Today, Senate candidate Marco Rubio (R-FL) released his economic platform, which he claims is a “a clear alternative to the anti-growth, anti-job creation economic policies coming out of Washington.” “We have reached a point in our history when we must decide if we are to continue on the free market, limited government path that has made us exceptional, or if we are prepared to follow the rest of the world down the road of government dependency,” he said.

However, as the Orlando Sentinel’s Jim Stratton pointed out, “after perusing the list, the sharp-eyed reader will likely notice a recurring theme: This Rubio guy appears to be a big supporter of tax cuts. The proposals are sure to please his conservative base, many of whom see tax cuts as a magical elixir, good for pretty much anything that ails you.” Indeed, of the 12 steps that Rubio proposed, six are tax cuts, and another three are directives to stop regulations or taxes from being implemented. Here are some highlights:

– IDEA #1: Permanently Extend The 2001 And 2003 Tax Cuts

– IDEA #2: Cut Taxes On American Businesses

– IDEA #3: Permanently End The Death Tax

If this plan looks like a simple doubling-down on the Bush tax cuts, it is, with an unspecified corporate tax cut thrown on top for good measure. This comes despite the fact that the Bush tax cuts led to “the weakest jobs and income growth in the post-war period,” with monthly job growth the worst of any business cycle since 1945. In fact, the supply side tax cuts of both 1981 and 2001 failed to deliver as much investment growth, GDP growth, household income growth, wage growth or employment growth as the Clinton-era economic policies.

The cuts that Rubio proposes would also spend trillions of dollars while overwhelmingly sending the benefits to the very rich. In fact, at the 2009 level, the estate tax only affects the richest 0.2 percent of households in the country. So Rubio would spend billions on the hope that a tiny percentage of the population creates some jobs. “Those 2001 and 2003 tax cuts didn’t seem to help America avoid the recession, and Jeb Bush’s effort to cut taxes in Florida didn’t seem to help this state avoid becoming one of the worst hit by that recession,” wrote Kyle Munzenrieder at the Miami New Times.

Rubio has consistently tried to position himself as a deficit hawk, criticizing the government for “spending money we don’t have,” but as Stratton noted, “the campaign release doesn’t address what programs it would cut or any way to make up revenue lost from the tax cuts.” Of course, Rubio could just subscribe to the version of economic principles espoused by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) which says that “you should never have to offset” tax cuts for the rich.

Yesterday, two Federal Reserve officials — Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker and Federal Reserve Board Governor Elizabeth Duke — said that the central bank “has no plans to deploy additional tools for stimulating the economy and that the recovery is intact.” “There are no plans to do that at this point,” said Duke.

Last week, the Washington Post published an article reporting that the Fed is weighing “new steps to bolster growth” in the face of the sluggish economic recovery, but Lacker and Duke seem to think otherwise. (It should be noted that Lacker doesn’t have a vote on the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee this year, due to the voting positions rotating.)

Yesterday, I wondered whether President Obama’s three nominees for the Fed Board, who are scheduled to come before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday, can push the central bank into taking more action to boost employment, considering that maximizing employment is one half of its mandate. But there are already members of the FOMC who aren’t quite so willing to rule out additional steps. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren said that if Congress doesn’t step up to do more about the unemployment rate, it will be up to the Fed to fill the void:

If it looks like we’re not going to meet either element of our objective in a two- to three-ear horizon, we need to start thinking about what else we could do or what else the fiscal authorities could do. But in the absence of fiscal action we’d have to think about what more we could do … if the economy gets weaker and the inflation rate gets lower, we should be thinking about alternative policies.

“I’m not expecting to see that much progress on the unemployment rate over the course of the second half of this year,” Rosengren said. “Ideally we’d be seeing growth north of 4% in order to be really pushing the unemployment rate down from its very elevated levels and we’re not seeing growth at nearly 4% at least for the second half this year. Unfortunately, it looks like it will be a good bit slower than that.”

Yesterday, Paul Krugman laid out what additional Fed steps to boost employment in the face of anemic growth might look like:

It can buy longer-term government debt. It can buy private-sector debt. It can try to move expectations by announcing that it will keep short-term rates low for a long time. It can raise its long-run inflation target, to help convince the private sector that borrowing is a good idea and hoarding cash a mistake. Nobody knows how well any one of these actions would work. The point, however, is that there are things the Fed could and should be doing, but isn’t.

Deficit hysteria has gripped Capitol Hill, making it all but impossible to move the most common sense stimulus measures, like extending unemployment benefits. So Rosengren’s scenario under which more Fed action is called for is likely to become reality.

Critics of the financial regulatory reform bill that looks set to pass the Senate have been knocking the legislation by saying that it would not have prevented the financial meltdown of 2008. “Democrats have crafted a bill that fails to address the origins of the crisis and will not prevent a replay of events in the future,” said Rep. Tom Price (R-GA).

However, not all Republicans are so disparaging of the legislation. In fact, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said in an interview with the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin that he would have “loved to have” the resolution authority that the bill creates for dismantling failed financial firms. Paulson said that such power would have allowed him to take over Lehman Brothers and AIG, thus stemming the financial panic that occurred in 2008:

“We would have loved to have something like this for Lehman Brothers. There’s no doubt about it,” Mr. Paulson declared…[H]e suggested that had he had resolution authority, he would have been able to take over Lehman Brothers and the American International Group without the financial system crumbling…He said that he believed that if the government had had the authority to take over Lehman and A.I.G., it would have stopped the panic endangering other firms.

Paulson’s comments resemble those of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who has said that “if a federal agency had had such tools on September 16, they could have been used to put AIG into conservatorship or receivership…That outcome would have been far preferable.” And Paulson’s evident support of the Senate bill is especially interesting considering that it includes almost none of the fixes that Paulson himself recommended for the financial system in early 2008.

Congressional Republicans have continually tried to portray resolution authority as a continuation of the ad hoc bailouts to which the government had to resort in 2008. But in fact, the bill creates a clear process for unwinding big financial institutions without calling on taxpayers to bear the burden. It lays out a process for identifying whether a failing financial institution is too systemically entangled for traditional bankruptcy and, if so, puts it into an FDIC-style receivership, after receiving approval from a panel of bankruptcy judges.

Of course, the ultimate success of the new resolution authority all depends on regulators actually pulling the trigger and using it when the time comes. But at least regulators will have the adequate tools going forward, instead of improvising unsavory fixes like they had to in 2008.

Paulson added that the most important part of the financial reform bill is actually the creation of a council tasked with identifying systemic risk in the financial system, which was lacking from the pre-2008 regulatory structure. However, he said that such a council would have needed to be in place when the subprime bubble first began inflating to be effective in preventing the economic crisis. “We’d have needed the systemic risk regulator up and running by 2005 or so, to recognize the dangers of ever more lax underwriting and intervene,” he said.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — who is supposedly one of the Republican party’s “Young Guns” — has released a budget “Roadmap” that balances the federal budget by privatizing Social Security and Medicare and swapping out the corporate tax for a national sales tax. The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes called it “the most important proposal in domestic policy since Ronald Reagan embraced supply side economics in the 1980 presidential campaign. However, it is such a stark outline of the kind of cuts required to balance the budget entirely on the spending side that even Republican leaders have distanced themselves from it.

Today, Ryan appeared on CNBC and was asked about his plan. He warned that unless Congress adopts the sort of measures he prescribes, tax increases and benefit cuts for seniors will surely follow:

If you do that [follow the Roadmap], you will get us on the path toward prosperity. If you don’t do that, then it’s austerity, raising taxes on the economy now, cutting benefits for seniors currently.

Watch it:

So Ryan is essentially saying that unless Congress passes his tax raising, benefit cutting plan, then it will have to raise taxes and cut benefits. He acts like his cuts aren’t draconian, but as Ezra Klein wrote, his plan calls for “the government capping its payments and moderating their growth in such a way that many seniors will not get the care they need.”

It’s also odd to see Ryan raising the specter of tax increases, because according to Citizens for Tax Justice, his Roadmap raises taxes on fully 90 percent of people, while still losing $2 trillion in revenue. Under Ryan’s plan, “the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers would pay about $1,700 more, on average, than they would if President Obama’s [budget] proposals were enacted,” while “the richest one percent would pay about $211,300 less.” “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.

CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla actually asked Ryan about CTJ’s report, and while Ryan felt comfortable enough to scoff as CTJ’s methodology, he did not provide any rebuttal to its numbers. Instead, he simply pivoted into a discussion of his proposal to replace the corporate income tax with an 8.5 percent national sales tax.

The implementation of a national sales tax, which targets low- and middle-income families who “spend most or all of their income on consumption,” along with his abolition of the corporate and estate taxes, are what cause the dramatic shift of tax burden from the rich to the lower- and middle-class under Ryan’s plan.