Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R) is having a bit of an on-again, off-again relationship with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus) and the more recent attempt by Congress to aid states by providing them with $26 billion for Medicaid and education. To review, Daniels requested — then publicly opposed — the additional aid package, but ultimately decided to accept his state’s share. Yesterday, he appeared on Fox Business to try and straighten out those who might see hypocrisy in that stance, explaining that he simply doesn’t want to subsidize irresponsible states:

They poured almost all this money into government in various forms, on the theory that some demand would fall out the bottom and maybe somebody’d go to the Walmart and they’d hire a new greeter. Complete failure, as we can all see. I very consistently said that more spending stimulus was not going to be a good idea, especially done that way. The question is, does the check arrive, do we cash it? Sure. This stimulus thing they just did amounts to states that have been responsible, as ours has, are in the black, subsidizing those that have been less careful with their spending. We send the check back, maybe there’d be some emotional satisfaction for a day, but it only makes that subsidy worse.

Watch it:

But Daniels failed to mention that his state’s budget is only in such good shape because of the original stimulus. In fact, his budget includes more than one billion in Recovery Act funds.

“He’s balancing the budget with stimulus money, and then blaming folks giving him the money for doing the stimulus, and then taking credit for balancing the budget and saving the economy in Indiana,” said state Rep. Russ Stilwell (D). “I want to make sure that the people of Indiana realize that this budget survives thanks to support from the federal stimulus package that has often been attacked by the governor,” added state House Speaker Patrick Bauer (D).

Daniels also saw fit to lecture other states about accepting what he calls subsidies, even though Indiana receives $1.05 in federal funding for every dollar it pays in taxes. Many other states receive far less than they pay into the system, including New Jersey, which receives 61 cents for every dollar, or Daniels’ neighbor Illinois, which receives 75 cents.

Of course, Daniels is far from the only GOP governor and conservative movement darling to tout his budget mastery while neglecting to mention the extent to which it depends on the stimulus. Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) said last month that “I hope Richmond would be a model for Washington,” even though his budget relies on $2.5 billion in stimulus money.

Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment executive running who is Connecticut’s Republican senate nominee, is earning the respect of her state’s Tea Party, according to an article in the Connecticut Mirror today. And one of her chief selling points is her anti-government spending stance.

“Stop the spending, we can’t afford it,” she has said. “And that’s where I think the focus is in this country.” McMahon actually believes that the government should never, ever run a deficit, even when there is an economic downturn, which is a nutty idea that even a former staffer for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) calls “stupid.”

But as the Mirror noted, McMahon does not lay out any “specifics about what she would cut.” And when it comes to the big entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which amount to about forty percent of the federal budget — McMahon not only doesn’t offer specifics, but flat-out refuses to discuss them at all:

“I can certainly tell you I’m not adverse to talking in the right time or forum about what we need to do relative to our entitlements,” McMahon said in an interview. “I mean, Social Security is going to go bankrupt. Clearly, we have to strengthen that…I just don’t believe that the campaign trail is the right place to talk about that.“

It’s vital to know exactly what McMahon would do to “strengthen” Social Security, as she has expressed sympathy with “some of” Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap for America, which privatizes Social Security. (It also, of course, increases taxes on 90 percent of Americans while still losing a dramatic amount of revenue.)

When she was asked for specific spending cuts by the New York Times’ John Harwood, McMahon replied with the boilerplate GOP response of a spending freeze and cutting the public sector workforce, while failing to touch on the structural problems in the budget (health care spending, giant tax cuts, and defense spending). Like Florida’s Republican senate nominee Marco Rubio, she seems to advocate balancing the budget on pipe dreams, or she’s actually in favor of huge entitlement cuts but, knowing how unpopular that is, won’t say it.

Considering that a whole host of Republican senate nominees — including Pat Toomey (PA), Rand Paul (KY), Sharron Angle (NV) and Rubio — have suggested either privatizing or slashing Social Security, McMahon should have to lay out what she means by “sort of” embracing Ryan’s radical plan for Social Security. And if a campaign isn’t the appropriate time to do it, when is?

When the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act first passed last year, Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MI) was one of the Republican governors who grandstanded against accepting all of the money, and since then, he has continually criticized the Recovery Act and poo-pooed its substantial effects. “A lot of this is just crazy,” he said. “I’m better off not to get it.”

Barbour was no more receptive to the $26 billion in additional state aid that was passed by Congress last month. “There is no justification for the federal government hijacking state budgets, but that is exactly what Congress has done,” Barbour said. But as it turns out, Barbour not only wants the money, he wants to save it, in order to make his budget look better next year:

Republican Gov. Haley Barbour and a bipartisan group of Mississippi lawmakers are considering saving, rather than spending, one of the two pots of federal stimulus money Congress recently approved. Doing so could make it easier for officials to craft a state budget during the 2011 election-year session when most lawmakers are either seeking another term or running for higher office, and when Barbour – a potential 2012 presidential candidate – is wrapping up his final year as governor.

Barbour is just the latest in a line of Republican governors — including Gov. Rick Perry (TX), Gov. Tim Pawlenty (MN), and Gov. Mitch Daniels (IN) — who criticize the stimulus while reaping its benefits and bragging about their fiscal stewardship of their respective states.

Mississippi state Sen. Hob Bryan (D) said he “strongly objects” to Barbour’s proposed move. “Why on earth are we putting all this money in the bank at the bottom of a recession?” Indeed, Mississippi has had to make some severe cuts in its budget already, eliminate funding for mental health services and K-12 education, and lay off workers who staff juvenile justice facilities.

Perry has also said that he will attempt to use the latest round of state aid for something other than Congress intended, while lawmakers in both California and Oregon have suggested that they’ll use federal education funding to simply plug holes in their budgets. But Barbour is planning to take this a step further, socking away funding meant to alleviate the pain of the Great Recession this year to bolster his own fiscal credentials next year.

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released its annual report on executive compensation today — “CEO Pay and the Great Recession.” “I’m afraid that this year’s report will raise just about everybody’s blood pressure,” lead author Sarah Anderson said. Indeed, the report found that “CEOs of the 50 firms that have laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis took home nearly $12 million on average in 2009.” Those CEOs’ combined compensation totaled $598 million, while at the same time, their companies eliminated 531,363 jobs despite reporting a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009.

More staggering is the level of executive pay, according to IPS:

[A]fter adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century.

American workers, by contrast, are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s.

The Kansas City Star took a closer look at some of the CEOs and companies in IPS’s report:

Fred Hassan, former CEO of Schering-Plough, presided over announced layoffs affecting 16,000 workers after a 2009 merger with Merck. He resigned after the merger, receiving “golden parachute” compensation in 2009 of more than $49.6 million to rank as the highest-paid layoff leader.

The top five companies announcing the most layoffs for the study period were General Motors (75,733); Citigroup (52,175); Bank of America (35,000); Caterpillar (27,499) and Verizon (21,308). Among those top five, the biggest compensation package — nearly $17.5 million — went to Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon.

According to IPS, American CEOs make 263 times the average compensation for American workers, up from the 30 to 1 ratio in the 1970s. For comparison, the average compensation of a Japanese CEO is less than one-sixth that of their American counterpart and 16 times more than the average Japanese worker.

But on top of the lavish CEO pay at the expense of the American worker, many of these top-layoff firms received money from the taxpayer bailouts in 2008. Of these, IPS notes, “American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault took home the highest 2009 pay, $16.8 million, a sum that included a $5 million cash bonus. American Express has laid off 4,000 employees since receiving $3.39 billion in TARP funding.”

“These numbers all reflect a broader trend in Great Recession-era Corporate America,” the IPS report says, “the relentless squeezing of worker jobs, pay and benefits to boost corporate earnings and maintain corporate executive paychecks at their recent bloated levels.”