In an address to the Cobb Country Chamber of Commerce today, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) called one of the most regressive changes that could be made to Social Security — raising the retirement age — a painless fix for keeping the program solvent in the long-term:

The deficit commission said, you know, if you just change [the retirement age] and by the year 2075 you make that 69 years for the eligibility age and you take the cap and raise the cap by five percent on the taxable income that you apply to the payroll tax, you save Social Security. Now there are people, interest groups that are out there, who don’t believe in shared sacrifice, are already saying that destroys Social Security. It doesn’t destroy it, it saves it…Social Security is fixable, actuarially and painlessly.

Watch it:

Contrary to Isakson’s assertion, an increase in the retirement age would actually be quite painful for many Americans. Raising the retirement age would cut benefits for middle-class retirees, exasperate income inequality and disproportionately affect low-income earners whose life expectancies have stagnated in the past three decades (as changes in life expectancy have largely mirrored changes in income inequality).

Yet Isakson and other Republican leaders such as Govs. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) and Mitch Daniels (R-IN) have enthusiastically endorsed raising the retirement age while ignoring its impact on low-income workers. Isakson’s other proposed reform — raising the cap on taxable income for Social Security — would be a much more progressive and effective change that would help the program keep paying full benefits for the next 75 years. Even with no changes, Social Security will pay full benefits until 2037 and close to full benefits for decades after that.

Isakson — the 46th richest member of Congress — even went as far to call opponents of raising the retirement age “interest groups who don’t believe in shared sacrifice.” Yet recent polling has shown strong support even among Tea Party members for raising the income cap rather than cutting benefits.

– Kevin Donohoe

Last month, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) — who has now officially been named the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee — explained that, in his view, “Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” And it seems that the rest of the Republicans on the Financial Services Committee are coalescing around their chairman’s philosophy.

Last week, Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ), who is chairing the Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises, said that he wants to implement a mortgage finance system that is entirely private, jeopardizing the very existence of the 30-year mortgage on which so many families rely. And in a speech today, Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said that he wants all foreclosure prevention efforts to be halted immediately:

“All these foreclosure mitigation initiatives we’re taking need to stop,” he said, speaking at an event co-hosted by the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and the NYU Stern School of Business. Neugebauer said the private market should be allowed to work through the problems in the housing market without “administration pressure” to avoid foreclosures. “Markets aren’t kind, but they’re very efficient,” he said. “There were people who were put in their homes that probably never should have been there before.”

Neugebauer is parroting the conservative vision of the housing crisis — which to them was caused entirely by government policies encouraging homeownership amongst those who couldn’t afford it — so it’s not surprising that he thinks the government should get out of the foreclosure prevention business. But the actual problems in the housing market bear little resemblance to those Neugebauer outlined.

For one thing, leaving aside that many of the borrowers who faced foreclosure early in the housing crisis were hoodwinked by predatory lenders, the foreclosure crisis long ago migrated out of subprime loans and into prime loans, as people lost their jobs in the Great Recession. So a crisis created in large part by the shenanigans of bankers then walloped homeowners, who become unemployed through no fault of their own. Neugebauer’s prognosis also ignores the problem of underwater homeowners, who, again, through no fault of their own, now owe more on their mortgage than their home is currently worth, due to plunging home prices.

Meanwhile, one million homes were foreclosed upon last year, and real estate analysts say that another one million will go into foreclosure this year. This not only harms the individual borrowers, but the wider economy, dragging down home values for everyone else and blowing holes in bank balance sheets.

The administration’s foreclosure prevention efforts have, admittedly, left a lot to be desired, but that’s because they involve lots of carrots for banks to modify mortgages, but few sticks, while banks have institutionalized systems biased in favor of foreclosure (like their use of “robo-signers“). Neugebauer’s approach would simply remove the limited help current foreclosure prevention efforts provide, leaving homeowners to the mercy of the very banks whose negligence helped drive the housing crisis in the first place. For some ideas on how to properly reform foreclosure prevention programs, visit here, here, and here.

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who has raised his national profile by repeatedly criticizing the Obama administration’s response to the Great Recession, found out earlier this month that his state’s deficit for the 2012-2013 fiscal years is twice what he had thought. (Texas, unlike the federal government and many states, has a two-year budget cycle.) After months of criticizing the fiscal policies of the Obama administration and touting “the hard work that Texas and states like ours have done to make prudent fiscal decisions,” Perry wound up facing a budget fiasco on par with that in California.

Perry’s previous budget would also have been in significantly worse shape were it not for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e. the stimulus), which the Texas legislature used to balance its budget, even as Perry scored tons of political points grandstanding against a small portion of the funds. And as it turns out, according to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, Texas relied more heavily on stimulus funding to fill its budget hole than any other state:

Turns out Texas was the state that depended the most on those very stimulus funds to plug nearly 97% of its shortfall for fiscal 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Texas, which crafts a budget every two years, was facing a $6.6 billion shortfall for its 2010-2011 fiscal years. It plugged nearly all of that deficit with $6.4 billion in Recovery Act money, allowing it to leave its $9.1 billion rainy day fund untouched.

When he made a show of rejecting some Recovery Act money, Perry said “this was pretty simple for us…We can take care of ourselves.” In addition to filling nearly his entire budget gap with Recovery Act funds, Perry also used the Build America Bonds program — created as part of the Recovery Act — to fund billions of dollars in infrastructure projects. He also grandstanded against — and then promptly accepted — federal funding meant to prevent teacher layoffs.

Perry is hardly alone amongst GOP governors in bashing the stimulus and then turning around and taking advantage of the important funding it provided. Govs. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) and Chris Christie (R-NJ) have done much the same thing. But Perry was the only one threatening secession as a response to government spending, even as his state took advantage of that spending more than any other.

Last week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) called for “elements” of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) radical “Roadmap for America’s Future” — which purports to balance the budget via draconian cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — to be included in the 2011 budget. Cantor’s call came after the Republican leadership spent the last congressional session backing away from Ryan’s plan.

On Meet the Press yesterday, the garbled message from the GOP continued, with Cantor telling host David Gregory that the “direction in which the Roadmap goes is something we need to embrace”:

CANTOR: David, we’ve–we have a program that we have seen one of our members, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee, put together called the “Roadmap.” And he and Kevin McCarthy and I wrote a book together, and in that book we reserved a chapter for a discussion about Social Security, about Medicare, and how we can begin to at least discuss to do that. [...]

GREGORY: How about–and the irony of Paul Ryan being introduced, the budget chairman, and he’s doing the response to the State of the Union, he is the one who’s proposed draconian cuts to Social Security and to Medicare and Republicans don’t stand behind him.

CANTOR: David, that’s not true. I just told you that we put a chapter in our book about it because the direction in which the Roadmap goes is something we need to embrace.

Watch it:

Gregory repeatedly pressed Cantor on which aspects of the Roadmap he wants to implement — including cutting Social Security benefits via privatization and a raise in the retirement age — but Cantor refused to specifically endorse anything. For the record, in addition to gutting Social Security, the Roadmap also calls for privatizing Medicare and implementing a tax reform package that manages to raise taxes on 90 percent of Americans and still lose $2 trillion in revenue over ten years due to dramatic tax reductions for the wealthiest Americans.

Under the Roadmap, effective tax rates will be higher on the middle class than for millionaires. Not only that, but the Roadmap would actually fail to stem the growing national debt. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, under the Roadmap, “the debt would continue to grow in relation to the size of the economy for at least 40 more years — reaching over 175 percent of GDP by 2050. Even by 2080, the debt would still equal about 100 percent of GDP.”

It’s possible that Cantor — like his and Ryan’s co-author, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — doesn’t actually understand what the Roadmap would mean in practice. But the likelier story is that the Republicans would love to implement the Roadmap, but understand that such draconian cuts would be immensely unpopular, so they continually mention the document while leaving aside all of its specifics.