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.