As ThinkProgress previously reported, online retailers like Amazon.com are using a loophole in state tax codes to avoid collecting sales taxes. This loophole is denying states millions of dollars of tax revenue. For example, in “2011 alone, Wisconsin will lose an estimated $127 million in uncollected sales tax on purchases made online.”

In Texas, state lawmakers — overwhelmingly conservative Republicans — decided that they couldn’t tolerate Amazon’s tax dodging at a time when the state cut $15 billion from important social services, health care, and education in the name of deficit reduction. Seizing on an earlier ruling by state comptroller Susan Combs that said Amazon owed the state “$269 million in sales taxes it failed to collect from 2005 to 2009,” the legislature passed a bill that would tighten sales tax rules and force many online retailers to begin collecting sales taxes just like any other business.

This morning, Perry quietly vetoed the bill, protecting Amazon and other large retailers’ tax-dodging:

Gov. Rick Perry has vetoed legislation that was aimed at tightening the state’s rules on when online retailers must collect sales taxes on Texas transactions, the bill’s author said this morning. Perry had earlier criticized Comptroller Susan Combs for moving to collect $269 million from Amazon.com for uncollected sales taxes.State Rep. John Otto, R-Dayton, said Perry’s office told him the governor had vetoed the measure, House Bill 2403, but did not tell him why. However, Otto said the measure also was included in the fiscal matters bill that is on the agenda for the Legislature’s special session that begins today.

Combs has estimated in the past that Texas “loses $600 million a year from untaxed online sales.” When Combs originally demanded that Amazon collect sales taxes just like any other retailer, the online giant actually threatened to leave the state. More recently, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos falsely claimed that collecting sales taxes from his company would be unconstitutional.

In response to the Great Recession and the continuing high unemployment that has followed in its wake, Congress wisely extended unemployment benefits beyond the traditional 27 weeks, with unemployed workers in the hardest hit states eligible for up to 99 weeks of benefits. These extended benefits were put in place over the strong objections of Republicans, who first filibustered an extension on the Senate floor, and then only agreed to approve the extension if it were paired with tax cuts for the wealthy.

Proving that the GOP is not through picking on those who lost their jobs during the recession, GOP 2012 hopeful Rick Santorum appeared on CNBC this morning where he claimed that extended unemployment benefits have created “too big of a social safety net”:

I’m talking about success from the standpoint of traditional capitalist success, in investing, in innovating, in succeeding, and not saying, well, we’re going to tax you more, we’re going to regulate you more because you’re successful. No. And by the way 99 weeks of unemployment — I always use the example, in Pennsylvania we have one of our big, favored companies is Hershey. I remind people that Milton Hershey, the person who started the Hershey chocolate company, went bankrupt four times. Now imagine if back in the late 1800′s you’d had a program of 99 weeks of unemployment benefits. Would there ever have been a Hershey chocolate company? And probably the answer is no! So we’re not doing favors by creating too big of a safety net, nor are we doing any favors by hammering businesses who are successful.

Watch it:

The sad truth is that the nation has to create millions of jobs just to get back to the employment level from before the recession. There were still 7 million fewer jobs in April 2011 than in December 2007, and 43 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for six months or more. As CAP chief economist Heather Boushey noted, “there is a large backlog of workers waiting in the unemployment queue as well as millions who have given up searching, but still want to work.”

As to Santorum’s particular argument — that unemployment benefits discourage people from looking for other work — research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve has found that workers who qualify for unemployment benefits stay unemployed just 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits. Republican lawmakers in several states, though, have taken Santorum’s advice to the extreme, cutting benefits to the bone.

As I’ve been documenting, Republicans in both the House and Senate have been refusing to reauthorize an expired trade assistance program until after the Obama administration moves several pending free trade agreements forward. The administration, in turn, said that it won’t move the FTAs until trade assistance is reauthorized.

One of the loudest voices against renewing the trade assistance program — which helped more than 100,000 workers last year cope with job loss that was a result of international trade — has been Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). “[Tying trade agreements] to unrelated spending is hugely disappointing to American workers, farmers, and job creators, who are losing out to foreign competitors with every passing day. It makes no sense to shut the door on increasing U.S. exports by over $10 billion in order to fund a costly program,” Hatch said earlier this month.

But Hatch now has another justification for allowing workers hurt by trade to fend for themselves. According to Hatch, the country simply can’t afford to help them:

“One of the reasons I don’t think this will pass, is they want $7.2 billion at a time when this country is basically broke,” Hatch said. “Why hold up three agreements that are beneficial to the American worker?”

To push for more free trade deals while refusing to authorize more trade assistance to help the inevitable victims of such trade is bad enough. But to use the canard of “we’re broke” to justify it is even worse.

After all, the country is not broke. As the Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden and Michael Ettlinger note, “The notion that the United States is ‘broke’ is a popular talking point for conservative lawmakers…But we’re not broke. Not at all. If we were, it would mean that we were out of money, unable to pay our bills, or meet our financial obligations. We are none of those things.” Bloomberg’s David Lynch added that the notion the U.S. is broke “is a widely shared view with just one flaw: It’s wrong.”

Hatch and the rest of the Republicans standing against reauthorizing trade assistance refuse to admit that free trade has a downside, and that the government has a responsibility to help those most affected. As Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), “they continue to want to do free trade on the cheap.”

Across the country, the House Republican budget plan — designed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — has faced the ire of Main Street Americans, who are outraged that it effectively ends Medicare. But the plan also includes steep cuts to discretionary spending that would gut services and investments upon which Main Street depends.

For instance, the budget dramatically cuts back Pell Grants to college students and guts funding for food stamps. Ryan actually found 2/3 of his cuts in programs benefiting low-income Americans.

But at the same time, the budget would lower the top marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans to a 25 percent, returning the tax rate on the richest to pre-New Deal levels. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) demonstrates this with the following graph:

While the House Republican budget passed the House of Representatives with the votes of all but four Republicans, it failed to pass in the Senate. But it did receive 40 votes, including the votes of all but four members of the Senate Republican caucus — with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) actually voting against it because it wasn’t conservative enough.

Yet this position is radically out of step with Americans. A New York Times/CBS News poll released last month found that 72 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on Americans who earn more than $250,000 a year — with even 55 percent of self-identified Republicans supporting such a measure. By taking the position that taxes should be dramatically cut on the richest Americans, Republicans aren’t only out of touch with the country as a whole, they aren’t even representative of their own party’s self-proclaimed members.

Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) has been pushing to implement what he calls “tax reform” in the Sunflower State — with the main thrust of his effort focused on reducing the Kansas’ income tax:

“I think there’s a combination of things that need to be looked at, but to me the tax that’s one of the most sensitive for economic growth is the state income tax,” Brownback said after an event in Lecompton. “To look at the total picture is what we want to do, with an eye toward getting the state income tax down.”

But cutting the state income tax would make Kansas’ already regressive tax system significantly worse. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy noted, Kansas’ tax system already requires the poorest 20 percent of residents to pay nearly 10 percent of their income in taxes, while the richest one percent of residents pay less than six percent.

In fact, the only tax in the state that requires the rich to pay more than the poor is the income tax, the one that Brownback is intently focused on lowering. As Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out, the effort Brownback has in mind will “reduce the equity and sustainability of Kansas’s tax system.”

Brownback is moving this plan forward even though Kansas’ state Senate isn’t very interested in going along. After all, the Kansas state House already passed a bill that would have eliminated the state’s income tax and cut the corporate tax rate in half, but that was too much for the Senate, as the cost of the tax cuts was $739.4 million over two years. That revenue would have been foregone at the same time that Kansas is cutting its public school funding by nearly six percent.

But Brownback is not giving up, saying that he wants a plan for an income tax cut in place by the end of the year. “That would be great if the governor would facilitate that,” said House Speaker Mike O’Neal (R). However, the state senate is still very much on the fence, with Senate President Steve Morris (R) saying, “I don’t think that we’re at that point…It was not exactly well received.”

Back in February, House Republicans allowed an expansion of federal trade assistance to expire after new Tea Party members threw a fit about renewing spending for a program meant to aid workers who lose their jobs due to international trade. Workers who qualified under that particular expansion, which was funded by the 2009 Recovery Act, made up more than half of the 280,000 workers who benefited from trade assistance last year.

Republicans in the Senate then blocked consideration of the program’s renewal, saying they refused to move on it until several pending free trade agreements were approved. But at the same time that they have left the program to languish and die, Republicans have been making passionate defenses of it on behalf of their constituents, as the Hill found:

Several Republican lawmakers have sought help from a now-expired trade aid program that many in their party have bristled at reauthorizing. In letters and faxes sent to the Labor Department obtained by The Hill under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 11 Republicans in the House and Senate forwarded constituents’ pleas or outright supported their petitions for aid under the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program. [...]

Many congressional aides dismissed the letters as constituent casework and not representative of where their lawmakers stand on renewing TAA. Nonetheless, several members made a forceful case for petitions to the trade aid program.

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI), for instance, asked the Labor Department to approve a constituent’s request for benefits because, “until lawmakers are able to solve the trade problems to level the playing field … it is incumbent upon us to provide assistance for the families who suffer as a result [of] these practices and conditions.”

But when asked for comment, Duffy’s spokesman parroted the Republican line regarding moving the trade agreements forward. Others who sent letters to the Labor Department looking to aid constituents in obtaining benefits include House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Regardless of the merits of the trade deals in question, trade assistance should be reauthorized. Inevitably, more free trade produces both winners and losers, and trade assistance helps those who wind up with the short straw. And as these letters make clear, several Republicans feel the same way, even as their party holds trade assistance benefits hostage.

Welcome to ThinkProgress Economy’s morning link roundup. This is what we’re reading. Have you seen any interesting news? Let us know in the comments section.

– The House of Representatives is expected to reject an increase in the nation’s debt ceiling today, “setting the stage for a long summer of heated negotiations.”

– Democrats hitch a ride on the auto industry’s rebound.

– The U.S. homeownership rate “is now back to the level of 1998, and some housing experts say it could decline to the level of the 1980s or even earlier.”

– Bank of America forecloses on one of its own branches.

– Former Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) joins Goldman Sachs as an international adviser.

– Speaking of Goldman, the mega-bank made a very expensive typo.

– “Two former admissions recruiters at the University of Phoenix have filed a federal whistle-blower lawsuit that accuses the giant for-profit university of continuing to violate a ban on paying recruiters based on the number of students they enroll,” the Chronicle of Higher Ed reports.

Welcome to ThinkProgress Economy, a new ThinkProgress blog focused on reporting and analyzing the latest economic policy news. Thanks for coming by!

Though it was just a few years ago, the 2008 economic crisis has already largely disappeared from the daily political discourse. But its effects are still being felt all across the country, as evidenced by an unacceptably high unemployment rate, continued foreclosures, and economic growth that too slow to get the country out of the jobs hole in which it finds itself. Corporate profits have rebounded, but Main Street’s pain is still all-too-real.

Even with those miserable indicators, conservatives in Congress are pushing their same old economic prescriptions: tax cuts for the country’s wealthiest paired with steep cuts to programs upon which working Americans depend. Republican governors across the nation have used battered state budgets as an excuse to launch an assault on the rights of working people, while an emboldened House Majority is aiming to slow down new rules aimed at reining in the titans of Wall Street.

There are, of course, better solutions. ThinkProgress Economy will be covering everything from tax and budget negotiations on Capitol Hill to the latest instance of corporate malfeasance. We will be keeping an eye on housing policy, the labor movement, the implementation of financial reform, and much more, as we work towards building a sustainable, progressive economy based on broadly shared prosperity

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