Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Associate Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A Republican Senator walks into a bar and goes on and on about how bad the deficit is, and how much money the “Democrat” Congress has been spending and how President Obama has run up all this debt. The GOP Senator is so incensed about the state of the federal budget that he votes against extending unemployment benefits, even though the unemployment rate is at 9.5 percent. $33 billion, says the senator, is just too much to spend on the millions of people who are pounding the pavement looking for work.

Now here comes the punch line. The bartender asks the Senator if he’s in favor of $800 billion in tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans, and the Senator replies that not only is he strongly in favor of more tax breaks for wealthy people, but, “tax cuts should not have to be offset.”

It’s not a particularly funny joke, because, sadly, it’s not a joke at all. This is the position of the Republican party. Senate Republicans unanimously opposed extending jobless aid one day, citing concern over the deficit, but then turn right around and push for huge tax cuts for the very richest people in the country, which would cost more than 20 times as much.

I’ll never understand how a Senator can feign such anxiety about the deficit one minute, push for budget busting tax cuts the next and still keep a straight face. I’ll also never understand how they keep getting away with it.

Before the Senate had even managed to vote on final passage of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill today (which it approved on a 60-39 vote), House Republican leaders were publicly promising to repeal it. “I think it ought to be repealed,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH). “We hope [the Senate vote] falters so we can start over,” agreed Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN). “I think the reason you’re not hearing talk about efforts to repeal the permanent bailout authority is because the bill hasn’t passed yet.”

This isn’t a surprising development, as House Republicans have gone gangbusters with threats to repeal health care reform ever since it passed. However, much like repealing health care reform would remove protections like the ban on discriminating against customers with preexisting conditions, repealing the Dodd-Frank bill would send the country back to a status quo in which an unshackled Wall Street built up huge amounts of systemic risk, with the full knowledge that a taxpayer-funded bailout awaited their almost inevitable implosion. Here are some provisions of the Dodd-Frank that will become law with President Obama’s signature, but that the GOP is already set to repeal:

– Ability to unwind failed banks without bailouts: Republicans constantly demagogue the bailouts that occurred in 2008 to stabilize the financial system (though they occurred under a Republican administration), but repealing the Dodd-Frank bill would take away new tools granted to regulators to unwind failing firms without taxpayer dollars. This week, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said he “would have loved to have” the bill’s authorities during the crisis of 2008.

– Bringing derivatives out of the dark: The $600 trillion derivatives market is almost entirely unregulated, and helped bring about the demise of some of the big financial institutions, most notably AIG, that needed to be rescued by the government. The Dodd-Frank bill puts these instruments onto public exchanges and through clearinghouses, giving the companies clear price information and regulators transparent paths to follow while policing abuse. It also prevents banks from engaging in some derivatives trading with federally insured dollars.

– Reining in risky trading: Courtesy of the Volcker rule — named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker — banks are prevented from trading for their own benefit with federally insured dollars. Such trading, which amounted to gambling with the government’s backing, sustained upward pressure on the housing bubble. Repealing this rule would be a sign to Wall Street that the casino is back open for business.

Repealing the bill would also mean disbanding the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which fills a huge gap in the regulatory system that allows banks to run wild with predatory products while consumers have no advocate (and which Republicans have complained about so much that they probably would be all too happy to see it disappear).

Now, this bill is not perfect, and could have gone much farther in terms of breaking up the biggest banks or getting rid of risky trading entirely. But repealing it would simply let Wall Street banks right back into the wild, wild west that was created by years of deregulation and financial innovation that boosted bank profits but had no societal benefit.

The Defense Department and the House of Representatives have been engaged in a bit of a spat recently over funding for a second engine for the F-35 fighter jet. DoD says that the alternative engine is a big waste of money and has recommended that Congress jettison the program, but the House decided to fund it anyway in the 2011 defense authorization bill. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has pushed President Obama to veto the authorization if it ultimately includes the funding.

And the second engine isn’t the only item in the gargantuan defense budget that the DoD doesn’t want but that Congress insists on continually providing. Over the last four years, the Pentagon has requested precisely zero new C-17′s — a military transport plane — but has wound up with a whole bunch of them:

Despite the lack of a Pentagon request the past four years, Congress has appropriated $12 billion for 43 of the transport aircraft, including eight in the fiscal 2009 war supplemental spending measure and 10 in the fiscal 2010 Defense appropriations law.

As Congressional Quarterly pointed out, Congress’ insistence on funding a plane the Pentagon doesn’t want is “due in no small part to the lobbying efforts of Boeing Co., which builds the planes in California, Missouri, Georgia, Connecticut and elsewhere.” And Boeing is up to its old tricks yet again, “belatedly lobbying for the purchase of five more C-17s at a cost of about $1.3 billion” for this year.

“I am fully aware of the political pressure to continue building the C-17,” Gates has said. “So let me be very clear: I will strongly recommend that the president veto any legislation that sustains the unnecessary continuation.” As Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Michael McCord and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Alan Estevez told a Senate subcommittee this week, “it is not in the national interest to continue adding more C-17s…In our view, the production line should begin shutting down.”

This isn’t just about the upfront cost of purchasing more planes, which is considerable. It’s about then paying to maintain the planes for years. The Pentagon actually spends $1 billion per year to maintain the 43 C-17s that it didn’t request, but received anyway.

Obama has called the continued purchase of additional C-17s “waste, pure and simple.” And yet, they turn up in the budget year after year, as lawmakers look out for their own parochial interests at the behest of defense contractors.

This week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke at a Fed conference regarding the difficulty that small businesses are having accessing loans. “Though we believe that our and others’ efforts are making a difference [in easing credit], we also know more must be done,” he said:

The formation and growth of small businesses depends critically on access to credit. Unfortunately, those businesses report that credit conditions remain very difficult…Making credit accessible to sound small businesses is crucial to our economic recovery and so should be front and center among our current policy challenges.

In all, “lending to small business has dropped by some $40 billion since the second quarter of 2008 – going from more than $710 billion to less than $670 billion in the first quarter of 2010.” Of course, Bernanke is far from the only one who realizes that this is a problem, so the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats have been working on a bill that would create a $30 billion lending pool and provide $12 billion in tax credits and cuts for small businesses.

That bill, however, has been hung up by conservatives who want to implement the policy that they truly care the most about: tax cuts for the wealthy. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who along with Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) has crafted a $91 billion cut in the estate tax for the richest 0.25 percent of households, “has persisted in pushing for a vote on his amendment, even if it means holding up the bipartisan small-business package.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said yesterday that Kyl’s zeal to reduce tax rates on the richest of the rich “has become entangled with the small-business bill — making it harder to proceed.”

So, to sum up, there’s wide acknowledgment that small businesses can’t get the loans that they are looking for, and there’s a bill before the Senate designed to address that concern. But Kyl is so intent on spending billions to cut taxes for the very wealthy that he is holding it up.

Now, I’m not convinced that inducing small business lending via more top-down funding will necessarily do all that much, as it doesn’t fix the underlying problem for them, which is a severe lack of customers. But there are plenty of stories of small businesses that are looking for loans being unable to find them, and Kyl is indifferent to their plight, unless aiding them also means cutting taxes for the very rich.