediately ask “for her participation in the PSA be removed until the facts can be determined”:

Ms. Bullock was originally contacted through her attorney to be a part of the PSA in order to promote awareness of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. At no time was she made aware that any organization, oil company or otherwise had influence over Women of the Storm or its message. We have immediately asked for her participation in the PSA be removed until the facts can be determined. Her commitment to the Gulf region has been apparent for many years and she will continue to pursue opportunities that will bring awareness and support to the plight of the Gulf region.

With its deep pockets, BP’s focus should be on supplying necessary funds to restore the Gulf region, not secretly supporting greenwashing campaigns to redirect blame. The people of the Gulf of Mexico don’t need the toxic influence of the oil industry, and the American people don’t need its toxic pollution.

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Last week, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, called for a temporary extension of all the Bush tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest two percent of Americans, which the Obama administration would like to see expire. Conrad even suggested waiving pay-go rules (which apply to those cuts for the richest two percent) in order to extend the cuts without paying for them.

Conrad quickly clarified that he wasn’t embracing the Republican approach, which is simply extending all of the tax cuts forever, calling that a “formula for the decline of the United States.” Today, Conrad appeared on CNBC to keep on trying to explain his position. “Can you clarify what’s more important to you: the revenue you would generate by letting them expuire on the wealthy or the damage that it would do to a nascent economic recovery if you raise taxes,” asked CNBC’s Joe Kernen. “What should we do?” Conrad replied that taxes need to eventually go up on the rich but “I don’t think this is the moment“:

We’ve got to be very careful with the timing of what we do. There’s no question in my mind that taxes have to go up on the wealthiest among us. The question is when. I don’t think this is the moment.

Watch it:

Conrad’s argument is understandable, and far better than the Republican position of passing deficit financed tax cuts in perpetuity, but it’s still misguided. While Conrad’s aim is to preserve the tax cuts in order to boost the economy, the Congressional Budget Office has found that, of the available tax and spending options, cutting income taxes in 2011 is the least stimulative of all. In fact, such a move generates just 10 to 40 cents in economic activity for every dollar spent. Cuts for high income households are even less effective, as “higher-income households…would probably save a larger fraction of their increase in after-tax income.”

Reducing income taxes also has, by far, the lowest effect on job creation. Other options like extending unemployment benefits, cutting payroll taxes, or investing in infrastructure all have considerably higher bang for the buck. Plus, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, temporarily extending the tax cuts for the wealthy induces “a substantial risk that Congress would continue extending the tax cuts and even make them permanent, creating much larger deficits for years to come.

Indeed, as the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote, “a temporary extension of the upper-income tax cuts would be the worst of both worlds. In the short term, it would be ineffective as an economic stimulus. In the long term, it would add to the deficit.” A two year extension of the cuts for the rich would cost about $75 billion, with little in terms of economic activity to show for it.

Monday night, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was pressed by Chris Matthews to identify what programs he would eliminate in order to address the deficit, and all Ryan could come up with was repealing the remaining stimulus and TARP funds. Ryan was unable to name a program that affects the long-term deficit, and by advocating for the elimination of the stimulus he was endorsing a tax increase on the middle class.

However, at least Ryan was able to positively identify something that he would cut. Today, Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) went on MSNBC and put on an even less impressive performance. Mike Barnacle begged Shadegg to identify just one specific program that he would axe, but Shadegg fell back on the conservative tactic of calling for an across the board cut on all programs:

BARNACLE: We have had an endless stream of members of Congress and the United States Senate on here over the past two or three years and whenever they are asked the question, ‘specifically, what would you cut to trim spending in the federal government,’ everybody agrees it’s a huge problem, we have to soak our faces in cement here on the set to prevent ourselves from laughing out loud at the non-answers we get. So my question to you, long-winded question here, is, can you please, I’m begging you, give me just one program you’d cut? We’ll start with just one program you’d cut.

SHADEGG: Well, there are lots of programs I would cut. I would begin by an across the board cut on all spending because I think we need to spread this…I’d say five percent across the board tomorrow on every single program, including defense, then you’d begin the process in the right direction.

Watch it:

This is extremely lazy of Shadegg, and shows that he’s fundamentally disinterested in actually addressing the deficit. An across the board cut makes no attempt to prioritize between vital, necessary programs that people depend upon and unnecessary, wasteful spending. It simply takes the same chunk out of everything. Is Shadegg willing to cut veteran’s health care or Social Security benefits by five percent tomorrow? How about border enforcement, food stamps, homeland security, the FBI, or national park funding? The list goes on and on.

But it’s not that hard to come up with something in the federal budget that actually can be cut. Here are some suggestions: the second engine for the F-35 and the C-17 transport plane, both of which the Pentagon doesn’t want. How about the $45 billion in subsidies we give to Big Oil companies? There’s a tax subsidy for NASCAR track owners that can certainly go. Agriculture subsidies and subsidies for ethanol, which both benefit huge corporations, need to be cut. There are also a handful of Army Corps of Engineers projects that are environmentally and economically disastrous that can certainly come to an end.

At the same time, revenue needs to be responsibly raised by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, ending the preferential tax treatment that hedge fund managers receive, reinstating the estate tax, cracking down on offshore tax havens, and closing the S-corp tax loophole. But Shadegg isn’t interested in grappling with any of the realities of the budget, instead opting for a talking point that proves nothing besides his own lack of credibility on the issue.

Over the weekend, news broke that three months after his oil company’s rig set off the largest oil spill in American history, BP CEO Tony Hayward would be stepping down. In his resignation statement, Hayward stressed that, “BP will be a changed company as a result of” its oil spill in the Gulf.

As the Progress Report today details, “Hayward’s departure will mark the end of a disastrous legacy that was spent botching the company’s response to its oil spill in the Gulf.” Almost a month after the gusher released 32 million gallons of toxic oil into the surrounding ocean as well as an unprecedented amount of chemical dispersants, Hayward told Sky News that “the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest.” In May, Hayward told a reporter who asked him about the victims of his company’s oil spill, “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.”

However, BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, who has previously told the American public that he cares about the “little people,” appeared on CNBC this morning to celebrate Hayward’s record at BP. “Tony Hayward has done a great job for the company,” Svanberg said proudly. He then admitted to CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo that the change in leadership at BP is simply cosmetic. Hayward’s presence at the company, Svanberg explained, hurt its image, so replacing Hayward was based simply on “rebuild[ing]” the BP “brand and reputation”:

SVANBERG: Tony Hayward has done a great job for the company through his almost thirty years and he has done it very well, greatly as a CEO. He has driven the company’s performance and developed the company in many, many ways. He has also led an unprecedented response in the Gulf of Mexico. But it became obvious to him and to us that in order to rebuild our position, in order to rebuilt our brand and reputation, we needed fresh leadership and that is why we are doing the change.

BARTIROMO: Of course on Hayward’s watch, the company suffered and the country in America suffered the worst environmental disaster ever.

Watch it:

Given the golden parachute pension Hayward received — “an immediate £600,000-a-year ($930,000) pension when he leaves the firm in October” — it’s no wonder his fellow executives at BP think highly of his tenure at the oil conglomerate.

Today, in an 11-5 vote, the House defense appropriations committee approved the purchase of a second engine for the F-35 jet fighter, despite the Pentagon explicitly saying that the engine is a big waste of money. In fact, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called the second engine “costly and unnecessary,” and has repeatedly recommended that President Obama veto the 2011 defense spending bill if it ultimately contains the funding. U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley has referred to the engine as “another rock” on top of the F-35 program.

Making matters worse, Congress’ insistence on funding the wasteful program comes at the same time that deficit hysteria is preventing any and all measures to combat the Great Recession from easily moving on Capitol Hill. And one of the loudest voices fearmongering about further spending is House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH). “Republicans are offering better solutions to cut spending now and provide the fiscal discipline economists say is needed to put people back to work,” Boehner has claimed.

But when the opportunity to discard a program that the Pentagon has said isn’t worth it comes along, where is Boehner?:

The engine’s supporters, who include the House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, contend that competition could produce better engines and reduce the risks of problems with the Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, a single-engine jet that represents the Pentagon’s largest weapons program.

And Boehner’s insistence on perpetuating the wasteful program stands in stark contrast to his proclamation earlier this year that all wasteful Pentagon spending “ought to be eliminated”:

I don’t think any agency of the federal government should be exempt from rooting out wasteful spending or unnecessary spending. And I, frankly, I would agree with it at the Pentagon. There’s got to be wasteful spending there, unnecessary spending there. It all ought to be eliminated.

Regarding Boehner’s argument that competition will produce better engines, Pentagon officials have responded “while competition would be nice, the alternative engine program does not guarantee sufficient benefits to risk additional cost hikes or developmental problems.” But Boehner’s love for the F-35 second engine is almost certainly due to the fact that it brings jobs to Ohio. General Electric — which produces the engine — has a plant right outside of Boehner’s home district.

Boehner’s position on the second engine makes him — like many in the GOP — a deficit peacock, willing to use the deficit to score political points but not willing to make the necessary choices to eliminate it. As House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said, “any conversation about the deficit that leaves out defense spending is seriously flawed before it begins…I fear that if we can’t decide what we can afford to do without today, we’ll be forced to make much more draconian cuts in the years to come.”

Back in May, House Republicans launched a gimmicky website called “YouCut,” which allows people to vote on which item, from a pre-determined list, they would nix from the federal budget. All the website really did was confirm that Republicans are totally uninterested in actually addressing the deficit, as all of the items they chose for their initial list, combined, amounted to 0.017 percent of the budget.

The very first YouCut “winner” was the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Contingency Fund (TANF ECF), which was created as part of the stimulus package. Here’s what some key GOP lawmakers had to say about the program at the time:

REP. TOM PRICE (R-GA): I’m so pleased to announce that the first program that got over 275,000 votes to cut, to do away with, is a crazy one that actually incentivizes people not to work. That’s right!

REP. ERIC CANTOR (R-VA): Not only is the new program unaffordable and duplicative, it undercuts welfare reforms made in the mid-1990s that saved taxpayers billions of dollars.

Of course, the GOP’s claims about the program had little basis in reality, as the TANF ECF is actually a successful jobs program that helps needy families and subsidizes job creation, including placing young Americans in summer jobs. And, as it turns out, the program has created hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country. In fact, it is on pace to help 240,000 unemployed individuals find jobs by the end of September.

Price’s Georgia has actually been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the program, with 20,000 jobs created in the state. Only four states — Texas, California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania — owe more jobs to the program.

“States are using funds from the TANF Emergency Fund to provide jobs to individuals least likely to find employment on their own: TANF recipients, the long-term unemployed, and low-income youth. These also are the individuals who are most likely to spend virtually all of the money they earn, thus making this an effective mechanism to stimulate the local economy,” wrote LaDonna Pavetti of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Yet, the House GOP feels that this program is the epitome of government waste and needs to be tossed by the wayside.

Unfortunately, the TANF ECF is running low on funds and will expire at the end of September if Congress doesn’t reauthorize it. Already, the Senate has voted down a reauthorization once. But in the states where it is helping, the program has significant Republican support. Georgia State Senator Renee Unterman (R) said that “it is imperative to maintain the capacity of the TANF ECF program to improve the lives of those hardest hit by the current economic conditions.”

Yesterday, Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio (R) released a plan for “12 Simple Ways to Cut Spending,” a companion piece to his bonanza of tax cuts for the rich and corporations that was released earlier this month. “I don’t think there’s anyone out there that, with a straight face, could argue that there aren’t places to reduce federal spending,” Rubio said.

As ThinkProgress Ben Armbruster pointed out, “the plan contains many ideas that would do very little in terms of paying down the debt and reducing the deficit,” along with a few budget gimmicks such as allowing taxpayers to specifically allocate some of their taxes to paying down the debt. Rubio also calls for ending the stimulus to reduce the deficit, which means that he would rescind the stimulus’ tax benefits for the lower- and middle-class.

But the plan also includes one other provision proving, once again, that Rubio is fundamentally disinterested in actually reducing the deficit. He proposes instituting a supermajority requirement for Congress to approve tax increases:

– IDEA #7: Require Any New Federal Taxes Only Be Approved By A Two-Thirds Vote Of The House And Senate...This will ensure that the balanced budget amendment achieves its’ goal via spending cuts, not tax increases.

Of course, responsibly addressing the budget deficit means looking at both the spending side and the revenue side. As Michael Linden pointed out, “balancing the budget without raising any additional revenue 10 years from now would require cutting every program in the entire budget by more than 25 percent, including all defense spending, Social Security and Medicare benefits, air-traffic-control funding, veterans’ benefits, aid to schools, job training programs, agriculture subsidies, highway maintenance, and everything else.”

And for an example of what imposing a supermajority requirement does to the ability to budget, Rubio need look no further than California, where Proposition 13′s supermajority requirement has significantly contributed to the fiscal train wreck. As Harold Meyerson pointed out, despite California’s budget woes, the Republican minority “has refused in good times as well as bad to raise business or other taxes (increasing the tobacco tax, for instance, has failed each of the past 14 times it has come up for a vote).” The Golden State’s wealthiest 1 percent “pays just 7.4 percent of their income to the state, while the poorest Californians pay 10.2 percent.”

As former Reagan economic official Bruce Bartlett wrote, “every serious budget analyst — I mean every — knows that revenues must be part of the solution to our deficit problem…[T]he idea that we can or even should embark on serious deficit reduction with no tax increase whatsoever is grossly immature and unworthy of consideration.” And that basically sums up Rubio’s entire economic platform.

Last week, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) said that he favored paying for an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans with unspent stimulus funds, essentially calling for the tax cuts in the Recovery Act to be rescinded in order to finance tax cuts for the rich. And last night on MSNBC, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) went down the same road, advocating for a full extension of the Bush tax cuts, but rescinding the stimulus in order to decrease the deficit.

During the segment, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called out Republicans on their deficit hypocrisy, saying “you won’t raise taxes and you won’t cut spending, so in other words, all this bitching about the deficit doesn’t mean squat.” He then pressed Ryan to come up with one specific program that he would do away with:

MATTHEWS: I just don’t see any program cuts. You talk in general terms, but let me tell you this, the major Republicans that come on television will not cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, they won’t cut the military, they can’t cut debt servicing, they won’t get rid of a major cost of government. They’ll talk about ‘let’s freeze discretionary spending’ in some sort of generalized way, but they won’t get rid of any government…Take a chunk out of that $1.4 [trillion deficit] by getting rid of a big program, a good expenditure that people watching can understand.

RYAN: I would rescind the unspent stimulus funds, I would rescind all the TARP funds they aren’t spending, I would do a federal hiring freeze and pay freeze for the rest of the year, and I would go back and cut discretionary spending back to ’08 levels and freeze that spending going forward.

Watch it:

First, it’s worth pointing out that Matthews specifically criticized Republicans for their continued calls for vague spending freezes, only to have Ryan advocate…a spending freeze. But more importantly, Ryan’s plan is to place the burden for deficit reduction squarely on the middle class.

Remember, contrary to the conservative portrayal, the stimulus cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, and there are still $55 billion in tax benefits that have yet to be expended. So repealing the stimulus to pay down the deficit amounts to raising taxes on all of those people.

Of course, suggesting tax increases on the lower- and middle-class while pushing for tax cuts for the rich is nothing new for Ryan. After all, he has proposed a budget that raises taxes on 90 percent of Americans — while lowering them for the richest 10 percent of the country — and still manages to lose $2 trillion in revenue. His much ballyhooed Roadmap for America, which even Republican leaders don’t want to touch, would also privatize Social Security and Medicare.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce likes to portray itself as a defender of all businesses, big and small. During the debate over financial regulatory reform, the Chamber continually ginned up concern about the bill’s impact on small businesses, falsely claiming over and over that the new regulations would restrict credit for butchers and florists. The Chamber even flew in a host of small business owners to lobby lawmakers on the matter.

Today, meanwhile, the Chamber is hosting an event entitled “Behind the Curtain: The Health Care Law’s Impact on Small Business,” which the Chamber claims is aimed at “placing the spotlight directly on the entrepreneurs who will feel the financial and regulatory impact of the health care law – some of the people who constitute the nation’s real economic engine, who are the key to creating enterprise and lifting the U.S. out of the recession.”

But while it is content to use small businesses as a shield against legislation that it doesn’t like, the Chamber’s recent actions show that it isn’t really interested in helping those businesses get through the recession. After all, the Senate last week cleared a procedural hurdle towards passage of a bill providing $30 billion for small businesses lending. But as Bloomberg News noted, while the debate was going on, the Chamber was “mostly silent”:

Bruce Josten, the top lobbyist for the Chamber, Washington’s biggest business advocacy group, wrote lawmakers on July 23 saying it supports the underlying tax and Small Business Administration provisions. The letter doesn’t mention the $30 billion fund, and the Chamber doesn’t have a position on it, spokesman J.P. Fielder said in an e-mail. He declined to say why.

The lack of support coming from the Chamber has small businesses riled up. “Credit [for small businesses] is a terrible problem,” said Fred Knapp, president of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce (which has no relation to the U.S. Chamber). “These groups are tied to big businesses. That’s all this is about.”

As James Verini pointed out in the Washington Monthly, far from being a defender of all businesses, the Chamber is “beholden to a cadre of multinationals whose interests are often inimical to those of small business. In 2008, a third of its revenues came from just nineteen companies.” Indeed, on everything from health care to regulatory reform, the Chamber took the position that favored huge corporations and kept small businesses at a competitive disadvantage relative to the big guys.

In another example, the Chamber is currently lobbying the Senate against Democratic plans to close tax loopholes that multinational corporations use to dodge the corporate income tax. Such tax evasion shifts the tax burden back onto small businesses and individuals who pay the full statutory tax rate, but the Chamber is siding with the tax dodging multinationals.

As my colleague Brad Johnson has documented, the Chamber’s Board of Directors is also “overwhelmingly Republican, having contributed six to one to conservative over liberal politicians.” And it’s telling that the Chamber refused to weigh in on the one piece of legislation currently before the Congress that could provide some aid to ailing small businesses, but which Republicans have been obstructing.

According to a spokesman quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) plans to address the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in September. The goal, which President Obama campaigned on, is to renew the cuts for the lower- and middle-class while allowing the cuts for the rich to expire.

Republicans, meanwhile, are throwing their full weight behind renewing the cuts for the rich, with many stating on the record that extending those cuts shouldn’t be paid for. (Extending the cuts for the wealthy is subject to pay-go rules, meaning that pay-go would have to be waived in order to pass the extension without paying for it.) In fact, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) said over the weekend that House Republicans will throw “everything we’ve got” into extending the tax cuts for the rich.

But just one day before promising to go to bat for the rich, Pence was excoriating the Obama administration about the deficit. “This year alone the deficit is projected to surpass last year’s record and soar to $1.47 trillion,” Pence said. “We cannot continue to postpone the hard choices and sacrifices that are necessary to stop this fiscal train wreck.”

Of course, Pence’s preferred outcome when it comes to tax cuts would add at least $678 billion to the deficit, while only benefiting the richest two percent of the country. Inclusive of debt-service costs, it’s closer to $800 billion. And Congress would have to waive the pay-go law that Democrats worked to put in place in order to do it.

This all combines to make Pence the epitome of a deficit peacock: scaremongering about the deficit to score political points, but fundamentally disinterested in taking the necessary steps to rein in the deficit. Allowing the tax cuts for the wealthy to lapse is a common sense first step in getting the long-term structural deficit under control (as the Bush tax cuts are one of its primary drivers), but Pence scoffs at the very idea.

As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said on Meet the Press yesterday, “I think it is fair and good policy to allow those tax cuts that only go to two to three percent of the highest earners in the country to expire as scheduled.” Geithner added that “we have to make sure we can continue to earn confidence around the world that we’re going to have the will as a country to bring these large inherited deficits down over time to a much more manageable level.”

Incidentally, in the same speech in which he proved his complete lack of concern about the deficit, Pence also tried to claim that Democrats favor allowing all of the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of the year. Politifact rated his statement “false,” adding that it “verges on a scare tactic.”