Today, Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Bob Corker (R-TN) released what they have breathtakingly billed as a plan “to force Congress to dramatically cut spending over 10 years.” “Cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget in the coming years won’t be easy or painless; it will require backbone and discipline,” Corker said in a press release. “This is a bold step,” added McCaskill.

The plan, however, proves that McCaskill and Corker are nothing more than deficit peacocks: willing to score political points by assuring everyone how very serious they are about addressing the deficit, but not actually doing any of the work that serious budgeting requires.

All the Corker-McCaskill plan entails is a cap on overall government spending at 20.6 percent of GDP. But how will we get from the current 24 percent of GDP down below the cap? McCaskill and Corker don’t lay out any ideas! Perhaps that’s because actually adhering to the cap would require massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare or else draconian gutting of the rest of the budget, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted.

In fact, McCaskill and Corker’s cap would actually hold federal spending below the level at which it was under President Reagan, even though there are now tens of millions more seniors reliant on Social Security and Medicare than there were in the 1980′s. As CAP Senior Fellow Matt Miller wrote, “as a matter of math, if you run the government at a smaller level than did Ronald Reagan while accommodating this massive increase in the number of seniors on our health and pension programs, you have to decimate the rest of the budget.”

Even if Corker and McCaskill had some sort of plan in place for getting spending down to 20.6 percent, basing future budget needs on past historical averages is simply a lazy and silly way to budget, as CAP’s Michael Linden explained:

It’s simply wrong to try and budget for the future by looking backwards and trying to shoehorn future needs into whatever the past levels have been. Instead, we should be trying to determine broadly how much public investment will be required as we move deeper into the 21st century, and then how do we pay for those investments in the most efficient way possible…Certainly everyone agrees that times and circumstances have changed, and that the federal government should, presumably, change with them.

McCaskill clearly thinks highly of this proposal, saying today that “if this bill is distorted and twisted, it could cost me my senate seat, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay. It’s a price I’m willing to pay for my country and, more importantly, it’s a price I’m willing to pay for my grandchildren.” But it isn’t nearly the solution that she claims it is.

David and Charles Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries and primary financiers of the Tea Party, have amassed one of the world’s largest private fortunes and Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in America. Koch sycophants in the media have attacked anyone daring to criticize the company because Koch Industries employs nearly 50,000 people, according to a study produced by Koch Industries last week. In the last two years, David and Charles Koch have jumped from each being worth $16 billion to now being worth $21.5 billion. That means together they went from being worth $31 billion dollars to being worth $42 billion today. David is now the richest man in New York City, and the pair are now on the nation’s top ten list for richest Americans.

However, at a time when the Koch brothers were enjoying spectacular financial gains, Koch Industries laid off well over 2,000 people. Using the same approximate “jobs multiplier” Koch Industries used in its study last week, that means Koch Industries extinguished nearly 8,000 jobs in recent years:

– Koch’s John Zink Company subsidiary laid off 63 people in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

– Koch’s Georgia Pacific subsidiary laid off 118 people at its Roxboro, North Carolina plant.

– Koch laid off 50 people at its INVISTA plant in Wilmington, Delaware.

– Koch’s Georgia Pacific subsidiary laid off 158 people at a paper-making plant in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Most of the jobs have been replaced with automated machines.

– Koch’s INVISTA subsidiary laid off 50 people at its plant in Athens, Georgia.

– Koch laid off 150 people at its headquarters in Wichita, Kansas.

– Koch laid off 500 people at its Seaford, Delaware INVISTA plant.

– Koch laid off 400 people in its Waynesboro, Indiana INVISTA plant. As one of the primary employers in the city, the layoffs were expected to have serious ripple effects. City officials said layoffs at Invista will “force cuts across Waynesboro.” “The rest of the community, this will probably instill a bit of a wake-up call and they will cut back also,” predicted Waynesboro Vice Mayor Frank Lucente.

– Koch laid off 320 people at its Georgia Pacific plywood plant in Cleveland, Texas.

– Koch laid off 60 people at its INVISTA plant in Victoria, Texas.

– Koch laid off 169 people from its Flint Hills Resources plant in Odessa, Texas.

– Koch laid off 300 people at its Georgia Pacific plant in Monroeville, Alabama.

– Koch “indefinitely” idled its 60-worker Georgia Pacific mill in Louisville, Mississippi.

The Koch downsizing isn’t limited to the United States. In England, Koch laid off workers at its chemical plant in Wilton, England and closed down its INVISTA plant in Offenbach, Germany.

Koch Industries pretends that it thrives from the “free market,” and that the government only inhibits its growth. But in reality, as Koch slashed jobs, the company exploited government contracts, public forests, public land, narrow corporate loopholes, eminent domain seizures of private land, and has demanded taxpayer bailouts for its refineries.

Moreover, while Koch Industries has interests in a number of different businesses, much of its money is made by simply polluting for free. The core of Koch’s immense profits are based on burning fossil fuels that contribute to climate change, while not paying a dime for these “externalities.” For instance, Koch refines oil, including high carbon Canadian crude, at its Minnesota refinery, Koch owns one of the largest oil pipeline networks in America, Koch manufacturers fertilizer, Koch sells products for mining coal and owns coal-burning power plants, Koch transports coal, oil and natural gas, and finally, Koch sells financial derivative instruments to bet on the price of its own products, like oil or natural gas. Because Koch Industries gets rich burning fossil fuels, the Koch brothers are the largest funders of climate change denying organizations and “libertarian” nonprofits in the world. Koch political donations have helped the company escape serious prosecution for emitting cancer-causing chemicals as well.

The banner headline on the Financial Times today is “Oil over $100 as Egypt protests intensify,” marking the first time in two years that the price of an oil barrel has cleared the century mark. This spike in prices coincides with news that the biggest oil companies nearly doubled their profits from a year ago, with Exxon alone making $9.25 billion in the last three months. In the last decade, in fact, the five big oil companies have made nearly $1 trillion:

Obviously, the spike in oil once again shows the folly of continuing to rely on an oil economy that is subject to volatility from events around the world, and is slowly killing the planet anyway. And one of the most bogus policies encouraging the continued dependence on oil is the billions in subsidies that the U.S. hands out to oil companies every year, some of them for activities that are in the oil companies’ interest to perform anyway.

In his State of the Union, President Obama called for cutting oil subsidies and redirecting them toward alternative energy sources. But, of course, this common sense suggestion to remove government support from a mature, hugely profitable industry has run into the usual buzzsaw of congressional opposition and Big Oil lobbying.

“This is a tired old argument we’ve been hearing for two years now,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s main lobbying arm, in the New York Times today. “If the president were serious about job creation, he would be working with us to develop American oil and gas by American workers for American consumers.” But as CAP’s Daniel Weiss wrote, the industry’s argument about job creation is bogus, as “the evidence indicates that clean energy investments are a more cost-effective job creator“:

A University of Massachusetts study found that investment in clean energy creates anywhere from two to four times more direct and indirect jobs compared to the same investment in oil and gas production. Investing $1 million to retrofit buildings to make them more energy efficient creates three times more jobs than a $1 million investment in oil and gas. An investment in wind energy creates two and a half times more jobs compared to the same investment in oil and gas.

The latest jump in oil is one more reason to ditch these subsidies, saving taxpayers money and lending a little bit of a hand to the effort to combat climate change. But can Congress finally follow through?