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.