Today, the House is voting on H.R. 839, The HAMP Termination Act of 2011, which is sponsored by Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC). The bill would immediately end the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) — the Obama administration’s signature foreclosure prevention program — rescinding tens of billions of dollars in funding meant to aid troubled homeowners. This move comes despite analysts predicting that one million homes will go into foreclosure this year.

But during floor debate today, House Republicans came up with a novel reason to justify cutting foreclosure relief with the housing crisis still burning. They said that HAMP needs to be cut because Democrats haven’t yet done enough to fix it:

REP. PATRICK MCHENRY (R-NC): My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have not offered legislation to fix it when they were in the majority. And so we’re left with what is required today, [which] is to root out this federal program.

HOUSE FINANCIAL SERVICES COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN SPENCER BACHUS (R-AL): You haven’t mended it. You’re talking about mending it today. Where is your bill to mend it? Is there a bill to amend it?…You can file the bill, we’ll take a look at it, but we’re ending this failure.

Watch it:

Of course, if Republicans were actually serious about addressing foreclosures, they could suggest their own fix for HAMP. But they haven’t. To the contrary, they have opposed all foreclosure prevention efforts, including bankruptcy cramdown and the foreclosure fraud settlement that’s currently being negotiated by the nations’ attorneys general.

Undeniably, HAMP has suffered from significant design flaws and has fallen far short of the goals that the Obama administration set for it. But the answer is not to eliminate it compltely, leaving homeowners to fend for themselves. There are, instead, several fixes that could be made that would improve HAMP, including allowing housing counselors to directly approve HAMP modifications. See other recommendations here.

And if its really the cost of the program that’s bothering House Republicans, they could support Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA) effort to fund foreclosure prevention through a fee on the nation’s biggest banks. “I don’t mean to demonize, but I think Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo and the Bank of America and Citicorp and Morgan Stanley and the large hedge funds, I think they can pay for this,” Frank said.

Instead of adopting any of these fixes, Republicans are simply letting the program disappear, because they believe that all federal foreclosure prevention efforts “need to stop.”

The current continuing resolution under which the federal government is operating expires on April 8, and at the moment, it seems that budget talks between House Republican leadership and Senate Democrats have broken down. Republicans want their spending bill — H.R. 1 — to “serve as a starting point for all negotiations” (even though Democrats have now upped the amount of spending cuts they’re willing to pass, alongside zero concessions from Republicans).

As we’ve noted, H.R. 1 includes debilitating cuts to programs that benefit women, children, students, and veterans. And by limiting their cuts to the non-defense discretionary portion of the budget, the GOP’s cuts disproportionately fall upon those who depend most on government programs that provide important services like education and health care.

Republicans claim the cuts are necessary to reduce the deficit, but in an interview with The Wonk Room today, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) noted that cuts to anti-poverty programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) are “fiscally stupid” due to their potential for providing savings over the long-term:

On two levels [the cuts are] wrong. One is they’re wrong morally. We need to take care of women and children and WIC program is very important for childrens’ health and healthy babies and for healthy mothers. But on a second level it’s fiscally stupid, because if you don’t feed kids, if you don’t feed mothers and get them up to speed, they deliver a low birth-weight baby that then you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars dealing with in the premie units of hospitals.

If you get a mother healthy through the period of her pregnancy she delivers a normal baby, normal birth-weight, and the child has a decent start and it’s a lot less expensive. So if you don’t care about morals and you just want to talk about money, it’s better on the money side. That’s why what they’re doing makes no sense at all.

Watch it:

According to the Government Accountability Office, every dollar invested in WIC “generated $2.89 in health care savings during the first year after birth and $3.50 in savings over 18 years.” But this isn’t the only way in which Republican cuts could conceivably make the deficit worse: they’re also cutting programs like IRS tax enforcement (which lowers tax receipts) Title X family planning (which leads to higher Medicaid expenditures) and food safety regulations (which leads to more foodborne illness and higher health care costs).

Potential 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney earlier this month endorsed a lobbying push by multinational corporations that are trying to cajole Congress into granting them a big tax break. These corporations — many of which already have very low effective tax rates — want Congress to enact a tax repatriation holiday, allowing them to bring money they have stashed offshore back to the U.S. at a dramatically lower tax rate. Usually, money brought back to the U.S. is subject to the statutory corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

As of last night, Romney is no longer alone amongst 2012 GOP hopefuls in supporting this tax break. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty told CNBC’s Larry Kudlow that such a move “makes perfect sense”:

And as to repatriating foreign income, of course, Larry, we’re getting none of that now. And offering a dramatic reduction or even a holiday for repatriation makes perfect sense.

Watch it:

Pawlenty is right that, currently, money that U.S. corporations have stashed offshore is untaxed. But that’s because the U.S. tax code has the incentives completely backwards, allowing corporations to stow money offshore while still claiming domestic tax credits. This enables them to dramatically lower their effective tax rate by stashing money in tax havens.

The solution to this problem is not, as Pawlenty and Romney claim, allowing corporations to repatriate the money tax free. The corporations claim that allowing a repatriation holiday would enable them to invest in domestic operations and job creation. But Congress approved a tax repatriation holiday in 2004, and the result was corporate executives lining their own pockets and then increasing the amount of money they moved offshore, in the hopes that they could sucker Congress into approving another tax holiday sometime down the line.

The data shows that the corporations benefiting the most from the tax holiday actually cut jobs in the subsequent two years. So while a tax holiday may make “perfect sense” for Pawlenty, in terms of tax policy, it makes absolutely no sense at all.