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.