Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Associate Director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Before we all get too weak-kneed over House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) “courageous” budget, let’s take a quick look at the tax side of the ledger. Ryan uses boilerplate language and topline bullet points to obscure an important fact: his plan would almost certainly raise taxes on most middle-income people.

Here’s what we do know. Ryan’s plan would:

– Maintain the Bush tax cuts, and further, cut the top individual tax rate down to 25 percent from 35 percent;

– Consolidate the current six tax brackets into some, unspecified, fewer number of brackets;

– Keep overall revenue levels the same;

– Pay for the enormous tax cut for the top by eliminating or curtailing some, unspecified, tax expenditures.

But without the missing details — which brackets are going to be consolidated, what the new rate structure will be, which tax expenditures will be eliminated, which will be limited and how — this is nothing more than pure boilerplate.

That’s probably on purpose, since any detailed description of his ideas for tax “reform” would reveal a massive middle class tax hike. For Ryan to cut the top rate by nearly one-third and still keep revenue the same as it would have been under the Bush tax cuts regime, he has to raise taxes somewhere else. And though he pointedly refuses to tell us where those tax hikes will come from, we can make an educated guess.

For one thing, the basic math makes a middle class tax hike unavoidable. The rate cut at the top, of course, benefits only those in the top brackets (the richest 2 percent of Americans), but to pay for it, Ryan says he will “broaden the tax base.” Broadening the tax base means removing some tax expenditures that currently benefit the middle class – the rich too, but they’re getting a huge rate cut. For another, Ryan’s previous budget plan, the “Roadmap for America’s Future” includes a massive tax cut for the rich paid for by an equally massive tax increase for the middle class.

Ryan’s “reform” of the tax code is long on rhetoric and short on details. It would almost certainly mean a huge tax increase for the middle class in order to pay for a huge tax cut — another one — for the rich. But Ryan doesn’t come right out and say that. Instead he obfuscates, and leaves his plan deliberately vague.

By Christy Goldfuss, Public Lands Project Director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

For freshman Rep. Jeff Landry (R-LA), record pay for oil CEOs as Americans suffer from surging gas prices is the realization of the American Dream. According to an AP analysis, the pay package for ConocoPhillips’ top executive, Jim Mulva, went up by 25 percent last year to $17.9 million, money sucked from taxpayer subsidies and drivers’ wallets. “Mulva was paid a $1.5 million salary, stock awards of $6.2 million and option awards worth $5.7 million. He also received perks of $294,000, including the personal use of company cars and aircraft, life insurance premiums and medical services.”

In a House Natural Resources Hearing last week, Landry had a remarkable exchange with Michael J. Fox (a lobbyist for gas station owners, not the actor). Pressed on Big Oil’s supposedly low profit margins, Fox pointed out that Exxon CEO Lee Raymond’s retirement package was “$450 million dollars for doing a 90 hour job,” and the service station retailer gets paid $60,000 for doing a 90 hour job. Landry responded by claiming that’s just the American Dream, and that Big Oil executives must be smarter and better than everyone else, including small business owners:

LANDRY: But isn’t that what America is all about, about that American dream, about that kid who might not have it real good and grows up in a poor family and works his way to the top, and shouldn’t he be able to make as much money as he possibly can and work as less hours as he possibly can, if he’s that smart and that good? Should we destroy the American dream to put your equation into play here?

FOX: He’s not “that smart” or “that good.”

Watch it:

Rep. Landry’s equation for the American dream includes $4 billion dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies to corporations that continue to make record profits. Over the past decade, the big five oil companies – BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell – made nearly $1 trillion in profits. The companies had record profits in 2008, which was the same year that oil reached all-time high of $147 per barrel (USA Today link). In 2009, ExxonMobil did not pay any federal taxes, because of all the federal help it received.

The oil and gas industry spent $146 million lobbying Congress last year, including $87,450 to Landry’s campaign, making oil and gas his largest single industry contributor. Mr. Landry and his Republican allies have voted unanimously to protect the oil and gas subsidies. For most, the American Dream means working hard, playing by the rules, and achieving success, not on the backs of other hardworking taxpaying citizens.

Transcript: Read more

House Republicans — led by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — released their 2012 budget today. The plan, of course, includes a giant tax cut for the wealthy, as well as a complete dismantling of Medicare and Medicaid.

But it also includes a gift for Wall Street, in the form of a repeal of the provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that protect taxpayers from the situation they faced in 2008 — bailing out financial institutions or watching the economy tumble. Here’s how the House Republicans framed their repeal effort:

Although the bill is dubbed “Wall Street Reform,” it actually intensifies the problem of too-big-to-fail by giving large, interconnected financial institutions advantages that small firms will not enjoy. While the authors of Dodd-Frank went to great lengths to denounce bailouts, this law only sustains them.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) now has the authority to access taxpayer dollars in order to bail out the creditors of large, “systemically significant” financial institutions. CBO’s expected cost for this new authority is $26 billion, although CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf recently testified that “the cost of the program will depend on future economic and financial events that are inherently unpredictable.” In other words, another large-scale financial crisis in which creditors are guaranteed to get government bailouts would cost taxpayers much, much more. This budget would end the regime now enshrined into law that paves the way for future bailouts.

The provisions in question — which Ryan dubbed “permanent bailout authority” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning, reviving a key GOP talking point from the financial reform debate — are actually two distinct parts of the financial reform law. The first allows the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) to designate some firms as systemically significant and subject them to stiffer regulation. As CAP’s David Min pointed out, failing to do so amounts to ignoring, not addressing, the problem of “too big to fail.”

The second, known as resolution authority, allows the FDIC to unwind failing firms that, because they are so large and interconnected, can’t go through traditional bankruptcy. The FDIC recoups any costs incurred by selling off the assets of the company that was dissolved. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Dodd-Frank law also reduces deficits by $2.3 billion by 2015.

The big bank lobbying groups — including the American Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable — oppose resolution authority. “You don’t want to create a system that raises great uncertainty and changes what institutions, risk management executives and lawyers are used to,” said Edward Yingling of the American Bankers Association.

These provisions correct two key problems that plagued the pre-2008 financial system: giants firms didn’t have to adhere to stricter standards and the government had no tools to unwind them when they failed. The choice was ad hoc bailouts or economic catastrophe, and the House GOP budget would return the regulatory system to this standard.