Today, President Obama pressed Congress to approve a pending bill that provides tax credits to small businesses and sets up a lending fund to get credit to businesses that are having trouble finding loans. “We must continue our efforts to do everything in our power to spur growth and hiring. And I hope the Senate acts this week on a package of tax cuts and expanded lending for small businesses,” he said.

One of the reasons that the bill Obama referenced hasn’t made its way through the Senate is that Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has been threatening to bog it down with his proposed cut in the estate tax, which would send $91 billion in tax cuts to the richest of the rich. But Kyl is claiming that his obstruction of the small business bill is actually an attempt to protect small businesses from tax rates that he says are “going to skyrocket”:

If the Small Business Lending bill is intended to help small business create jobs, wouldn’t it make sense to provide small business owners with the certainty that their tax rates aren’t going to skyrocket at the beginning of next year?

It definitely does make sense to ensure that tax rates don’t “skyrocket” on small businesses, and Kyl is presumably worried that allowing the estate tax to reset to its 2001 level, as current law stipulates, will do just that. But even if we grant Kyl’s premise, all that’s needed to avoid that outcome is for the Senate to approve a bill to approve a bill which has already passed the House that will permanently set the estate tax at the 2009 level. However, it was Kyl himself who blocked that plan, in his zeal to cut taxes for the super rich.

In fact, just like Kyl’s position on the Bush tax cuts proves that he doesn’t really care about deficits, his position on the estate tax proves that he doesn’t really care about small businesses. After all, at the 2009 level, just 0.25 percent of estates will have any estate tax liability at all. And just 1.3 percent of that 0.25 percent will be composed of estates with significant small business assets.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that at the 2009 level, just 110 small businesses in the entire country will owe any estate tax in 2011. Of these, all but a handful will have sufficient assets to pay the tax, and the exceedingly few that don’t “have other options — such as spreading their payments over a 14-year period — that would allow them to pay the tax without selling off any” assets.

In all, less than one quarter of one percent of the total cost of Kyl’s tax cut would actually end up in the hands of small businesses; the rest would simply go to further enriching the rich. So either Kyl has no idea what the practical implications of his stated policy preference are, or he’s using small businesses as a convenient prop to knowingly push through tax cuts for the rich. Either way, his professed concern over an imaginary tax hike on small businesses is getting in the way of small businesses receiving actual relief.

Back in February, Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), backed by a handful of Republican Senators, took a well-publicized stand against an extension of unemployment benefits, repeatedly objecting to motions to move the extension and telling Democrats trying to approve the benefits, “tough sh*t.”

One month later, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) expressed regret that Republicans hadn’t supported Bunning en masse, saying, “we didn’t give him as much help as we probably should have.” And the Senate GOP seems to have taken that to heart, as today Bloomberg details how “almost every Republican” in the Senate is now jumping aboard the Bunning express:

It turns out U.S. Senator Jim Bunning was ahead of the curve. Four months after the Kentucky Republican made colleagues squirm by blocking an extension of unemployment benefits for Americans out of work long-term, the party has adopted his cause as its own…“Our party caught up with the people Bunning was already with,” said New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg.

“This is the issue across the country,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). “We’ve had a few primaries and elections along the way and people understand the ferocity of the public’s view on this.”

Actually, it would seem that people don’t understand the “ferocity of the public’s view” when it comes to this issue, as a recent Gallup poll showed that 60 percent of Americans favor additional government spending in order to boost job creation. Just today, a group of leading economists released a “manifesto calling for more government stimulus and tax credits to put America back to work.” “The urgent need is for government to replace the lost purchasing power of the unemployed and their families and to employ other tax-cut and spending programs to boost demand,” they wrote.

The Republicans blocking these extensions claim to be doing so because they don’t want to add to the deficit. But even deficit hawks aren’t buying that rationale. “Attacking that is not attacking the real deficit issue,” said Bob Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition (which does nothing but advocate for balanced budgets). “Unemployment benefits seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Due to the Republican filibuster, almost 3.2 million Americans have seen benefits that they expected to receive unceremoniously yanked away, at a time when there are five workers for every job opening and 45.5 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months. Never before has Congress allowed benefits to lapse with unemployment so high.

Fortunately, Carte Goodwin, who is replacing the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) in the Senate, will be sworn in tomorrow, and with his vote, Democratic leaders are “optimistic” that they can “break the impasse and restore the benefits.” Today, President Obama pushed for the GOP to give up on its obstruction. “For a long time, there’s been a tradition – under both Democratic and Republican presidents – to offer relief to the unemployed. That was certainly the case under my predecessor, when Republican Senators voted several times to extend emergency unemployment benefits. But right now, these benefits – benefits that are often a person’s sole source of income while they’re out of work – are in jeopardy,” he said.

Last week, a handful of Republicans tried to claim — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that tax cuts inevitably pay for themselves, so the $678 billion extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans does not have to be offset. At the same time, Senate Republicans are standing pat against a $33 billion extension of unemployment benefits, because they say that it is too expensive.

As Michael Linden wrote, “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.” And this crazy double-standard is also being espoused by the GOP’s candidate for Senate in Florida. Marco Rubio appeared on Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie’s MSNBC show today to say that an extension of jobless benefits must be paid for, but that extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy does not. “They will be paid for because they create economic growth,” he said:

RUBIO: I would vote for [a jobless benefits extension] if it’s paid for. You’d have to show how its going to be paid for and I think Republicans have been working to do that in Washington and certainly I would be part of trying to find that. [...]

GUTHRIE: So you mentioned that you want the unemployment extension to be paid for. Would you take that principle to other issues? For example, there’s talk, of course, among Republicans that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans should be extended, but it sounds like there’s not necessarily a plan to pay for those. Would you draw the line there?

RUBIO: Well, let’s understand what the bigger picture is and it’s about the debt. [...] We definitely need growth if we want to pay down the debt, and that’s why you need policies like making permanent the ’01 and ’03 tax cuts.

TODD: Okay, but I’m confused, would you support them if they were not paid for, if they were not balanced out by spending cuts?

RUBIO: Well, the question is they will be paid for because they create economic growth, especially in the long-term.

Watch it:

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has said that “you should never have to offset” tax cuts for the rich, and it would appear from these comments that Rubio wholeheartedly agrees.

However, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, the claim that tax cuts inevitably pay for themselves “is contradicted by the historical record.” Even President Bush’s own economists don’t believe that tax cuts are free, as Andrew Samwick, Chief Economist for the Council of Economic Advisers in 2003-2004, said that “no thoughtful person believes that this possible offset [the Bush tax cuts] more than compensated for the first effect of these tax cuts. Not a single one.” Edward Lazear, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in 2007 added, “I certainly would not claim that tax cuts pay for themselves.”

As Paul Krugman wrote, “the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves has no empirical support. And yet the GOP leadership — which claims to be oh so worried about the deficit — is willing to stake America’s solvency on its belief that tax cuts are free.” In fact, the path of revenues following the Bush tax cuts is “pretty much what you would have expected if the Bush cuts had no supply-side effect at all.”