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.