Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) today released a budget proposal, alongside a slew of ultra-conservative senators, including Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Marco Rubio (R-FL). Toomey’s budget document, unlike the budget proposed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and passed by the House Republican caucus, does not touch Medicare or Social Security.

However, Toomey did elect to co-opt Ryan’s tax “reform” plan, which involves lowering marginal rates, consolidating brackets, and supposedly paying for it all by getting rid of loopholes and deductions. (According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Toomey envisions a top marginal tax rate of 25 percent, though he doesn’t lay out specific rates in his budget.)

In Ryan’s case, as CAP’s Michael Linden pointed out, the catch is that preserving the Bush tax regime, but cutting rates (including the top rate), and having it all come out revenue-neutral necessarily implies a big middle-class tax increase:

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.

Toomey’s budget is designed in exactly the same way as Ryan’s, hiding the tax increase under pleasant sounding talk of reform. Toomey actually settles on a revenue-level of 18.5 percent of GDP, below the level of revenue raised the last time the budget was actually balanced. Since he exempts Medicare and Social Security, nearly all of Toomey’s savings comes from draconian cuts to the non-defense discretionary budget and Medicaid, which Toomey turns into a block-grant system.

Adding insult to injury, Toomey — like Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) did last night — endorses changing the corporate tax code to allow corporations to never pay taxes on overseas profits, which, as Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out, gives companies a huge incentive to both move jobs offshore and employ tax havens to hide profits earned in the U.S. Of course, this isn’t all that surprising coming from someone who thinks its “not clear” that tax cuts reduce revenue.

Last week, my colleague Zaid Jilani pointed out that America’s income inequality is worse than that in places like Pakistan and Ethoipia and roughly equivalent to that in Uganda and the Ivory Coast. Before its revolution, Egypt’s income inequality — which played a role in sparking the uprising against former President Mubarak’s regime — was actually better than that in the U.S.

This is some dubious company. And as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted today, America has the worst income inequality amongst 24 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (known as the OECD-24):

This chart measures inequality after taxes and all other government benefits, showing that the U.S. is doing a miserable job dealing with inequality through government policy.

Income inequality in the U.S. is currently the worst its been since the 1920s. Just the richest 400 Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined, and the richest 10 percent of Americans control two-thirds of the country’s net worth. Currently, the top one percent of households make nearly 25 percent of the total income in the country, after they made less than 10 percent in the 1970s. Between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent.”

One of the manifestations of this inequality is hedge fund managers making as much in two minutes as Navy SEALs make in a year. Yet, Republicans in Congress are still content to whine about the unfairness of returning tax rates on the wealthy to the level at which they were under President Bill Clinton. And of course they consider new tax brackets for millionaires — like those proposed by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — to be entirely out of the question.

Back in March, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) astoundingly claimed that the iPad and iPhone are “built in the United States of America.” This news must have been a great surprise to the Chinese workers who work for Taiwanese-based manufacturing giant Foxconn, which is notorious for the poor conditions at its factories and the wave of suicides at its plants.

After much of the international media covered the abuses at Foxconn’s factories, the company, along with the major American corporations it supplies — like Apple and HP — announced that it would be reforming its practices.

Yet a new report from Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based advocacy and research group, finds that many of the practices that led more than a dozen workers committ suicide continue to live on. SACOM conducted a comprehensive study of practices at several Foxconn factories over the months of March and April and found that a number of shocking policies are in place. Here are some of the highlights of their study:

– Workers Are Being Asked To Work 80-100 Hours Of Overtime: Despite promises by Apple and Foxconn to limit overtime work to 36 hours a month, SACOM researchers found that in some factories, like in Chengdu, it is typical for workers to work 80-100 hours overtime instead. This is actually 2-3 times the legal limit of allowed overtime work.

– Workers Are Being Forced To Sign ‘No-Suicide’ Pacts: In the wake of a huge wave of suicides at Foxconn plants, the company began reforming its practices related to the suicides. Among these changes included installing anti-suicide nets to catch workers who attempted to leap out of company windows. Yet workers are also being forced to sign a non-suicide pact as a condition of employment. As part of the pact, the employees families have to promise “not sue the company, bring excessive demands, take drastic actions that would damage the company’s reputation or cause trouble that would hurt normal operations” in the case of a suicide.

– Employees Regularly Are Forced To Stand For 14 Hours A Day: SACOM found that workers in Chengdu “usually…have to stand for 14 hours a day.” “I don’t understand why we can’t sit. And we can’t bring our cell phone to the shop floor. Even the cell phone without camera is prohibited,” said one worker to the SACOM researchers.

– Employees Are Crammed Together In Dormitories With Squalid Living Conditions: In Chengdu, where almost all workers live in company-owned dormitories, the number of employees placed in a dormitory room range from 6 to 22. Employees’ living quarters are also under factory rules, and workers cannot even bring basic items such as hair dryers into their dorms. “Some of my roommates weep in the dormitory. I want to cry as well but my tears have not come out,” one 19 year-old employee told SACOM

Foxconn responded to the SACOM report with a statement given to the magazine PCWorld: “We have made tremendous progress over the past year as we work to lead our industry in meeting the needs of the new generation of workers in China and that has been confirmed by the many customer representatives, outside experts, and reporters who have visited our facilities and openly met with our employees and our management team.”

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) delivered a speech last night at the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan, laying out the Republican vision when it comes to the debt ceiling, the budget, and taxes. Boehner, of course, denied that increasing revenue has any role in deficit reduction, and to bolster his argument, he pointed to a speech that President Kennedy gave in the 1960′s that called for tax reform:

If we’re serious about balancing the budget and getting our economy back to creating jobs, tax hikes should be off the table…Rather than increase government spending, President Kennedy told the New York Economic Club, we should cut taxes significantly, and take steps to ‘increase incentives and the availability of investment capital’ for employers. I would note that my colleagues and I are not calling for tax cuts in our budget. Rather, we’re calling for an end to the threat of tax hikes — and a fundamental reform of the tax code — to provide certainty to those in our country who create jobs.

This is a favorite reference for Republicans, who attempt to use Kennedy’s calls for tax reform (which resulted in legislation that passed in February, 1964, three months after Kennedy’s death) to bolster their bipartisan credentials and push for further reductions in taxes for the richest Americans. But Boehner and the rest of the GOP conveniently leave out key planks in Kennedy’s plan. Are Republicans saying that they support the following facets of Kennedy’s proposed tax system?:

– The tax reform passed after Kennedy’s death cut the top marginal tax rate from 90 percent to 70 percent, twice today’s top rate of 35 percent. Kennedy explicitly called for a top rate of 65 percent, but added that it should be set at 70 percent if certain deductions weren’t phased out at the top of the income scale.

– Kennedy called for U.S. corporations to be taxed on all their profits, earned anywhere in the world, rather than the current system of allowing them to defer taxation until they bring those profits home. “The undesirability of continuing deferral is underscored where deferral has served as a shelter for tax escape through the unjustifiable use of tax havens such as Switzerland,” Kennedy said in 1961. During Kennedy’s time in office, corporate taxes made up more than 20 percent of total revenue. Today, it’s less than ten percent.

– Kennedy called for cutting tax preferences for the oil and gas industries, saying in 1963 that, “while these are complex as well as controversial problems, we cannot shrink from a frank appraisal of governmental policies and tax subsidies in this area.” Republicans have been adamantly opposed to cutting subsidies for oil and gas companies.

– Kennedy called for limiting itemized deductions for the rich, saying that they should receive the same benefit for things like charitable giving “as everyone else,” instead of preferential treatment (which they still receive). President Obama has called for the same system since he came into office, but the GOP has derided Obama’s proposals.

Kennedy’s tax reforms also called for boosting the child care deduction and raising the standard exemption, thus providing tax relief for the poorest Americans. “The Revenue Act of 1964 was aimed at the demand, rather than the supply, side of the economy,” said Arthur Okun, a Kennedy economic adviser.

Is Boehner on board with tax reform that fits these parameters? If not, he probably shouldn’t be invoking Kennedy’s name to support his tax cut agenda. The Kennedy family, during the 2010 Congressional campaign, took issue with Republicans using Kennedy’s legacy to support their tax plan, calling the portrayal “dishonest” and “false.”

ThinkProgress Blog Fellow Micah Uetricht is a staff writer for Campus Progress. He lives in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @micahuetricht.

At a town hall meeting in Sycamore, Illinois two weeks ago, freshman Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) faced a largely hostile audience that repeatedly questioned his vote in favor of the House Republican budget, and expressed opposition to subsidies for big oil companies and the privatization of Medicare. While Hultgren effectively dodged a number of the questions, he also expressed a desire to see companies like General Electric — which had no federal tax liability in 2010 — pay more in taxes.

Hultgren’s comments about GE came after a constituent asked him about offshoring by American companies:

CONSTITUENT: We’re allowing corporations to move abroad and subsidizing them. What do you think about that?

HULTGREN: I’d like to see policies that encourage companies to stay here… A lot of our work that we’ve been spending time on in Washington is dealing with the regulations. There are so many regulations, there is so much incentive for them to be going elsewhere. I think it’s ridiculous. And I don’t know if it’s true—I gotta find out if General Electric truly is paying no taxes. That’s crazy. That’s wrong. That’s gotta stop.

Watch it:

Notably, Hultgren has done nothing to end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, or to close the loopholes enjoyed by companies like GE.

Politicians around the country have been peppered with questions on GE’s tax payments and Republicans have had mixed sentiments on whether they should have to pay up. ThinkProgress reported from a South Carolina town hall meeting where Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) “agree[d] with it generally” that corporations like GE should pay taxes. And House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) stated he is in favor of making GE pay taxes on the Don Imus show. Other Republicans, however, remain insistent that Main Street should foot the country’s bills while large corporations pay nothing.