Ever since the Obama administration came into office, the Chamber of Commerce has been fearmongering about its plans to close certain corporate tax loopholes. And now the Chamber is also wading into the debate over the administration’s plans to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire on schedule, with the its chief economist, Martin Regalia, saying that bringing tax rates back to where they were under President Clinton “is a corporate bullet in the head”:

“That’s what you’re suggesting, is a corporate bullet in the head. That is going to be a bullet in the head for an awful lot of people that are going to be laid off and an awful lot of people who are hoping to get their jobs back.”

Regalia also said that allowing the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of the population to expire — saving $830 billion over the next ten years — is a “fool’s error” and “accused the Obama administration of acting ‘as if the upper class aren’t part of the economy’.”

The “Voice of Business” is explicitly going to bat for the rich here, as the personal income tax has little to do with the corporations that the Chamber represents. But this outlandish rhetoric is just part and parcel of the usual response from the Chamber of Commerce to a tax increase.

In 1993, when President Clinton proposed his tax increase, the Chamber said “the considerable goodwill that the President had, despite the skepticism that business normally shows toward a Democrat, is largely gone.” The Chamber also criticized President Reagan’s tax increase of 1983, saying, “no doubt that it will curb the economic recovery everyone wants.”

The reality, of course, has been much different. Under President Clinton, the country experienced the longest period of sustained economic growth in its history. And as far as the business community is concerned, Clinton’s economic policies resulted in more business investment as a percentage of GDP than President Bush’s. Michael Ettlinger and John Irons ran the numbers:

[Business investment] was 2.8 percent in the seven-year period beginning in 1981 and 2.7 percent in the period beginning in 2001. In the period with higher taxes beginning in 1993, the growth rate was 10.2 percent. In the parallel portions of the business cycles following the tax changes of 1981, 1993, and 2001, investment grew faster under the 1993 tax regime than under either supply-side regime. The average rate of growth was 10.5 percent post-1993, 1.4 percent post-1981, and 6.1 percent post-2001.

With its fearmongering about tax increases, the Chamber of Commerce is much like the Republican party, which also excoriated Clinton’s plan. But that actually makes sense, considering that the Chamber’s board “is overwhelmingly Republican, having contributed six to one to conservative over liberal politicians.”

Last week, California’s Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina used farmers as props in her quest to cut the estate tax, falsely claiming that if the currently expired tax is reinstated, farms such as the ones she visited would be clobbered. And it appears that her northern counterpart Dino Rossi, one of Washington state’s Republican senate candidates, is taking a page out of Fiorina’s book.

Rossi yesterday toured Seattle’s GM Nameplate, which is a company that “makes face-plates and touch screens for appliances.” Rossi claimed that the company would be hammered by the estate tax, saying, “just to pay that 55 percent tax you’d have to sell to some group from out of state or out of the country, instead of passing it on to the next generation.”

Rossi referenced a 55 percent rate, which only takes effect if no legislation is passed this year. President Obama and many congressional Democrats have proposed permanently reinstating the estate tax at the 2009 level of 45 percent with a $3.5 million exemption, a move which made the GOP balk. Rossi, meanwhile, wants to completely eliminate the tax, out of supposed concern for small businesses and family farms:

“Small, family-owned businesses are the backbone of our economy, providing 64 percent of jobs in the last fifteen years, and, if Patty Murray doesn’t extend this critical tax relief, many could be swallowed up by faceless corporations so that families can pay Uncle Sam,” said Rossi. “Family farms and businesses are part of what make Washington State unique, and eliminating the death tax will keep this tradition alive for generations to come.”

Actually, reinstating the estate tax at the 2009 level will have almost no effect on the small businesses Rossi claims to care so deeply about. According to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, about 110 small businesses or family farms in the entire country would be affected by the estate tax at that level, and according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities “all but a handful” would have sufficient funds on hand to pay the tax.

The exceedingly few that don’t “would 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 of the business or farm assets.” People having to sell their farms or businesses to satisfy the tax man is a convenient conservative story that isn’t based in reality.

So Rossi is essentially hiding behind small businesses and farmers to push a cut that would almost exclusively benefit multi-millionaires. Nearly two-thirds of estate tax revenue comes from estates worth more than $20 million. Repealing the estate tax would cost $784 billion over ten years, with less than one quarter of one percent of the benefits going to actual small businesses.

And, incidentally, if it’s really small businesses that Rossi is concerned about, he chose an odd venue at which to make his anti-estate tax stand. GM Nameplate is an 800 employee manufacturing firm with divisions in Singapore and Dongguan City, China, and it brags about its “seamless transfer of US-manufactured prototypes to a company-owned offshore production facility.” Even by the federal government’s overly inclusive definition of small business, this doesn’t fit.

In his most recent weekly radio address, President Obama noted that “some Republican leaders in Congress don’t seem to have learned any lessons from the past few years. They’re pushing to make privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda if they win a majority in Congress this fall.” The Democratic National Committee also released an ad pointing to the GOP’s desire to privatize the 75 year old program.

A few Republican talking heads have taken exception to this portrayal, and have claimed that no Republicans actually want to privatize the system in the way Democrats describe:

DANA PERINO: I don’t know of a single Republican who actually wants to do what the Democratic ad just said. It’s sad for the Democrats…they still can only run on fear of something that somebody is not suggesting.

ED ROLLINS: The President’s out there saying ‘Republicans are going to take away your Social Security.’ There’s no Republican, basically, standing up and saying that, and we haven’t for a very long time.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: How stupid does he think Americans are? Not only will Barack Obama not allow Social Security to be privatized, Republicans will not allow Social Security to be privatized.

Watch a compilation:

Contrary to their assertions, Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) much ballyhooed Roadmap for America’s Future calls for the creation of private Social Security accounts, akin to those proposed by President Bush in 2005. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has explicitly advocated “reviving President George W. Bush’s failed plan to partially privatize Social Security.”

Reps. Dan Lungren (R-CA), Jack Kingston (R-GA), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) have all touted personal accounts, while Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has expressed a desire to “wean everybody off” Social Security entirely. Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) even questioned the constitutionality of the program.

Kentucky’s Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul, meanwhile, has said “let young working people opt out, the sooner the better, let ‘em opt out and get a better investment.” Indiana’s GOP Senate candidate Dan Coats has endorsed a Social Security plan “along the lines of what Paul Ryan has proposed.”

As a Center for American Progress Action Fund analysis found, under a Bush-style privatization plan, an October 2008 retiree would have lost $26,000 in the market plunge of that year, and if the U.S. stock market had behaved like the Japanese market during the duration of that retiree’s work life, “a private account would have experienced sharp negative returns, losing $70,000 — an effective -3.3 percent net annual rate of return.” But despite the market turmoil that America just went through, Republicans are most certainly pushing a privatization agenda, under the guise of a manufactured Social Security “crisis.”