Yesterday, before the Senate’s pre-election adjournment, Senate Democrats attempted to pass legislation funding a pair of multi-billion dollar lawsuit settlements with black farmers and Native Americans. The settlements were part of “a discrimination suit filed by black farmers against the Agriculture Department” and “a case involving mismanagement of trust funds that Indian tribes filed against the Interior Department.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had worked out some differences on the legislation with Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and was ready to pass the bill by unanimous consent. But then along came Sen. Tom “Dr. No” Coburn (R-OK) who objected to the motion to approve the bill.

In May, Coburn blocked the same bill, objecting to the fact that the authorized payments weren’t offset with budget cuts elsewhere. This time, the bill was fully offset, but still Coburn objected. “We changed the offsets to address the concerns of Senators Grassley and Kyl in an effort to try to pass the legislation. We also addressed the concerns of Senator Barrasso and were very close to passing the legislation before we left last night. Unfortunately at the 11th hour, Senator Coburn objected,” Reid’s Deputy Communications Director Regan Lachapelle told me in an email.

This is, of course, nothing new for Coburn, who earlier this month objected to the passage of a much-needed food safety bill, saying that he took issue with the cost. That bill was also fully offset with budget cuts elsewhere. However, Coburn is not alone in his crusade to deny payments to farmers who were discriminated against by the USDA or Native Americans whose land trusts were woefully managed.

Yesterday, a cadre of House Republicans alleged that this particular settlement process is rife with “massive and widespread fraud and abuse.” Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) — who appeared alongside Tea Party-darlings and conspiracy theorists Reps. Steve King (R-IA) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — said that the Obama administration “should put the brakes on this. [Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack] should not be asking the Congress to sweep money into this.”

Even Grassley doesn’t buy that preventing fraudulent settlement payments and having the funding move forward are mutually exclusive. “People who aren’t entitled to it shouldn’t get it, and that should be the Department of Agriculture’s responsibility and the court’s responsibility,” he said. But it seems that even righting past federal wrongs is too much to ask of the current Republican caucus.

When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) released his radical Roadmap for America’s Future — which he claims will balance the budget via privatizing Social Security and Medicare — Republican leadership quickly ran away from it, emphasizing that it was Ryan’s personal plan and not the official GOP platform. Now, it seems, Ryan doesn’t want anyone else scrutinizing his plan at all.

During an appearance at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Ryan criticized Democrats for “the political weaponization” of Social Security, and asked candidates on the campaign trail to please stop attacking Republican plans to gut entitlements. Politico reported:

“We’ve got to get through this political moment. The political weaponization of entitlement reform is very unfortunate. It’s hurting our chances of actually getting bipartisan agreement in the near future. It’s unfortunate but we’ve got to get out there.” Though he called for candidates to stop talking about entitlement reform on the campaign trail, Ryan also cast his Roadmap in a soft light to deflect criticism that it will hurt seniors. He reminded the audience that his plan doesn’t affect those over 55.

Of course, Ryan’s plan would radically alter Social Security, to the detriment of the program, which is something that needs to be talked about. Remember, under the Roadmap, Social Security would be privatized through the creation of personal investment accounts and benefits for future retirees would be cut, all without setting the program on a path for solvency:

The Ryan plan proposes large cuts in Social Security benefits — roughly 16 percent for the average new retiree in 2050 and 28 percent in 2080 from price indexing alone — and initially diverts most of these savings to help fund private accounts rather than to restore Social Security solvency. Because the plan would divert large sums from Social Security to private accounts, it would leave the program facing insolvency in about 30 years, just as under current law. The plan would avoid insolvency by transferring $1.2 trillion from the rest of the budget to Social Security between 2037 and 2056.

Ryan’s Roadmap would also end Medicare as we know it, creating a voucher that won’t keep up with the cost of health care.

Republicans, from their rhetoric to the plans that they actually put on paper, have failed to explain what cuts to the federal budget they would make if given the opportunity, leaving raiding entitlements as the only way to make their various plans work. Ryan, on the other hand, has laid out some of the draconian cuts that he would make, but he would really prefer people don’t take him to task for proposing to tear apart programs upon which millions of Americans depend.

New Hampshire’s Republican senate nominee, Kelly Ayotte, has consistently called for extending the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, which would entail borrowing and spending $830 billion in order to give millionaires a $100,000 tax break. She also wants to cut the corporate tax rate, giving large corporations who already have a tax code that they easily manipulate to their advantage yet another break.

But how about giving middle-class workers a break by guaranteeing paid sick leave? During a “lightning round” of questions at the latest New Hampshire senate debate, Ayotte was asked “would you support legislation guaranteeing paid sick leave to employees?” Ayotte said that deciding whether or not to provide paid leave is “certainly” something best left to employers:

I think that that is certainly an issue that should be addressed by employers rather than mandated by the government.

Watch it:

Ayotte’s opponent, Rep. Paul Hodes (D-NH), was even quicker with an answer. “Yes,” he said.

The problem with Ayotte’s response is that employers have shown this is an issue they have no interest in addressing. Nearly 50 percent of private sector workers (including 86 percent of food service workers and 78 percent of hotel workers) do not have guaranteed paid sick leave. This amounts to some 57 million workers. The United States is the only nation in the industrialized world that does not mandate guaranteed paid sick leave.

The choice not to guarantee paid sick leave entails real health risks, particularly since so many food service workers are forced to come to work ill or forego their paycheck. Lost productivity due to sick workers attending work and infecting other employees costs the U.S. economy $180 billion annually. During the swine flu outbreak late last year, public health experts expressed a concern that failure to provide sick leave was contributing to the spread of the disease.

The typical conservative response is that mandating paid sick leave will mean creating crippling new costs for businesses. But the Drum Major Institute released a study this week that examined San Francisco’s city-wide implementation of a paid sick leave law and found “no evidence that businesses in San Francisco have been negatively impacted by the enactment of paid sick leave.”

The model that Ayotte is clinging to — in which employers always do the right thing for their employees and dissatisfied workers can always leave their job to find a better deal elsewhere — sounds nice in theory. But what does that world look like in practice?

Nearly all of the discussion regarding the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of the year has focused on the effect the expiration would have on marginal income tax rates. But there were other facets of the Bush tax cut package, including cutting the capital gains and stock dividends rates to 15 percent.

President Obama has proposed increasing the rates on capital gains and stock dividends back to 20 percent for those making $250,000 or more. Republicans, meanwhile, have opposed allowing the increase to occur. And now they’ve been joined by 47 House Democrats:

Forty-seven House Democrats have signed a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi urging that tax rates on capital gains and dividends be maintained at the current level of up to 15% for all earners…The letter from House Democrats argues that raising taxes on dividends and capital gains would be harmful to companies’ ability to grow and add jobs.

The rationale for having a lower capital gains and dividend rate is that it will encourage investment, as investors will want to take advantage of a lower rate. Under President Clinton, the capital gains rate was 20 percent, while dividends were treated as regular income, so Obama is proposing a tax policy even more deferential to these sorts of income than was in place in the 1990′s. Plus, as Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out, these House Democrats are to the right of President Reagan when it comes to investor income:

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Tax Reform Act that ended the tax preference for capital gains and taxed all types of income at the same rates. Conservatives have long complained about this Reagan tax reform, and have even incorrectly claimed that capital gains tax revenue actually fell as a result of it…Today, conservative critics of President Reagan have been joined by a group of House Democrats who also seem to feel that Reagan was not sufficiently devoted to tax preferences for the wealthy investor class.

Of course, Obama hasn’t proposed evening the rates between regular income and investment income either, but to think that wealthy investors need a capital gains rate 20 points below the top marginal income tax rate (currently 35 percent) in order to invest their money is silly. Do conservatives, and these House Democrats, really believe that the wealthy will squirrel away their money under the mattress if the capital gains rate goes back to the level at which it was under Clinton? In fact, business investment was stronger under President Clinton that it was under President Bush.

The overwhelming majority of capital gains go to the richest households. Keeping that rate so far below the rates applied to normal income is simply a giveaway to the wealthy that doesn’t boost the economy.

A few Senate Democrats — including Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) — have come out against President Obama’s plan to extend the Bush tax cuts for the middle-class while allowing them to expire for the richest two percent of Americans (saving $830 billion in borrowing and spending). In fact, Nelson feels so strongly about extending the Bush tax cuts that he delivered a speech today at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank, arguing for “why we should not raise taxes in a weak economy.”

“I hate deficit spending, but some matters are so urgent that they can’t wait. Such was the case with the stimulus package, which contained more than $300 billion in tax relief, and I believe the same holds true about the expiring Bush era tax cuts,” Nelson has said. Heritage promoted the event by noting Nelson’s support for Bush’s tax cuts in the first place:

Since coming to the Senate in 2001, Nelson has played a key role in passing several major tax cuts, including providing the lynchpin of Democratic support for both the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush. In September, Nelson announced that he would again break ranks with his party and support the continuation of the 2001/2003 rates, noting that raising taxes in this economy could impair recovery and “hold back economic development across America.”

To his credit, Nelson did tout the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a success during the speech. But if Nelson’s worried about holding back development, he might want to take a look at the Congressional Budget Office’s work on the effects of the Bush tax cuts. CBO has found that extending the Bush tax cuts are the least effective tax or spending step available for boosting the economy and that extending the entire Bush tax cut package permanently will actually decrease incomes and gross national product, due to the increased borrowing needed to pay for them.

Unlike many Republicans, Nelson has said that an extension of the tax cuts should be “paid for as much as possible.” When asked for a potential pay-for, Nelson has responded, “well, you still have unspent stimulus funds,” which means Nelson is willing to pay for extending tax cuts for the rich by raising taxes on the middle class.

Nelson’s message went over well at Heritage, where fealty to Bush tax policies is paramount, but if Nelson truly believes in his policy prescription then he should be willing to face a more skeptical audience. With that in mind, we’d like to extend an invitation to Nelson to come to the Center for American Progress and debate the Bush tax cuts anytime he’d like.

We’ve been following the trials and tribulations of various Republican candidates and lawmakers as they are asked, after waxing poetic about the need to cut government spending, which program they’d remove from the federal budget. One of the many who were unable to cite a single program was Carly Fiorina, California’s Republican senate nominee.

You’d think that, having failed to name one program to cut while on live television, Fiorina might take some time to find specific budget reductions before releasing a plan on how she would reduce the deficit. But Fiorina released her plan “to rein in out-of-control government spending” yesterday, and it literally has no proposals for spending to cut, aside from ending earmarks, which account for less than one percent of the federal budget.

Fiorina promises to cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, and then has this to say about where the cuts to get to that level will come from:

– Review every government program as their authorizations expire to ensure only effective programs receive additional funding.

– Terminate ineffective programs that are unable to be reformed such that they have a positive impact.

– End earmarks and sweetheart deals and give the president the authority to line item veto any spending not in the national interest.

That’s it: “terminate ineffective programs.” And we’re all for terminating ineffective programs! In fact, here’s $100 billion in the Defense Department and hundreds of millions in the Education Department that could be cut, just to get the ball rolling. Fiorina’s inability to even suggest one program that she would eliminate shows how fundamentally disinterested she is in actually controlling spending.

Of course, eliminating ineffective and duplicative programs won’t get you anywhere close to bringing the budget into balance. In fact, you’d have to eliminate the entire discretionary side of the budget — including discretionary defense spending, all federal education funding, some veteran’s benefits, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, federal highway funding, and Congress itself — to eliminate the deficit.

The real structural deficit is a result of health care spending, defense spending, and massive tax cuts, none of which Fiorina suggests cutting by one dime.

Interestingly enough, though, Fiorina may have accidentally come out in favor of a tax increase. She says she would cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP — which is where it was the last time the budget was balanced and far below the levels of the Reagan administration — but revenues through 2015 are not projected to go higher than 19 percent of GDP. So either Fiorina is going to have to cut further than even she says we need to, or she’s going to have to raise some taxes.

I understand that candidates are hesitant to say exactly which programs they’d cut, because such choices will inevitably be unpopular with someone. But is it too much to ask that a plan explicitly about reducing spending actually lay out some ways to reduce spending?

Pennsylvania’s Republican senate nominee, former Rep. Pat Toomey, has been going to great lengths to reassure everyone that his plan to privatize Social Security will not, in fact, be detrimental to the program. In fact, Toomey denies that his plan involves privatization at all (even though it very clearly calls for the creation of personal investment accounts, which is privatization).

Last night, during an interview with Ted Koppel, Toomey said that there’s no reason to be concerned with the creation of private Social Security accounts, as long as you’re “bullish on America”:

Koppel also pushed back on Toomey’s long-standing and somewhat controversial stance on allowing American employees to invest their Social Security privately. Koppel pressed that if President George W. Bush had been successful in getting such a plan through, people would have lost their savings during this recession. “The big question is whether you’re bullish on America,” Toomey said. “If you think in the long run that America is not going to grow, is not going to thrive, then you should be worried about this approach.”

As my colleague Ian Milhiser has noted, “privatization imposes significant new risks on seniors, while creating new administrative costs and forcing benefit reductions. Yet despite being a riskier, less beneficial program for seniors, it also will cost more money than the present system.” And even if you’re bullish on America, the fact of the matter is that investments and the stock market go up and down, which is precisely the kind of uncertainty that we don’t want to inject into senior’s retirements.

As CAP economist Christian Weller wrote in 2005, long before the market turmoil of 2008, “while the market has increased on average by over 6 percent over the past 75 to 100 years, it has also seen extended periods in which rates of return were well below or above that…At its lowest point, it had an average rate of return over 35 years of 3 percent over inflation. Individual account holders would lose money under this scenario.” If the U.S. stock market had behaved like the Japanese market during the life of a 2008 retiree, a private account would have lost $70,000.

And, of course, the financial meltdown of 2008 should have been the final nail in privatization’s coffin, as someone retiring that year would have seen $26,000 vanish right then and there.

These numbers have nothing to do with being bullish; they’re simply calculations made from market behavior that the country has already experienced. Unless Toomey has a super-secret plan for guaranteeing market stability — which, given his pride in having deregulated risky financial instruments, I’m betting he doesn’t — Toomey is asking seniors to trust in a system that can’t deliver.

Today, Senate Democrats tried to bring the Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act, which would give “companies…that shift overseas jobs to the U.S.” a special payroll tax holiday, to the floor for a full vote. Yet thanks to a united Republican filibuster and the defection of a handful of Democratic caucus senators — Max Baucus (MT), Ben Nelson (NE), Jon Tester (MT), Mark Warner (VA), and Joe Lieberman (CT) — the Democrats failed to achieve cloture and were unable to bring the bill up for a vote.

Last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared its opposition to the bill, claiming that “replacing a job that is based in another country with a domestic job does not stimulate economic growth.” The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) also came out against the bill, arguing it would “jeapordize” American job creation.

Today, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) answered questions from reporters about the legislation’s demise. He told them that, “of course,” NAM and the Chamber opposed the offshoring bill because they “much prefer paying people in Vietnam 20 cents an hour than American workers a living wage“:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday blasted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) for opposing legislation that attempts to in-source jobs by granting companies a payroll tax holiday that shift overseas jobs to the U.S. and limits the use of tax deferral. “Of course they are [opposed],” Sanders told reporters. “They much prefer paying people in Vietnam 20 cents an hour than American workers a living wage.” [...]

Sanders suggested that these organizations oppose the bill because it bolsters the bottom lines of their members. “It is to their advantage, in many cases, to shut down plants here and pay people a fraction of the wages that American workers lose by going to China,” Sanders said. “What’s the surprise about that?”

The Chamber has made passing legislation that makes it easier for its member corporations to offshore labor a centerpiece of their agenda. NAM also makes expanding U.S. hiring overseas a main part of their legislative plans.

Last month, Florida’s Republican senate nominee, Marco Rubio, explained that his plan for balancing the budget amounted to cutting earmarks (which account for less than one percent of federal spending) and instituting a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, which former Reagan economic official Bruce Bartlett rightly characterized as a “phony solution.”

And if anyone needed more evidence that Rubio is not serious about reducing the deficit, he provided it during a recent meeting with the editorial board of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Rubio pitched his balanced budget amendment, as well as his desire to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but refused to name any actual cuts that he would make to reduce federal spending:

Rubio favors a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. “You have to have spending reductions and spending discipline.” Yet he favors extension of all the Bush-era tax cuts, including those benefiting families earning more than $250,000 a year, which would add an estimated $700 billion to the federal deficit over 10 years. And he declined to identify a specific program that benefits Broward or Palm Beach county residents that should be cut because the government can’t afford it.

Rubio joined an ever-growing list of Republican candidates and lawmakers who can’t provide a single item they would cut from the budget. That Rubio’s unable to name one cut while simultaneously preaching “spending reductions and spending discipline” — and throwing in $830 billion in tax cuts for the rich on top — is doubly galling.

In addition to extending the Bush tax cuts, Rubio has proposed blowing more holes in the budget with an unspecified corporate tax cut and by eliminating the estate tax, which costs $784 billion over ten years. So getting to the balance budget that Rubio says he wants will be that much harder; and of course he flatly rules out any tax increase.

All of which goes to show that Rubio is either ignorant as to how the federal budget works or he’s willing to explode the deficit, as long as the benefits go to the rich and to big corporations.

And lest we open ourselves up to the same line of criticism, here are some spending cuts that could be made, as a decent start towards a responsible budget: $100 billion in defense programs (that won’t compromise national security), $45 billion in subsidies to oil companies, $1 billion in tax expenditures for big agricultural firms, and hundreds of millions in redundant or duplicative education programs.

But those cuts need to pared with responsible revenue increases, like allowing the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans to expire, closing the carried-interest loophole, reinstating the estate tax, and cracking down on the use of offshore tax havens. Rubio, though, would prefer platitudes and slogans.

Last week, after House Republicans released their “Pledge to America” — which waxed poetic about the need to reduce government spending — the plan’s architect, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), was unable to name a single program that he’d cut from the federal budget. McCarthy joined a whole host of House Republicans, including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ), who are unable to name one item that they’d axe from the budget.

But this problem has also afflicted Republican Senate candidates, as Carly Fiorina (CA) was unable to provide CNBC with any specifics regarding what she’d like to see removed from the budget. And Fiorina has now been joined by Wisconsin Republican Senate candidate Ron Johnson, who asserts that there is billions available for cutting, but refuses to say where any of it is:

“There’s billions of dollars…that from my standpoint would be available for cutting. But I’m not going to get in the game here and, you know, start naming specific things to be attacked about, quite honestly,” said Johnson. [...]

“If you’ve got a tough budget in business, you go to all the departments and go, ‘OK, 10% cut across the board, figure out where you cut.’” Asked if he thinks it’s the role of a senator to identify such cuts, Johnson responded: “I would just respectfully disagree. I think the first priority is to establish that spending cap, and be dedicated to doing that.”

Johnson did cite repealing the Affordable Care Act and preventing the outlay of any more Recovery Act funding as ways to save money, even though the former would add to the deficit and the latter would increase middle class taxes and have no effect on the structural deficit.

Simply asserting that you’d implement an across-the-board spending cut shows you’re fundamentally disinterested in serious budgeting, as such a cut makes no attempt to prioritize between necessary programs that people depend upon and programs that are less important. Is Johnson willing to cut federal education funding, FEMA, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the National Park System, federal highway funding, food safety inspection, and the Secret Service, which are all on the discretionary side of the budget? If not, he’ll have to find larger savings elsewhere to compensate, or raid entitlement programs.

It’s precisely because such large cuts would be required to vital and popular programs, if we were to balance the budget without tax increases, that Republicans don’t want to detail them. But Johnson is far from the only one who thinks that he should be elected before laying out specifics regarding his policies. Linda McMahon, the Republican senate candidate in Connecticut, said that she won’t divulge her position regarding Social Security. “I’m not adverse to talking in the right time or forum about what we need to do relative to our entitlements,” McMahon said. “I just don’t believe that the campaign trail is the right place to talk about that.”

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Contingency Fund — a successful jobs program that has helped hundreds of thousands of people find employment at small businesses, non-profit organizations, and with the federal government — is set to expire this week if Congress doesn’t act to reauthorize it. Since it was created as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the program is responsible for more than 250,000 jobs in 37 states. The New York Times today noted one example of the good the program’s done:

In rural Perry County, Tenn., the program helped pay for roughly 400 new jobs in the public and private sectors. But in a county of 7,600 people, those jobs had a big impact: they reduced Perry County’s unemployment rate to less than 14 percent this August, from the Depression-like levels of more than 25 percent that it hit last year after its biggest employer, an auto parts factory, moved to Mexico. If the stimulus program ends on schedule next week, Perry County officials said, an estimated 300 people there will lose their jobs — the equivalent of another factory closing.

Republicans in Congress, “many of whom oppose all things stimulus,” have derided the program, despite its obvious benefits. In fact, House Republicans employed their gimmicky “YouCut” website to propose cutting the TANF Emergency Fund altogether.

However, many Republican lawmakers at the state level have heaped praise onto the program. Governor Michael Rounds (R-SD) said that it provided “vital financial and supportive service offerings for needy families facing increased hardship.” Georgia state senator Renee Unterman (R) called it “essential in the rebuilding of our economy.” Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) said the fund provided “much-needed aid during this recession by enabling businesses to hire new workers, thus enhancing the economic engines of our local communities.”

The program also has support from economists, with Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi saying that the program’s imminent expiration “is particularly inopportune given that unemployment will likely still be in or near double digits, and more workers will have exhausted their [unemployment] benefits.” Extending the program for another year until unemployment is clearly moving lower seems appropriate,” he said.

Were the program to expire on schedule, it would mean the end of 14,000 jobs in Texas, 20,000 in California, 27,000 in Illinois and more than 12,000 in Pennsylvania. The House has already approved an extension of the program on two separate occasions, but so far, the Senate has shown no inclination to do the same.

As Steve Benen wrote, “in a sane political world, the death of the TANF Emergency Fund would be a pretty big scandal, and Republicans would be afraid to kill an effective jobs program with an unemployment rate near 10%.” But instead, it seems that a successful program with bipartisan support in the states is going to be allowed to simply vanish on Thursday.

Today, President Obama will finally sign into law legislation providing tax credits and a lending facility to small businesses, after Republicans in the Senate obstructed it for months. Even when it finally came to the floor, all but two Senate Republicans and one House Republican voted against the bill.

At the same time, though, Republicans are trying to portray themselves as advocates for the country’s small business community, through their desire to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich and because of a plank in their “Pledge to America” that would provide a 20 percent tax deduction on business income.

It’s already been well-documented how the Bush tax cuts for the rich affect less than two percent of small businesses, and that the GOP’s definition of small business includes behemoths like the Bechtel Corporation, the Tribune Company, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. But is their Pledge proposal any better?

“What we’re really talking about is a 20 percent deduction immediately on the bottom line of every small- business owner and family farmer in America,” said Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN). However, as CAP economist Christian Weller found, “the proposal is an ‘upside-down’ tax break that gives the largest benefits to those who already have the highest incomes”:

A deduction reduces the taxable income and thus the taxes that somebody has to pay. A business owner with lots of business and other income will thus get a government subsidy of 35 cents for each dollar in deduction, while a small business owner in the 15 percent tax bracket will get 15 cents for each dollar in deductions…Larger businesses could easily use this windfall to outcompete smaller businesses. A larger business owner with a 35 percent marginal tax rate will get a benefit that is 133 percent greater than the benefit that a smaller business owner with a 15 percent marginal tax rate gets for each dollar in tax deduction.

This tax break for business income would be worth more to those paying in the highest marginal tax brackets, as it’s calculated according to the marginal rate paid. So Bechtel and the Tribune Company would be given a much larger break than the owner of a hardware store or dry cleaner who is paying in the 15 percent income tax bracket.

The way to avoid this inequity is to craft tax breaks as credits, thus giving the same amount to businesses across-the-board. But the deduction sought by House Republicans would exacerbate already existing inequities that advantage large business over small, as well as dropping a windfall into the laps of wealthy business owners who certainly don’t need it.

Yesterday, as we’ve discussed here extensively, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” which contains the policy steps they would supposedly take immediately, were they so empowered. The document is chock-full of lofty rhetoric about reducing the size of government, but while it lays out plenty of budget-busting tax cuts — to the tune of $4 trillion — it has precious little in terms of actual spending cuts.

In fact, its lead author, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), couldn’t identify a single program he’d cut from the federal budget during a cable television appearance today. And Republicans like House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and the Republican budget chief, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), have been careful not to explicitly say that the Pledge, by itself, will eliminate the deficit or balance the budget. Other Republicans though, have seen nothing wrong with asserting that the plan would cause the deficit to disappear and lead to a smaller federal debt:

Rep. Charles Djou (R-HI) “says the proposals will reduce annual budget deficits and lead to a smaller national debt.”

Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO): “We have a credible plan to rein in the budget deficit.”

Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA): “As massive debt threatens the prosperity of our children and grandchildren, we have a credible plan to rein in the budget deficit.”

However, even if we take the Republicans at their word that they’ll actually cut every dollar they say they will in the Pledge, the plan doesn’t come anywhere close to eliminating the deficit. As Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden calculated:

The “Pledge to America” budget would mean $11.1 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years. By 2020, the federal budget deficit would be 6.3 percent of gross domestic product, the federal debt would exceed 93 percent of GDP, and interest payments on the debt would be more than $1 trillion a year. The budget deficit would be about $200 billion larger in 2020 under the “Pledge to America” plan than it would be under President Barack Obama’s budget, and over the next 10 years deficits would be $1.5 trillion higher than under the president’s budget.

Were the Pledge implemented, federal revenue would be about 16.7 percent of GDP; the last time that the federal budget was balanced, 20 percent of GDP was raised in revenue.

And there’s really no reason to believe that the cuts laid out in the Pledge would actually ever be made, as they are achieved through across-the-board reductions, not specific program cuts. And when push comes to shove, will the GOP really cut into discretionary programs like the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and federal highway funding? If not, that will require even larger cuts in other programs to achieve the savings they want, which still don’t come close to covering the cost of their massive tax cuts.

Click here for more on “Unpacking the GOP’s ‘Pledge to America’: The Who, What, When, Where and Why Behind Republican Irresponsibility.”

Yesterday, House Republicans rolled out their “Pledge to America,” which is supposedly a series of ideas that the GOP would enact tomorrow, if given the chance. At the top of the list, of course, is a full extension of the Bush tax cuts — at a cost of almost $4 trillion — and a promise to allow no tax increases.

At the same time, though, the Pledge claims to put the country “on a path to a balanced budget.” But when it comes to spending cuts, it is incredibly vague, including only a promise to reduce non-defense discretionary spending to the 2008 level and to “set benchmarks” for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Today, in fact, the lead architect of the Pledge, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), couldn’t name a single program that he’d cut from the federal budget when pressed by MSNBC’s Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd:

GUTHRIE: Everybody likes to cut spending, but the issue is where, how? What specifically are you going to cut? [...]

MCCARTHY: What are you going to cut? Discretionary spending. Anything that’s not security…

TODD: Well, hang on. What is discretionary? Give us two or three items that are discretionary.

MCCARTHY: You could go through every different program within government, outside of entitlements, outside of national defense, that is discretionary spending that Congress has control of. That has gone over 88 percent in the last two years.

GUTHRIE; So what comes to mind for that, if you could wave a magic wand and do it unilaterally, what would you cut?

TODD: If you had the line item.

MCCARTHY: The line item would be across-the-board.

Watch it:

McCarthy finally settled on cutting Congress’ administrative spending, which he said would save $100 million. So in a $3 trillion federal budget, with a $1.3 trillion deficit, McCarthy identified $100 million in savings, reducing the deficit by less than 0.01 percent. And those savings won’t even come out of a federal program. But McCarthy is not unique in this regard: plenty of Republicans, including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), can’t identify a single program that they would cut.

With the Pledge, McCarthy and the rest of the House Republicans would have you believe that eliminating the deficit with cuts to discretionary spending is both possible and simple. But discretionary spending this year will be about $1.4 trillion. So you’d have to get rid of almost all of it — including discretionary defense spending — to eliminate the deficit.

The non-defense discretionary side of the budget — which includes all federal education funding, FEMA, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the National Park System, federal highway funding, food safety inspection, and the Secret Service — comes to about $530 billion, nowhere near enough to eliminate the deficit.

And if the Pledge were actually enacted, Republicans would be starting from an even deeper fiscal hole, as deficits over the next ten years would be $1.5 trillion higher under the Pledge than they would be under President Obama’s budget. That’s right, the House GOP pledge, taking Republicans entirely at their word that they’ll cut every dollar of spending they say they will, produces $1.5 trillion more in deficits than we would have under Obama’s budget.

Of course, since McCarthy can’t even be bothered to understand the economic policies laid out in his own book, it’s not surprising that he’s unable to justify the Pledge’s fuzzy math.

Our guest blogger is Heather Boushey, Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Fair pay is an issue that “touches every family across this nation- each one of us,” said Lilly Ledbetter in a recent conversation with Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. She went on to say that equal pay is “not a gift,” it’s something we are “rightfully entitled to.” But, we have to work for that right.

Lilly was speaking the truth. For millions of American families — in fact, two thirds of families with children — mothers are breadwinners. If they aren’t paid fairly, not only they, but their whole family suffers.

Fair pay is also not just an issue about today’s paycheck, it’s a family’s economic well-being over a lifetime. When a colleague left Lilly Ledbetter an anonymous note that listed her salary and the higher salaries of three of her male colleagues, she told us how her first reaction was “letting it go.” But, then she thought about how she would be short-changing herself for the rest of her life.

Of course, Lilly Ledbetter’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court. She won, but the Court told her that she could not claim her nearly two decades of back pay because the statue of limitations had run out. Basically, she’d been discriminated against for too long.

Congress has fixed this with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but there is more to be done. Women who face inequity have to confront their employers. To do that, they need to know the score—they need to know if there is indeed lower than the man they stand next to on the assembly line or who sits in the cubicle next door. Markets only work when all the participants have full information.

The Paycheck Fairness Act prohibits employer from retaliating against employees who share salary information. This provision alone will not completely solve the gender pay gap, but it will allow employees to access the information they need to understand if their pay is at the market rate. Combined with the provision to give employees an opportunity to improve their salary negotiation skills, this could be a powerful step towards greater pay equity, especially among men and women in similar jobs within a single firm. Read more

Today, Forbes released its annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, which is topped by Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway head Warren Buffett. Overall, the total worth of the 400 “rose to an estimated $1.37 trillion in 2010, up 8% from 2009.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), though, doesn’t think that the very richest of the rich have made such gains. Inhofe wants to spend $830 billion over the next decade to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, and said that those who want to see the tax cuts for the rich expire are fudging the numbers, “making everybody think they are middle class and that the superrich are getting richer”:

“It’s a continuation of class warfare. Nothing’s changed,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe said. “They try to play to the numbers, making everybody think they are middle class and that the superrich are getting richer.” Inhofe specifically rejects claims that extending the tax cuts automatically would add to the deficit.

As the Forbes list makes clear, the superrich are, in fact, getting richer. And at the same time, their effective tax rate has been falling, all the way to 16.6 percent according to the latest data (as most of their income is subject to lower capital gains and dividends rates).

Now, obviously, allowing the high-end Bush tax cuts to expire would affect people making far, far less money than those on the Forbes 400 list. But those affected are still in the richest two percent of American households, and 80 percent of the cost of extending the cuts would go to millionaires. This year, the Bush tax cuts will give a millionaire more in tax breaks than 90 percent of Americans will earn in total income.

Income inequality is also the worst its been since 1928, as the richest one percent of the country has been reaping a bigger and bigger share of total income. According to the latest data, “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.” Between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent.”

Currently, the top one percent of households make nearly 25 percent of the total income in the country, after they made less than 10 percent in the 1970′s. And there’s even a stark divide within that one percent. The incomes of the top one-tenth of 1 percent (0.1 percent) has increased by 94 percent — or $3.5 million per household — since 2002. “The share of the nation’s income flowing to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of households increased from 7.3 percent of the total income in the nation in 2002 to 12.3 percent in 2007,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted.

Just 2.3 percent of Oklahomans (who live in a state where the median income is $42,000) would be affected if the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire. But I guess Inhofe is able to square all this by convincing himself that tax cuts don’t add to the deficit, and thus can be given to anyone whenever he wants, for free.

Today, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” a document styled after 1994′s Contract with America that the GOP claims is “an outline of the party’s targets in the final weeks of the legislative session.” We’ve already explained how the Pledge promises to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with portions of the Affordable Care Act and how it represents a blood oath to Big Oil, so let’s turn to another aspect: its effect on the deficit.

Of course, the Pledge includes a promise to extend all of the Bush tax cuts — including those for the richest two percent of Americans — for a total price tag of $4 trillion over the next decade, while laying out spending cuts that, even if the numbers are taken at face value, don’t come close to covering that cost. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the ranking member of the House Budget Committee — to explain how the GOP can square its desire for huge, regressive tax cuts with its supposed commitment to deficit reduction:

STEPHANOPOULOS: How are you going to pay for that $4 trillion, if you’re going to reduce spending?

RYAN: I brought a budget to the floor last year that cut $4.8 trillion in spending, which would have more than compensated for these tax cuts. [...]

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you do concede that you do not have a plan to balance the budget and you don’t pay for the tax cuts you’re extending?

RYAN: Well, we can pay for the tax cuts we’re extending. I have provided budgets that do that in the past.

Watch it:

Ryan went to great lengths to emphasize that he was not referring to his Roadmap for America’s Future, which is a long-term plan that purports to balance the budget by privatizing Social Security and Medicare, from which the GOP leadership has distanced itself. However, the budgets that Ryan actually brought to the floor are barely less radical.

Last year, Ryan’s released an “alternative budget” that would have privatized Medicare, cut Social Security benefits (in an admittedly unspecified manner) and implemented a five-year non-defense discretionary spending freeze that would have meant significant reductions in programs like Head Start and Pell Grants. Not only that, but it would have raised taxes on low-income families while cutting them for the very wealthy, as Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out:

Over a fourth of taxpayers, mostly low-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the President’s plan. The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $100,000 less, on average, under the House GOP plan than they would under the President’s plan.

The Pledge, as Ben Adler noted, “calculates how much spending cuts will save the government and how much tax cuts will save the taxpayer, but not how much their tax cuts or spending proposals will cost the government.” So are Republicans counting on using the Pledge as a way to backdoor in Ryan’s radical budgets, even when they publicly disavow Ryan’s ideas? (He didn’t even appear at the Pledge’s unveiling.)

The Pledge doesn’t have any specific proposals for dealing with the big drivers of the federal budget — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — but instead includes vague promises to “require accounting” and set “benchmarks” for the programs. So all we have to go on is Ryan’s assertion that he has a budget that can pay for all the tax cuts, which he clearly wants to accomplish by dismantling entitlements.

Earlier this week, One Wisconsin Now revealed an alleged voter suppression plot designed to disenfranchise minorities, students, and others in heavily-Democratic areas of the state. At the center of this apparent “voter caging” operation that we reported on yesterday is the Wisconsin chapter of Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. While the allegations of potentially illegal conduct leveled against Americans for Prosperity, the Wisconsin Republican Party, and other tea party groups are extremely serious, a ThinkProgress investigation reveals an even larger and more insidious effort by Koch-backed groups to tamper with the democratic process.

While a federal crime, the most essential voting issues, from registration and eligibility to specific early and Election Day voting procedures, are largely governed by state law. Even before becoming involved in the apparent plot to suppress the vote in Wisconsin, a web of Koch-backed groups played a key role earlier this year in defeating a proposed Wisconsin law that included numerous voter protection measures—including significant penalties for efforts to unlawfully challenge and intimidate voters. In fact, those at the center of the alleged voter suppression plot were caught on tape in June admitting that they could only proceed with their so-called “Election Observer Program” because they had successfully blocked the Voter Protection Act from passing earlier in the spring:

“And since the voter law did not get passed this year that could hit you with $100,000 and three years for unsuccessfully challenging a voter, we can still do this,” said Tim Dake, a prominent tea party member with the Wisconsin GrandSons for Liberty, the group that provided cover for Americans for Prosperity and the Wisconsin GOP by agreeing to be the public face for the campaign.

“Hallelujah,” shouted an unidentified meeting attendee in response.

“Yes, everybody gets to take credit for that,” replied Dake, before decrying early voting and detailing purported instances of voted fraud committed by individuals with Vietnamese surnames.

Tellingly, the Voter Protection Act provision that Dake references only criminalizes acts that “make use of or threaten to make use of force, violence, restraint, or any tactic of coercion or intimidation in order to induce or compel any person to vote or refrain from voting or to refrain from registering to vote at an election.” It also put in place less severe penalties for attempting to prevent someone from registering or voting “based upon fraudulent, deceptive, or spurious grounds or information.” If the goal of their “Election Observer Program” was simply to weed out ineligible voters and notify the proper authorities of any issues—rather than the deliberate use of intimidation and other tactics to suppress votes—it’s unclear why Dake and his compatriots would have been concerned about this provision or considered it an impediment to their plans.

Whether they were concerned about the bill’s voter protection provisions, numerous other provisions designed to make it easier to register to vote and to vote early or absentee, or the provision that implemented a federal law that makes it easier for military voters—including troops serving overseas—to cast ballots, right-wing activists derided it as the “Voter Fraud Protection Act,” an ACORN-Style Election Fraud Act,” and the “election deform bill.”

Regardless of the exact source of their concerns, a network of Koch-backed groups swooped in earlier this year and succeeded in killing the bill. Here’s a look at the key Koch-backed players that pushed for the defeat of the Voter Protection Act: Read more

Back in June, even with his state facing a $10 billion budget shortfall, Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) vetoed a tax increase for millionaires, deriding the proposal as a “cute idea” that “doesn’t work.” He then set about slashing New Jersey’s budget to ribbons, including cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit and homestead rebates to such an extent that he increased taxes on the middle class.

Now, Christie has a new plan for getting his state’s finances under control that involves raising the retirement age and cutting retirement benefits for public-sector workers, including ending cost-of-living adjustments for current retirees (which amounts to a benefits cut). But at the same time, Christie is ready to blow a new hole in his state’s budget, as he told Bloomberg Radio that he hopes to implement a cut in the state’s top marginal income tax rate in the next year or two:

“We’ve got to do that,” said Christie…“You can’t be competitive when your top marginal rate is three times your neighbor.”

The 9 percent top marginal tax rate in New Jersey only applies to those making $500,000 or more annually, and because it’s a marginal rate, it is only levied on income in excess of that amount. The median income in New Jersey is about $69,000, so someone subject to the highest rate is making about seven times more than the median household.

It’s understandable that Christie is making budget cuts to deal with the effects of the Great Recession (though I think he made some bad choices), and it also makes sense that he is looking to reform his state’s pension system, which is badly underfunded. But to do so while simultaneously cutting taxes for the state’s most well-off residents is the height of fiscal irresponsibility. The Newark Star-Ledger’s Editorial Board took Christie to task for the proposal on those grounds:

Think about those priorities. Middle-class families just lost their property tax rebates. Schools lost nearly $1 billion in funding, their biggest hit ever. Thousands of working poor families were closed out of health care programs. And our colleges and universities were whacked hard, forcing tuition hikes as the state scholarship programs run dry. The governor said those cuts were necessary because the state’s vaults were empty. He was the guy telling us to live within our means, to face hard realities. And now this — a tax cut that would blow a new hole in the budget.

The Gloucester County Times also weighed in, saying Christie “ought to suspend his supply-side tax policy freight train long enough to examine the consequences.” But with his proposal, Christie is simply confirming what we already knew: Republican concerns about deficits evaporate when they see an opportunity to cut taxes for the rich.