Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio (FL) has been having a little trouble laying out exactly how he plans to balance the budget (as his proposed constitutional balanced budget amendment would require), while simultaneously cutting taxes for the rich and corporations. And when pressed for specifics regarding what, exactly, he would endorse eliminating from the federal budget, Rubio has simply refused to answer.

Today, Rubio’s penchant for budget fuzziness was on full display during an interview with Fox News. Asked what he would cut from the budget, Rubio seized onto the same John Boehner-inspired return to 2008 non-defense discretionary spending levels that was included in the House Republicans’ Pledge to America. But when asked what that translates into practically, Rubio managed to name precisely zero items in the discretionary budget that he would cut:

Q: What would be the first thing you would cut?

RUBIO: First thing that we need to do is actually roll back discretionary spending and freeze it at the 2008 level. [...]

Q: Is there an item on the discretionary spending that you think would be where to focus?

RUBIO: Oh, goodness. Yeah, how ’bout the unspent stimulus money? How ’bout the unspent TARP money? I mean, those two alone are significant billions of dollars that can be used to pay down the debt. That’s just a start. I think when you add $3 trillion to the national debt, the way this administration has done over the last 18 months, you’re not going to struggle to find places to cut back federal discretionary spending.

Watch it:

Both the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 were one-time emergency spending measures, not discretionary spending programs. They aren’t going to be re-authorized. In fact, TARP has already expired! Some discretionary programs did receive stimulus funding, but the Recovery Act, as a piece of legislation, is not discretionary spending and has no effect on the federal budget beyond 2012.

But what is in the discretionary budget? For starters, all federal education funding, some veteran’s benefits, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, federal highway funding, the National Park Service, the Coast Guard, and Congress itself. And even if you cut every last penny of the non-defense discretionary budget, you still wouldn’t eliminate the deficit.

Rubio, like many Republicans, seems to think that there a whole host of programs in the federal budget that affect no one and that no one will miss. But it’s simply not true, and in the meantime, Rubio is utterly incapable of identifying anything he would do to get the long-term deficit under control. Instead, he simply names programs that are explicitly designed to disappear no matter what he or anyone else thinks of them.

Today, the New York Times builds on research published by ThinkProgress by noting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is mostly funded by a small group of large corporations. The Chamber has tried to lie about its identity for years, absurdly telling the media that it represents 3 million businesses. Then after being caught with no proof of such membership, it modified that number to 300,000 — but then claimed small businesses were the true driver of the Chamber’s member rolls. But the Times correctly points out that in 2008, the Chamber received the bulk of its donations from only 45 companies, including firms like Goldman Sachs, Edward Jones, Alpha Technologies, Chevron Texaco and Aegon.

Many corporations pay regular dues to the Chamber, but pitch in more during election cycles or particular lobbying campaigns. For instance, on top of its regular $100,000 commitment of yearly dues, health insurance giant Aetna joined other health insurers to funnel $20 million to the Chamber to kill health reform. Similarly, Fox News parent company News Corporation gave an additional $1 million to the Chamber for its attack campaign this midterm election. While ThinkProgress forced the Chamber to acknowledge that it receives foreign funds to its 501(c)(6) account used for attack ads, the Chamber refuses to disclose any of its other donors or how exactly it funds its nasty attack ads. Using public corporate records, ThinkProgress has found more dues-paying members of the Chamber. The numbers below reflect a bare minimum, and in many cases these corporations have paid ten times the amount of their regular dues to the Chamber in the past two years:

– Microsoft’s corporate disclosures state that the company paid the Chamber up to $999,999 in 2009 and up to $999,999 in 2010 in its minimum dues.

– Procter and Gamble paid the Chamber $3.2 million in 2009.

– Outsourcing giant CSC, which specializes in IT outsourcing, paid the Chamber at least $100,000 in 2009 and $100,000 in 2010.

– eBay paid the Chamber at least $100,000 in yearly dues ($100,000 in 2010, and what appears to be $100,000 in 2009).

– Drug company Merck paid the Chamber $234,000 in 2008, and still counts itself as a dues-paying member of the Chamber.

– Utility company Dominion Resources gave the Chamber $100,000 in 2009.

– On the Chamber’s Egypt Business Council website, Apache Corporation, British American Tobacco, The Blackstone Group, The Boeing Company, Cargill USA, CitiGroup, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, Google, Microsoft Corporation, PepsiCo, Intel Corporation, Monsanto Company, Pfizer Inc, Philip Morris International combined committed an additional $375,000 to the Chamber for 2009-2010.

Earlier this year, U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue admitted to ThinkProgress that CitiGroup, a bailed out financial conglomerate that still has not paid back taxpayer TARP funds, is a dues-paying member of the Chamber. Many bailed out banks are in fact dues-paying members of the Chamber. A Huffington Post crowd-sourced study of the Chamber found that there are dozens of other large corporations that have indicated membership in the Chamber, but have refused to confess their level of involvement. The Chamber has shilled for BP, and Donohue said after BP’s spill that taxpayers should pay for the clean up. Indeed, BP admitted membership, but has not disclosed how much they pay to the Chamber.

As a ThinkProgress investigation found, at least 80 foreign businesses have been paying the Chamber at least $885,000 in yearly dues for the last two years. The money went directly to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6), the same account the Chamber is now using to run a $75 million attack campaign against Democrats. As we have shown, many of the foreign corporations have a direct stake in American public policy; for instance the Chamber has been the most vigorous lobbying operation in DC to promote outsourcing of American jobs. Of course, many other corporation join the Chamber to benefit from its right-wing corporate lobbying campaign, like keeping corporate tax loopholes open (Chamber members CitiGroup, ExxonMobil and Bank of America already paid no corporate income taxes last year) and maintaining the status quo on energy policy so the fossil fuel industry can emit carbon pollution free of charge.

Yesterday, Bloomberg News released an extensive report showing how Google used tax havens in Ireland and the Caribbean to dodge $3.1 billion in taxes in both the United States and abroad. Employing strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich,” Google managed to lower its effective corporate tax rate all the way down to 2.4 percent, far below the U.S. statutory rate of 35 percent.

Last night, CNBC ran a segment on Google’s tax dodging, which even CNBC’s supply-side guru Larry Kudlow seemed to think was out of bounds, saying, “I think, with a $1.3 trillion budget deficit, we do want corporations to pay their share.” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), though, used the revelation regarding Google’s handiwork to call for cutting the corporate tax rate. Hensarling freely admitted that he didn’t actually have any clue what it was that Google did, but he is certain that Google’s taxes should be cut anyway:

I don’t know the individual facts of the Google situation. What I do know is that, second only to Japan, we have the highest corporate income tax rate of any industrialized nation of the world. I also know that for companies that want to repatriate their capital to the American shores, they’re looking at a 35 percent income tax rate, where on many other OECD nations, several of the EU nations, will tax it at zero to two percent. So, again, I don’t know the individual situation with Google, but I do know that zero times zero is zero and we ought to be look at how do we get this capital back into the United States of America.

Watch it:

So that Hensarling can get up to speed on the situation, here’s a handy interactive graphic laying out how Google’s tax scheme works. But Hensarling is hardly alone in finding corporate tax dodging a justification for lowering the corporate tax rate. Over the summer, Rep. David Camp (R-MI) said that the U.S. corporate tax rate “puts pressure” on companies to shift income, and therefore needs to be reduced.

But Hensarling’s position makes little sense. He called for bringing the corporate tax rate down to 25 percent, but why would that prevent companies from using tax havens? After all, Google’s 2.4 percent rate is still far below Hensarling’s proposed rate. And when given past opportunities to repatriate money at a lower tax rate, as Hensarling also suggested, corporations have used that money to enrich shareholders and executives, not to create jobs or make investments.

From his seat on the Financial Services Committee, Hensarling has consistently carried water for big corporations, no matter their behavior. Saying that they should be rewarded for tax dodging is simply another part of his pattern.

Our guest blogger is Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at American Progress.

Many Republican officials greatly admire the father of cap and trade: President Ronald Reagan. Yet opposition to “cap-and-trade” legislation to reduce global warming pollution is a common refrain among many Republican and a few Democratic officials this fall. The program is derided as a “cap and tax” that would drain voters’ wallets while bankrupting the nation. After the demise of comprehensive global warming legislation in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gloated that “cap-and-trade, which is also known as the national energy tax, is dead in the United States Senate.”

Ironically enough, the three most recent Republican presidents promoted cap and trade, including Ronald Reagan. They employed such a system to phase out lead in gasoline, cut chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting chemicals, and reduce sulfur pollution from power plants responsible for acid rain — all without undue cost.

Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) praised Reagan last year:

When you realize the magnitude of President Reagan’s achievements, there is absolutely no reason why anyone would ignore his ‘demonstrably good’ example.

Nonetheless, she and many of today’s public officials oppose a global warming plan that would employ the innovative cap-and-trade system first created by President Reagan, repudiating his legacy for cheap political gain and to curry favor with polluting industries.

The Reagan White House conceived the first cap-and-trade program to reduce pollution, used in the 1980s to phase out lead in gasoline at a lower cost. It was developed as a more flexible, market-based system to reduce environmental pollution compared to the so-called “command and control” model employed by environmental laws in the 1970s. The old system required each polluting facility to make a fixed reduction in air or water contamination, which ignored that some facilities could cut pollution more cheaply than others. An EPA analysis shows:

… estimated savings from the lead trading program of approximately 20 percent over alternative programs that did not provide for lead banking, a cost savings of about $250 million per year.

President Reagan also signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to slash the production and use of chemicals that deplete the upper ozone layer essential to screen out cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. His administration established a cap-and-trade system to implement the chemical reductions the protocol required. A 2006 scientific assessment concluded that “the Montreal Protocol is working” to reduce chemicals and protect the ozone layer.

President George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s successor, was the first president to propose the employment of a cap-and-trade system in an environmental law. The Clean Air Act of 1990 includes his proposed cap-and-trade system to reduce the sulfur pollution from power plants responsible for acid rain.

The Clean Air Act passed the Senate by a vote of 89-10 and the House by 401-25. Many staunch conservatives voted for it including Sens. Kit Bond (R-Mo), Trent Lott (R-MS), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Strom Thurmond (R-SC). Conservative House supporters included Reps. Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Joe Barton (R-TX), Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and Fred Upton (R-MI).

When President Bush signed the Clean Air Act into law he highlighted its innovative cap-and-trade mechanism:

The acid rain allowance trading program will be the first large-scale regulatory use of market incentives and is already being seen as a model for regulatory reform efforts here and abroad.

“To reject this legacy and embrace the failed 1970s policies of one-size-fits-all regulatory mandates would signify unilateral surrender of principled support for markets,” write economists Richard Schmalensee, who worked in the Reagan White House, and Robert Stavins. “If some conservatives oppose energy or climate policies because of disagreement about the threat of climate change or the costs of those policies, so be it. But in the process of debating risks and costs, there should be no tarnishing of market-based policy instruments. Such a scorched-earth approach will come back to haunt when future environmental policies will not be able to use the power of the marketplace to reduce business costs.”

Schmalensee and Stavins’s warning should be heeded: This current crop of Republican and a few Democratic officials—in their zeal to curry favor with their special interest funders and Tea Party activists—could doom future efforts to follow the path paved by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush to reduce pollution in the most cost-effective way possible.

Read the extended version of this post at American Progress.

A slew of Republican Senate candidates have recently tried to dress up their support for Social Security privatization as something else entirely, denying that they support privatization while continuing to advocate for the creation of private Social Security accounts that could be invested in the markets. Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, Ohio Republican Rob Portman, Arkansas Republican John Boozman, and Colorado Republican Ken Buck have all said they oppose privatization, while simultaneously advocating for private accounts.

Oregon’s Republican Senate nominee, law professor Jim Huffman, became the latest to join this club during a debate last night with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Huffman asserted that he hasn’t argued for privatizing Social Security, literally one sentence after calling for the creation of private accounts. He then reiterated his idea later in the debate:

I have argued for allowing newcomers to the Social Security system to have the option of private accounts. I have not argued for privatizing the Social Security system. There’s nothing in the record that would uphold that argument.

Watch it:

This is all part and parcel of the concerted conservative campaign to change the terms — but not the policy prescriptions — of Social Security privatization. Privatization polls badly, so conservatives want to change the word, but not the idea.

And the fact remains that creating private Social Security accounts would impose new risks on seniors, create new administrative costs and benefit reductions, and wouldn’t even set the Social Security system on a path to solvency. In fact, such a move would force the federal government into trillions of dollars of new borrowing, as money that should have gone into the general Social Security system gets diverted into the creation of personal accounts.

An analysis of private accounts done by Robert Shiller found that, “given an all-stock portfolio and typical stock market returns across the world’s 15 largest economies, a worker’s account would have negative returns 33 percent of the time.” And diversifying an account with other investments such as bonds actually increased the likelihood of a negative return. This is an unnecessary risk for seniors — more than 13 million of whom are kept out of poverty only because of Social Security — no matter what those on the right want to call it.