President Obama met with House Republicans today at the White House to discuss ways to move forward on negotiations regarding the nation’s debt ceiling and the budget. During the discussion, talk evidently turned to taxes, and when Obama noted that taxes today are lower than they were under President Reagan, the GOP, according to The Hill, “engaged in a lot of ‘eye-rolling’“:

Republicans attending a White House meeting on Wednesday didn’t take kindly to President Obama telling them tax rates were higher during the Reagan administration. GOP members engaged in a lot of “eye-rolling,” according to a member who was on hand to hear Obama, who invited House Republicans to the White House for discussions on the debt ceiling. [...]

“[The President] made a comment like the tax rate is the lightest, even more than (under former President) Reagan,” Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) told The Hill following the meeting. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joked that during the meeting, “We learned we had the lowest tax rates in history … lower than Reagan!”

That House Republicans find this preposterous is symptomatic of the hold Reagan mythology has over them. After all, for seven of Reagan’s eight years in office, the top tax rate was higher than the current 35 percent. In six of those years, it was 50 percent or more. And every year that Regan was in office, the bottom tax bracket was higher than the current ten percent.

For a family of four, the “average income tax rate under Reagan in 1983 was 11.06 percent. Under Clinton in 1992, it was 9.18 percent. And under Obama in 2010, it was 4.68 percent.” During Reagan’s time, income tax revenue ranged from 7.8 to 9.4 percent of GDP. Last year, it was 6.2 percent and is not projected to climb back to 9 percent until 2016. In fact, in 2009, Americans paid their lowest taxes in 60 years.

Republicans are very fond of saying that the U.S. has “a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” But the truth is that revenue has plunged due to the recession and to continued misguided tax cuts, and revenue needs to be raised to eventually bring the budget into balance. And Reagan knew that taxes were an important part of the budget equation. After all, he “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years.

Ohio is one of 17 states that require workers to be paid above the minimum wage mandated by federal law. But Ohio Senate Republicans are working to limit the number of people eligible to earn that wage, attaching an amendment to an omnibus budget bill that would circumvent the law and prevent an untold number of workers from collecting the state-mandated minimum wage.

In 2006, Ohio voters approved an amendment to the state constitution setting the state’s minimum wage at $6.85 an hour with a built-in increase attached to inflation each year. The current minimum wage in Ohio increased to $7.40 an hour this year, $0.15 higher than the $7.25 an hour required by federal law.

The amendment by state Senate Republicans would reduce the number of workers eligible for the state minimum wage, making only those covered by the looser federal law eligible to earn Ohio’s minimum wage:

(Image courtesy of Plunderbund)

The Legislative Service Commission, which evaluates legislation in Ohio, said the amendment “may result in fewer individuals subject to the minimum wage.”

As Plunderbund notes, Ohio Republicans, led by Gov. John Kasich (R), are already facing the remarkable unpopularity of Senate Bill 5, which rolls back collective bargaining rights for public employees, including police officers and firefighters. Now they have chosen to further their attacks on workers by targeting a law that was approved by voters in a referendum just five years ago.

But the attack on minimum wage laws is hardly unique to Ohio.

Since it became law, Republican lawmakers have waged various attacks on federal minimum wage legislation, falsely attacking it as a burden on small businesses and saying it stunts job creation, despite a lack of evidence on back up those claims. One of the Senate’s biggest critics of the minimum wage was former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), who is currently contemplating a run for president. And in 2007, Senate Republicans demanded that any increase in the minimum wage be accompanied by a tax cut for small businesses. They were successful, and increased the minimum wage to its current amount of $7.25 by offsetting the increase with $4.8 billion in small business tax breaks

Other conservatives have included the minimum wage among the many federal programs they view as unconstitutional overreaches into state’s rights, similar to federal child labor laws and federal safety standards.

Meanwhile, a recent study from Michigan showed that a worker making the minimum wage does not earn enough each week to support him or herself. According to the report, in Michigan, where the minimum wage is also $7.40, a single worker with no children would need to make more than $12 an hour to cover basic food, shelter, clothing, and transportation costs. A single mother with two children, meanwhile, would need to make $24.49 an hour — more than three times the minimum wage — to support herself and her family.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, led by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), has been holding a series of hearings looking at the for-profit college industry. As ThinkProgress has been documenting, these subprime schools collect millions in taxpayer subsidies while leaving their students crippled with debt and with bleak job prospects. The schools pay their CEOs millions, yet count on the government for up to 90 percent of their revenue. (For more background on this issue, see our primer, “For-profits, not students.”)

Harkin has used his chairmanship of the HELP committee to uncover some very unsavory practices at subprime schools, including documents describing the “pain funnel” — a series of questions used by for-profit recruiters to make prospective students feel so bad about themselves that they sign up for classes. This particular hearing will focus on the debt level of students who graduate from for-profit schools, but only Democrats will be listening:

Republican members of the Senate committee won’t attend the hearing because it will examine only for-profit colleges, rather than public and nonprofit institutions, according to a letter that Wyoming Senator Michael Enzi, the senior Republican on the education committee, sent to Harkin today.

“We agree that the rising cost of higher education, student debt and student outcomes are issues that warrant the attention of Congress,” Enzi said in the letter. “However, these problems exist throughout all sectors of higher education.”

Student debt at all levels of higher education is undoubtedly a concern. After all, the average student debt for a bachelor’s degree is now about $22,900, and the class of 2011 will be the most indebted ever.

But these numbers are even worse for students who attend for-profit colleges. One-quarter of students at for-profit colleges borrow more than $40,000, compared with just five percent of public college graduates. The median debt of for-profit graduates — $31,190 — is nearly four times as high as the median public school student’s debt and more than twice as high as the average debt of a private college attendee.

This is an issue worth examining, but the Senate GOP is simply going to pull a no-show. The HELP committe’s ranking member, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), received more than $40,000 in donations from subprime schools (to both his campaign and his leadership PAC) during the last election cycle.

All around the country, conservative lawmakers continue to cut services and investments in Main Street America, claiming that these steps are necessary to close budget deficits. At the same time, major corporations and wealthy individuals continue to benefit from special tax breaks and loopholes that allow them to get away with paying little to nothing in taxes.

Today, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) released a new report chronicling the tax rates of some of the nation’s major corporations. CTJ looked at a sample of a dozen major corporations and analyzed both their profits and their effective federal corporate income tax rates between 2008 and 2010.

CTJ found that from 2008 to 2010, these major corporations earned $173 billion in profits put together. Yet these major corporations paid an average federal corporate income tax rate during this period of -1.5 percent, meaning they actually got money back from the Treasury in the form of tax benefits. ThinkProgress has assembled the average tax rates of these corporations over this period in the following graph:

Americans would certainly find it unfair that companies raking in billions in profits are getting away with paying so little in taxes or in some cases actually getting a net tax benefit. As ThinkProgress economy editor Pat Garofalo writes, as of yet, both major parties have not been able to put together a vision of corporate tax reform that would actually raise net revenues to really tackle deficits without unduly harming Main Street. He concludes that “failing to raise additional corporate tax revenue will simply shift more of the deficit reduction burden onto a middle-class already battered by the Great Recession.”

For months, Republicans have been trying to have it both ways on the debt ceiling, with some members saying that having the U.S. default on its obligations would not be a bad thing, while the leadership has admitted that failure to raise the debt ceiling would have serious adverse consequences. But since the debt limit was officially reached earlier this month — forcing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner into measures that can delay default until about August 2 — the GOP has moved towards more irresponsible debt ceiling rhetoric and actions.

Last night, the GOP brought a debt limit bill to the floor that was explicitly designed to fail, which was defeated overwhelmingly as Democrats refused to play along and vote for a bill that would never pass. Today, Ryan appeared on Fox News and said that unless Democrats accede to Republican demands, the debt ceiling will not be raised at all. “It won’t happen. I’m serious about this,” he said.

[Raising the debt ceiling] will happen if we get the kind of spending cuts we need to get the situation under control. It won’t happen, I’m serious about this, it won’t happen if we don’t cut spending.

Watch it:

But just a few months ago, Ryan admitted that failing to raise the debt ceiling was “unworkable.” “Yes, you can’t not raise the debt ceiling. Default is the unworkable solution, or the alternative, I guess I’d say — the unworkable alternative,” he said during an appearance at the National Press Club.

Failing to raise the debt ceiling could spark severe economic consequences, including pushing the U.S. back into recession (as Bank of America analysts predicted) or “reignit[ing] the world financial crisis,” in the words of Princeton Professor Alan Blinder. It would threaten the fragile housing market and potentially wipe out much (if not all) of the estimated 2011 growth. But Republicans continue to play chicken, holding the U.S. economy hostage for their conservative agenda.

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.

– A subprime dealer moves from homes to cars: “Ally, once known as GMAC Financial Services, is getting ready to go public this year, and is making the case that subprime loans for used car buyers are not about to produce the same results that they did in the housing market a few years ago.”

– “The pace of planned job cuts edged higher in May, with government sector layoff announcements dominating the numbers;” government jobs accounted for 40 percent of announced layoffs during the month.

– “Around one percent of households have 39 percent of the globe’s wealth,” according to a study by The Boston Consulting Group.

– Banks attempting to foreclose on homes are getting rebuffed by judges, “as some delinquent borrowers are successfully arguing that their mortgage companies can’t prove they own the loans and therefore don’t have the right to foreclose.”

– The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson looks at the 30-year collapse of American economic optimism.