A handful of Republicans — including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and California’s GOP senate nominee Carly Fiorina — have been claiming recently that extending the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans (at a cost of $830 billion) will pay for itself. “Let me propose something that may seem crazy to you: you don’t need to pay for tax cuts. They pay for themselves, if they are targeted, because they create jobs,” Fiorina said.

There is a whole host of economic data showing that this claim is clearly and demonstrably false. But Colorado’s Republican senate nominee, Ken Buck, not only thinks that the tax cuts will pay for themselves, but that they will actually help to “pay down the deficit“:

By extending tax cuts you pay down the deficit, you grow the economy by giving people more money and giving people the certainty they’ll know how to spend, they’ll have more money down the road to spend.

If there is no evidence that tax cuts pay for themselves, there is certainly no evidence that they reduce the deficit. After the Bush tax cuts, revenue plunged from 19 percent of GDP to 17 percent, and never recovered. Same thing after the Reagan tax cuts. And in both cases, deficits certainly did not go down.

But asserting that cutting taxes for the rich will somehow cause the deficit to magically vanish into the night is symbolic of Buck’s wider economic agenda. He is an avowed supporter of privatizing Social Security, saying, “we’ve got to peg Social Security to individuals so those individuals have the ability perhaps to invest in various funds that are approved by the government. But those individuals also own that fund.”

He also wholeheartedly supports Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap for America’s Future, which is a plan for slashing entitlements and raising taxes on 90 percent of individuals, while still losing $2 trillion in revenue. “The best plan that I saw to try to balance this budget is Paul Ryan’s plan,” Buck said. “He has put out a plan that has suggested that we can balance the budget through some spending cuts and changing some of our tax structure.”

Of course, calling a plan to dramatically reduce Social Security and Medicare “some spending cuts” shows that Buck either doesn’t understand Ryan’s plan or has no sympathy for the millions of Americans who depend on those programs. And his pronouncement that reductions in revenue also cause the deficit to go down shows that he doesn’t really understand the federal budget either.

Today, President Obama participated in a live CNBC townhall event. Recently, Obama has been feeling the “rage of the rich,” as Paul Krugman describes it today. One top Wall Street executive recently compared Obama’s tax proposals to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. During today’s discussion, Anthony Scaramucci, a CNBC contributor who is also a hedge fund manager, stood up to represent the aggrieved “Wall Street community.”

Scaramucci told Obama, “We have felt like a piñata,” complaining that “we certainly feel like we’ve been whacked with a stick.” Obama responded that Scaramucci needs to put things into perspective:

Now, you know, I have been amused over the last couple years, this sense of somehow me beating up on Wall Street. I think most folks on Main Street feel like they got beat up on. … There’s — there’s a big chunk of the country that thinks that I have been too soft on Wall Street. That’s probably the majority, not the minority.

Obama went on to note that the top 25 hedge fund managers took home $1 billion in profits last year. “If you’re making $1 billion a year after a very bad financial crisis where 8 million people lost their jobs and small businesses can’t get loans,” Obama said, “then I think that you shouldn’t be feeling put upon,” Watch it:

Indeed, 54 percent of respondents in a recent WSJ/NBC poll said Obama has “fallen short” on improving oversight of Wall Street and the banks, despite his signing of a new law that will put in place the most significant improvements to the nation’s regulatory framework since the New Deal.

The Wall Street Journal notes today that business groups are working with the GOP to compile a wish-list of regulations they’d like to see stopped or repealed. It’s no surprise, then, that Wall Street executives have been contributing upwards of 70 percent of their political contributions to Republicans.

Last week, Ben Armbruster noted that a slew of Republicans say that they want to cut federal spending, but when pressed for specifics, can’t come up with anything tangible to cut. One of these is Carly Fiorina, the Republican senate nominee in California, who was asked on CNBC last week to identify a specific spending cut that she would like to see, and only called for a spending freeze at 2008 levels.

Fiorina recently sat down for a nearly hour-long interview with the San Fransisco Chronicle editorial board, where she was asked the same question and at first provided the same answer. However, unlike CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, the Chronicle’s board pushed Fiorina further, asking for a tangible, specific cut that she would make. All that Fiorina could come up with, after a lengthy silence, is the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Q: Can’t you name some areas that you’d like to cut, some programs?

FIORINA: Sure. [pause] When you have, let’s just look at this financial regulatory reform bill as an example of an opportunity missed. What happened? We had 20 plus agencies who were responsible in some way for overseeing Wall Street and preventing Bernie Madoff. They all failed. They all failed. There is overlap, there is redundancy, there are gaps in their portfolios, and by the way, they cost a lot of money. And instead of dealing with that, instead of saying we need to have a more rigorous, accountable, and streamlined regulatory scheme, what did we do?…We’re going to create another one, called the Consumer Protection Agency, and we now have literally hundreds of regulations that are going to have to be written by thousands of bureaucrats. Wrong approach.

Watch it:

There are a couple of problems here. First, Fiorina is incorrect that no agencies were dissolved as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill. In fact, the Office of Thrift Supervision, which everyone agreed was an abysmal failure, will be absorbed into the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Second, Fiorina implies that she would defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but the CFPB is funded out of the Federal Reserve budget and is not subject to Congressional appropriations.

Even if the CFPB’s budget were overseen by Congress, it hasn’t been set up yet, so it isn’t having a budgetary impact at the moment. Fiorina didn’t name any current spending that she would cut, but future spending from a source over which the Senate has no jurisdiction.

But this is emblematic of the conservative approach to budgeting. The one specific thing that Fiorina can identify to cut, in a $3 trillion federal budget, is $500 million for the only regulatory agency whose sole purpose is to protect consumers from the excesses of the financial services industry. Besides that, all she can do is resort to the tired promise of rooting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” and budget gimmicks. (For a partial list of responsible spending cuts and revenue increases that we’d suggest, see here.)