Yesterday, the Census Bureau released a report showing that one in seven Americans is currently living in poverty, and that the median income decreased by nearly five percent during the last decade. At the same time, Congress is debating whether to adopt President Obama’s plan to allow the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans to expire on schedule, or whether to extend the entire package of cuts as Republicans desire.

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) has adopted the Republican line when it comes to the Bush tax cuts, even though he likes to style himself as a deficit-hawk. Today, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked Bayh about the poverty data, and whether there is a disconnect between the real economic pain that people are feeling and lawmakers squabbling over tax rates for the wealthy. Bayh agreed that there is a disconnect, but then concluded that the poverty increase means lawmakers should forget about “fairness and things like that” and cut taxes for the rich:

TODD: Yesterday, the Census came out and said one in seven Americans are living below the poverty line. Do you look at that story today — you know, you open up your USA Today, right, and you see that story — and you see Washington is debating the tax rates for the wealthy, and you sit there and say, isn’t that a disconnect in America right now?

BAYH: It is a disconnect, Chuck. What we need to be focused on is growth, how do we create jobs, how do we expand businesses. That needs to be job one right now. And all these other issues involving, oh, fairness and things like that can wait.

Watch it:

So Bayh thinks that Congress should forget about:

– Income inequality, which is the worst its been since 1928. Currently, the top one percent of households make nearly 25 percent of the total income in the country. 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.”

In order to:

– Borrow and spend $830 billion on the richest two percent of households. Extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich will give a millionaire an annual tax cut of $128,832, which is nearly two and a half times the median household income.

Bayh conceded that the top two percent of earners doesn’t include many small businesses, but said that we should spend more than $800 billion to cut their taxes anyway, because “we want them doing more hiring, more investing, and at least hanging in there from a consumption standpoint.” However, according to a new study from Moody’s Analytics, the rich are more likely to save the money if their taxes are cut than spend it.

Last week, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) — like Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) — conceded that taxes will have to increase somewhere in order to get the deficit under control. However, Hatch quickly ruled out increasing revenues by allowing the Bush tax cuts for the rich to expire or by removing subsidies for Big Oil companies.

In fact, Hatch is so adamant about protecting taxpayer subsidies to hugely profitable oil companies, that he’s ready to oppose President Obama’s proposal to make the Research and Development tax credit permanent, as he made clear on the Senate floor yesterday:

This is a bipartisan provision, the Research and Development tax credit and making it permanent. It has wide and deep support on both sides of the aisle here and in the House…We simply can not afford to lose our lead in research by keeping the United States as the premier location in the world to perform research and development…Now, my understanding is that some might go along with this but they want to increase taxes on oil and gas, and they also want to do some other very obnoxious things that would be — that would be difficult to, for, a bipartisan support.

Watch it:

Hatch should know a thing or two about the proposal to make the R&D credit permanent. After all, it’s his idea. He’s been proposing it for years. He introduced a bill in this Congress to do it. In June, he wrote in the Salt Lake Tribune that “the credit provides a proven and effective incentive for businesses to invest in the R&D that leads to long-term growth and new jobs.”

Meanwhile, oil and gas subsidies provide little bang-for-the-buck to American taxpayers. Not only is the oil industry highly mature and profitable — rendering subsidies unnecessary in any case — but removing them will have minimal impact on oil production. The Office of Economic Policy at the Department of Treasury has estimated that removing subsidies for the oil industry would affect domestic production by less than one-half of one percent.

Going to bat for giant corporations and the goodies provided them by the tax code is nothing new for Hatch. After all, he told us that closing corporate tax loopholes is a “stupid, dumb-ass” idea. But it seems that Hatch is so dead-set against removing corporate subsidies that he is willing to forego a useful tax credit that he himself has been championing for a long time.