Our guest blogger is Danielle Lazarowitz, Special Assistant for the Economic Policy Team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As tough as the tax deal was to swallow last December, it is about to get even worse, as Republicans are trying to eliminate the key piece of the agreement that helped working Americans. At the time, President Obama had to make the difficult compromise of extending the high-end Bush tax cuts, an unnecessary tax break for millionaires, in order to keep tax rates low for 98 percent of Americans and to continue funding for extended unemployment benefits through the end of 2011.

Earlier this month, House Republicans introduced the Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits, and Services Act of 2011 or, as they prefer to call it, the JOBS Act of 2011, which will cut unemployment benefits and allow states to apply their UI money to other things (such as tax cuts). As the Center for American Progress’ Heather Boushey and Jordan Eizenga wrote last week, “the JOBS Act, which provides an incentive for states to cut unemployment benefits, is less about creating jobs and more about hurting those who have lost one.”

And because it would cut the unemployment benefits that were a key part of the tax deal, this legislation amounts to House Republicans breaking their word. “In December, the price that had to be paid in order to give unemployment benefits to America’s workers was to give tax cuts to the richest people in America. That happened — but now they want to renege on the other side of it,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) at a press conference.

With national unemployment at 9 percent and more than 40 percent of the nation’s unemployed out of work for over six months, it critical that extended unemployment benefits remain in effect. The benefits are not only an important safety net for unemployed workers who lost their jobs through no fault of their own, but good for the economy. Economist Wayne Vroman estimates that for every dollar spent on unemployment benefits, an additional $2 was put back into the economy. Meanwhile, Moody’s Analytics economist Mark Zandi estimates that making the Bush income tax cuts permanent only puts 32 cents back into the economy for every dollar spent.

Even Republican governors see the importance of this program. As Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said last week as she endorsed a proposal to extend unemployment benefits, “We know that we have lots of people here in Arizona that are depending on those dollars to put food on the table for their families.”

The passage of JOBS Act would void the bipartisan agreement made in December to help the nation’s unemployed. If we can’t trust republicans to keep their word on an agreement as substantial as the tax compromise, we can only guess who they will betray next.

Even as American workers and families struggle with the lingering effects of the Great Recession — a recession spurred in large part by Wall Street malfeasance — the nation’s biggest banks have rebounded, as have the pay packages of their CEOs. For instance, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon received more than $20 million in compensation for 2010, while Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman made more than $15 million.

But American workers saw their pay grow by a measly two percent last year. And this is nothing new. Between 2000 and 2009, American workers experienced a “lost decade,” with incomes falling nearly five percent. As Marie Diamond noted, “the lack of wage growth has made it difficult for average Americans to keep up with rising prices on everything from gas to food.” Big bank CEO’s, meanwhile, made an average of $19 million per year between 2001 and 2010, as Fortune’s Colin Barr showed today:

Over the past decade the too-big-to-fail banks have showered a staggering $1.15 billion in cash and stock on a changing cast of hard-charging if inept chief executives, according to regulatory filings. That works out to an average paycheck of $19 million a year – this in a decade in which the biggest banks ripped off everyone in sight on their way to very nearly turning the lights out on the U.S. economy.

It’s not only in the banking industry that CEO pay has come roaring back. In 2010, median CEO pay climbed 27 percent. Median CEO compensation last year was $9 million, the highest since 2007, while the average CEO bonus grew by nearly 20 percent. CEOs at America’s largest companies now earn 343 times more than the typical worker. In 1970, the average CEO earned 28 times as much as the typical worker.

This disparity is contributing towards America’s sky-high income inequality, which is currently the worst its been since the 1920s. 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.”

House Republicans have been facing a backlash after voting for a plan authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) that would dismantle Medicare while cutting taxes for the rich. But that plan also included deep cuts in discretionary spending, the destructiveness of which is becoming more apparent as the budget process moves forward.

For instance, the Republican budget would implement a 15 percent cut in the agency tasked with policing oil markets, even with energy speculation at an all-time high. That same portion of the budget — which is being marked up by the House Appropriations agricultural subcommittee — would also cut $832 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), a program that provides low-income women and children with food, counseling, and health care.

As the AP reported, Republicans claim that the cuts “are taken from excess dollars in those accounts, and participants won’t see a decrease in services.” However, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ran the numbers and found that, with the expected increase in food prices over the coming months, hundreds of thousands of women and children would be bumped from WIC under the GOP’s plan:

House Republicans are proposing a cut in the WIC nutrition program that would force WIC to turn away 325,000 to 475,000 eligible low-income women and young children next year…Economists have varying views on the size of the likely increase in food prices over the next 18 months. If the cost of WIC foods increases by 2 percent between fiscal years 2011 and 2012 — the smallest increase likely — the proposed funding cut would force WIC to serve roughly 325,000 fewer people in 2012 than in 2011. If, as some food price experts believe likely, the price increase is 5 percent, WIC would have to be cut by roughly 475,000 people. Both of these estimates reflect the use of all contingency funds, as well as the use of carryover funds from fiscal year 2011, to close funding shortfalls.

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.” As Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) said regarding an earlier attempt by Republicans to cut WIC, “On two levels [the cuts are] wrong. One is they’re wrong morally…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.”

Republicans have, for the last several weeks, been lambasting President Obama for the nation’s high gas prices, while promoting so-called solutions — like authorizing more offshore oil drilling — that won’t bring down gas prices. At the same time, House Republicans are actively undermining the agency charged with policing manipulation in the oil markets.

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson admitted earlier this month that, according to traditional supply and demand, oil should cost about $60 or $70 per barrel, instead of hovering around $100. Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimated that speculation was adding roughly $27 per barrel earlier this month. Instead of addressing this clear problem, House Republicans have proposed cutting the budget of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — which oversees trading in energy markets — by 15 percent from its 2010 level:

The CFTC’s budget would fall to $172 million from $202 million under the plan to be considered tomorrow by the agriculture subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. It “provides the necessary resources” for the CFTC to fulfill its duties, Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican and subcommittee chairman, said in a statement. President Barack Obama had requested $308 million in his 2012 budget proposal.

Since 1990, speculators have more than doubled their share of the oil futures market. Back then, they composed roughly 30 percent of the market; they make up nearly 70 percent today. According to the CFTC, speculative positions in energy markets — oil and otherwise — are at an all-time high.

As Mike Masters and Dennis Kelleher of the nonprofit Better Markets wrote in Politico today, “excessive speculation defeats the purpose for the commodity markets, which have been largely taken over by new speculators from the capital markets gambling on future price moves. If this practice stops, prices for commodities such as oil — and gasoline — will fall.” However, House Republicans are more interested in scoring cheap political points off of unworkable solutions than actually allowing regulators to police the marketplace and protect consumers.

And, of course, cutting the CFTC’s budget not only allows speculations to continue running rampant, but also furthers the GOP’s goal of undermining the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. “We went to the brink of economic disaster. Congress gave us the directives in Dodd-Frank to ensure that doesn’t happen again, and now there are those who would keep us from having the budget to do the job,” said CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton.