In late 2009, as Americans across the country were still grappling with the effects of the Great Recession, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) advocated reviving President George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, blasting the current structure of Social Security as “socialistic.” He has described Social Security as a “failed program,” and thinks Medicare is unconstitutional.

So, of course, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is considering assigning DeMint to fill an open spot on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the very programs DeMint believes violate the Constitution:

In a sign of the growing power of conservatives within the Senate Republican Conference, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) held a rare meeting with Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Monday evening. The topic: an opening on the most powerful committee in the Senate, the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over taxes, trade, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

“It was a very positive meeting,” DeMint said. “It did come up and I expressed an interest — it’s where all the issues I came to work on in Congress are,” DeMint said.

As Ian Milhiser has noted, the conservative notion that Medicare is unconstitutional is absurd, as the Constitution explicitly provides Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the…general welfare of the United States.” DeMint has also turned to fringe right-wing constitutional theory in an attempt to find justification for his position that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

The upshot is that Senate Republicans are considering placing DeMint on a committee overseeing programs that he believes violate the Constitution or that he wants to privatize and turn over to the private sector. The ultra-conservative, anti-tax group Club for Growth is pushing for DeMint to be seated on the Finance Committee so that he can influence corporate tax reform.

Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee yesterday seized upon a new report — which showed that half of Americans had no income tax liability in 2009 — to claim that raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans would be unfair. “I get sick and tired of the demagoguery that goes on in Washington about taxing higher-income people,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). “How high do taxes have to go to satisfy the appetite of people in this Congress to spend money?”

Of course, the truth is that those Americans don’t have any federal income tax liability because they don’t make enough to fall into even the lowest income tax bracket, a result that has been exacerbated by the Great Recession. These Americans also pay a hefty proportion of sales and payroll taxes. In fact, when payroll taxes are included, less than a quarter of American households pay no federal taxes, and the vast majority of those are the elderly or people with very low incomes (including students and the unemployed).

The upshot is that income inequality has led to a situation in which huge quantities of wealth are concentrated in the hands of the few, which manifests itself in the number Republicans are citing to justify their opposition to raising taxes on the rich. And, as if we needed any more evidence, a report being released today by the consulting firm Deloitte shows that wealth concentrated in the hands of millionaires is “exploding”:

Total wealth among millionaire households could more than double over the next decade in 25 major economies, growing from an estimated $92 trillion this year to $202 trillion in 2020. The study shows the United States and Europe will continue to have the greatest concentrations of wealth…The wealth of millionaire households in the U.S. could reach $87 trillion in 2020, up from $39 trillion in 2011. In 2020, 43 percent of the world’s wealth held by millionaire households is predicted to be in the U.S.

While the trend in recent decades has been towards more income inequality — with the vast majority of income gains in the last three decades going to the richest one percent — the trend in tax rates has been going the other way. At the moment, just the richest 400 Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined, but effective tax rates on the richest 400 have fallen by half since 1995. My colleague Zaid Jilani noted today that income inequality in the U.S. is as bad as it is in places like Uganda and Pakistan.

As Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) said yesterday, “listening to the rhetoric used makes it sound like a significant portion of Americans are around, simply sitting, doing nothing, waiting for the taxman to bring riches. It seems to me that reality is far different.” Indeed, Republicans are either arguing that taxes need to go up on the poor and the middle-class or they are saying that the rich should never see their taxes go up, no matter how much wealth they accumulate.