A number of Republican lawmakers have recently trotted out the reasons that they favor raising the retirement age for Social Security (which is essentially the most regressive change would-be Social Security reformers could make). Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) said he favored increasing it because young people will start living to 100 by “replacing body parts like we do tires,” while Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) said that he simply wants to “correlate your retirement…to life expectancy.”

These reasons for suggesting yet another increase in the retirement age, which was also raised in 1983, are quite bad. But according to another advocate, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), raising the retirement age to “perhaps 70 or 72″ is actually a “positive thing,” because people are living longer and are more productive:

“To sit here and tell you it’s (Social Security) going to be actuarially sound for all the baby boomers and young people, that’s nonsense,” Shelby said, adding that the Social Security tax would have to be doubled or tripled to fully fund the system for younger people…“But,” he said, “we can do some positive things to prolong Social Security … will we is a different question, isn’t it?”

Shelby’s house-on-fire rhetoric regarding Social Security’s finances is vastly overblown. With no changes, Social Security will pay full benefits until 2037 and close to full benefits (once inflation is accounted for) for decades after that. Minor changes — including adjusting the rate of benefit growth for the richest beneficiaries and modest tax increases — can ensure full solvency for the program for the next 75 years, complete with benefit increases for the most vulnerable retirees.

Shelby, though, would prefer to just slash benefits for everybody to make his numbers add up. Here’s what his “positive” change would mean for retirees:

– As the Economic Policy Institute calculated, raising the retirement age to 70 would cut benefits for the average retiree by 19 percent, which amounts to about $35,419.

– As the Center for Economic and Policy Research found, if current trends in inequality continue, raising the retirement age to 70 would result in those born in 1973 and after having a shorter retirement than those born in 1912.

Plus, increasing the retirement age in response to America’s rising life expectancy ignores the fact that life expectancy gains have almost entirely benefited rich workers. Low- and middle-income workers haven’t seen the same gains.

While, on the surface, it seems logical to react to increased productivity and longer life expectancy by raising the retirement age, those gains should actually allow retirees to enjoy a longer retirement. “We have more than enough money to buy ourselves some leisure time at the end of our lives,” Ezra Klein wrote. “At least if that’s one of our priorities.” It’s clearly not a priority for Shelby.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is meeting today with a group of corporate CFO’s to discuss corporate tax reform, as talk heats up on Capitol Hill of a wider tax reform effort. The goal, should the administration pursue corporate tax reform, is to rework a corporate code that has a high statutory rate compared to the rest of the industrialized world, but is so riddled with loopholes and giveaways that many corporations pay little to no corporate income tax. The corporate tax code is both inefficient and encourages tax-dodging.

The administration has pledged that corporate tax reform, if it occurs, will be revenue-neutral, meaning any reduction in rates must be accompanied by a corresponding elimination of loopholes and other junk, so that the overall amount of corporate tax revenue doesn’t fall. However, as the Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery noted today, revenue-neutral reform makes such action “virtually useless as a method of deficit reduction.”

Indeed, there’s no reason that corporate tax reform be deficit-neutral: it should raise additional revenue! As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, “large disparities in the treatment of different types of corporate investment create opportunities for reforms that could be revenue neutral — or even raise revenue — while at the same time improving economic efficiency.”

At the moment, the U.S. raises less corporate tax revenue than most developed countries, due to its inefficient and loophole-riddlen corporate code. According to the Office of Management and Budget, “corporate tax receipts will account for just 7.2% of federal revenues in 2010, with large corporations contributing less than one-sixth as much as small business and individual taxpayers to the Federal Treasury.” Fifty years ago, corporate tax receipts were 23 percent of federal revenue, and “and individual income tax payments were less than twice those of large corporations’ tax payments.”

Of course, Republicans will oppose any effort to increase corporate revenue, even if it means that the corporate tax code has a lower-rate and is easier to navigate. But with the U.S. facing large, structural deficits for years to come, failing to grab the opportunity to raise revenue — while still making the corporate income tax more efficient and aligned toward productive investment (instead of tax preferential activities) — would be irresponsible, and mean that more of the deficit-reduction burden will have come via other tax increases or cuts to important and popular programs. The era in which Exxon and General Electric pay no income taxes in the United States and Google’s tax rate hovers at 2.4 percent should end, if those companies want an easier tax code with which to work.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has already made it abundantly clear that he expects Republicans to demand concessions in return for raising the nation’s debt ceiling, which will have to be done sometime in the coming months. Like a slew of equally irresponsible Republicans, Paul has issued demands that he wants fulfilled in return for his vote to increase the debt limit, essentially holding the credit-worthiness of the United States hostage to his brand of radical fiscal conservatism.

Last night, Paul was asked about his stance on the debt ceiling by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, where he replied that the only way he will vote to increase the debt limit is if Congress adopts “an ironclad rule that we will balance the budget from here on after”:

HANNITY: So it will take what to get your vote to raise the debt ceiling?

PAUL: I think an ironclad rule that we will balance the budget from here on after, and that’s what it’s going to take. Not a rule that they can break. You know, they passed pay-as-you-go, they broke it 700 times in the late nineties and the early part of this century. It has to be a very strict rule, so we have to have different rules that they are forced to obey.

Watch it:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — who has some radical ideas about the federal budget himself — has said that failure to raise the debt ceiling is “unworkable.” “Does it have to be raised? Yes, you can’t not raise the debt ceiling,” Ryan said. Leaving aside the myriad disastrous consequences that would result if the U.S. failed to raise the debt ceiling — and the fact that the current Congress can’t tie the hands of a future Congress, as Paul seems to imagine they can — Paul’s demand shows that he’s completely out-of-touch with what the federal budget actually looks like.

After all, to balance the budget “from here on after” once the debt ceiling is raised necessarily implies balancing the budget this year. And to do so without raising any additional revenue would entail a 44 percent cut in literally everything the government does: everything from Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending to highway funds, the FBI and the Coast Guard. Removing Social Security and defense from the equation then requires an 89 percent cut in everything else.

Responsible budgeting means finding a balance between the important and popular functions of government and the revenue necessary to fund them. Any budget plan that actually succeeds in reducing the deficit without pummeling the middle- and lower-class has to include tax increases and must be phased in over time, as the economy gets back to full strength. But Paul would risk the United States defaulting on its debt obligations to implement his irresponsible slash-and-burn vision of the budget.