One of the many tragic stories of the Great Recession involves Jefferson County, Alabama. As Matt Taibbi explained in an article in Rolling Stone last year, mega bank JP Morgan Chase used a predatory refinancing deal on sewer bonds to reap billions while the local area was financially devastated.

Now, Jefferson County, still reeling from the effects of JP Morgan’s dirty deals, is moving to place nearly 1,000 public workers on administrative leave without pay, as the state Legislature failed last week to come to the municipality’s aid with any fiscal support. In doing so, the county hopes to save “just over $12 million.”

Yet while the public workers of Jefferson County will soon face the prospect of losing their wages and livelihoods through no fault of their own, JP Morgan Chase continues to rake in lavish profits. In 2010, the mega bank posted a profit of a whopping $17.4 billion; during this past quarter, the bank “reported the biggest quarterly profit in its history,” with a 67 percent rise in net income.

ThinkProgress has assembled the following graph laying out the bank’s net income in the first quarter of 2011 — $5.6 billion — next to the paltry $12 million Jefferson County cannot find to pay nearly a thousand of its hard-working public employees:

The savings that Jefferson County hopes to get from placing the thousand employees on unpaid extended leave amount to approximately 0.2 percent of JP Morgan’ Chase’s 2011 first quarter profits. Speaking of placing public employees on extended leave, County Commissioner David Carrington said, “It’s disappointing for citizens in light of the services that will be lost. Of course for [the families of the affected public workers], it’s going to be a lot more personal than that.” Ironically, Rep. Spencher Bachus (R-AL), who currently chairs the House Financial Services Committee, represents Jefferson County in Congress and is trying to slow down the regulation of derivates like those that decimated his constituents’ community.

Governors all across the country have chosen to cut back on K-12 education in response to budgets battered by the Great Recession. But not many went as far as Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA), who not only proposed $1 billion in education cuts, but concentrated his cuts in low-income districts that can least afford it. According to the Education Law Center, Corbett’s proposed cuts in poorer districts are 10 times as deep as those in wealthier districts.

The Pennsylvania state House didn’t go along with Corbett’s plan, passing a budget that included $240 million more for schools than Corbett requested. However, that budget still contains funding inequities, which the Republican-held state Senate is looking at correcting:

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, agreed that some poorer school districts still face disproportionate reductions and said Republican senators will press for more money for them when they meet in the coming days in closed-door talks with their fellow Republicans in the House and governor’s office. “That will be an element of discussion that we have with the House and the governor,” Pileggi said. Pileggi would not say how much more money Senate Republicans will seek.

Pennsylvania’s Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley (R) has called the budget cuts the Corbett administration proposed the “adult thing to do.” “There are no easy answers. Budget cuts never seem to get a round of applause,” he said. In response to Corbett’s proposed cuts, 68 percent of Pennsylvania school districts are considering layoffs while 31 percent are considering eliminating full day kindergarten.

But as I’ve noted before, Pennsylvania doesn’t have to go down this road. Corbett could raise enough revenue to render his entire education reduction unnecessary just by ending a series of special interest tax breaks that Pennsylvania has allowed to fester. Taxing the gas “fracking” industry, for instance, could raise $400 million annually. Pennsylvania is the only state in the nation’s top 15 gas producers that doesn’t levy a tax on this environmentally destructive industry. State Sen. Joe Scarnati (R) has proposed levying a tax on fracking, but would earmark the money for purposes other than education.

With Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) at the helm, the Ohio GOP is successfully kneecapping the legs of Ohio’s middle class. The party’s first six months in power brought collective bargaining rights, the minimum wage, the prevailing wage, and education under the knife in the name of an $8 billion state budget deficit and “shared sacrifice.” Last week, the GOP-led state Senate passed Kasich’s $55.7 billion budget — the chief weapon in Kasich’s arsenal “that whacks schools, local governments, higher education, nursing homes, day care for children of low-income parents, the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, children’s hospitals and work-support programs for the poor.”

However, as the Columbus Dispatch noted, one group is notably exempt from this “shared sacrifice”: the wealthy. State Republicans coupled massive program cuts with an elimination of the estate tax for Ohio’s richest 8 percent of estates, restored $85 million in school funding for mostly affluent districts, and cut the state income tax so that “the largest dollar reductions” will go to “those with an annual income above $200,000.” TP Economy editor Pat Garofalo noted that measures like the estate tax elimination actually shift taxes on to the middle class.

When asked exactly “how the rich are being asked to sacrifice in the budget,” GOP lawmakers struggled to justify their lopsided favoritism. Kasich simply asked, “Why we would want to punish success?” and House Speaker William Batchelder (R) simply didn’t answer. Ohio Senate President Tom Niehaus (R) “searched for an answer” and landed on the idea that though the wealthy are receiving significant tax breaks, “they still suffer along with the rest of us“:

“There are no specific policies targeting the wealthy, but as taxpayers of the state of Ohio, they suffer along with the rest of us,” the New Richmond Republican said. “Some might argue they suffer less, but they still suffer along with the rest of us, whether it’s in opportunities that exist, and inability to expand businesses in a tough economic climate.”

When House Speaker William G. Batchelder, R-Medina, was asked about the burden on the rich, he gave a long reply that didn’t answer the question.

However, Gov. John Kasich did have a response for sparing the rich.

“What we’ve been doing is driving successful people out of Ohio, which has put Ohio in a ditch,” Kasich said. “I don’t know why we would want to punish success in Ohio.”

Athens County Jobs and Family Services director Jack Frech failed to see the “shared sacrifice” Kasich insisted upon to hustle through his budget. Overseeing programs for the poor in an Appalachian county with a 33 percent poverty rate, Frech said Republicans “consider themselves to have done a great job because they haven’t raised taxes and they didn’t cut human services as much as they could have.” “But they’re bad. They’re terrible,” he said. “There are people struggling to survive out there every day.”

Senate Republicans, however, nodded to the budget’s 5 percent pay cut for lawmakers beginning in 2013 as a sign of communal suffering. According to the Dispatch, the lawmakers “called that a gesture of ‘shared sacrifice’ to the people throughout the state affected by budget cuts.”

This week, the House plans to vote on the fiscal year 2012 Agriculture appropriations bill, which provides funding to, among other agencies, the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (the nation’s commodities market watchdog). House Republicans have been crowing that this bill cuts agriculture funding by nearly $3 billion from last year’s level, and is coming in $5 billion below President Obama’s 2012 budget request.

“This legislation reflects hard decisions to cut lower priority programs, reduce spending in programs that can be scaled back, and target funds where they are needed most so that our nation continues on the path to fiscal recovery,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY). Evidently, the House GOP finds nutrition assistance for low-income women and their children to be a “lower priority program,” as the bill cuts the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to such an extent that 325,000 to 475,000 currently eligible women and children will be denied help.

The bill also cuts funding for the CFTC, despite that agency’s new responsibilities to police derivatives and oil speculation under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. However, among the GOP priorities in the bill are ensuring that the National Arboretum maintains its azalea collection and calling for regulators to not apply the Animal Welfare Act on movie sets. Here are some of the bill’s highlights:

– MAINTAINING NATIONAL AZALEA COLLECTION: “The Committee directs the National Arboretum to maintain its National Boxwood Collection and the Glenn Dale Hillside portion of the Azalea Collection. The Committee encourages the National Arboretum to work collaboratively with supporters of the National Arboretum to raise additional funds to ensure the long-term viability of these and other important collections.” [Pg. 13]

– ENSURING THAT THE ANIMAL WELFARE ACT DOESN’T APPLY TO MOVIE SETS: “While the Animal Welfare Act’s intent is to establish minimally acceptable standards in the treatment of animals in research, exhibition, transport, and by dealers, the law was not aimed at regulating companion animals used as extras in the background of movies and television productions. The Committee urges the agency to use the Secretary’s discretionary authority to seek alternative means of meeting its statutory mandate, including the option of issuing exemptions or master exhibitor licenses to these pet owners.” [Pg. 19]

– $4 MILLION INCREASE IN WILDLIFE DAMAGE MANAGEMENT: “Wildlife Damage Management – The Committee provides $72,500,000 for Wildlife Damage Control, approximately $4 million above the President’s request…. Special emphasis should be placed on those areas such as livestock protection…predator control, and other threats to agriculture industries.” [Pg. 20]

Ensuring that an azalea collection is maintained and giving more funding to wildlife damage management are fine goals, but the GOP is trumpeting this bill — which cuts off hundreds of thousands of women and children from nutrition assistance and prevents regulators from reining in oil speculation that is out of control — as a reflection of their priorities. If that is true, it’s a pretty stark statement as to what House Republicans find important.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Jon Huntsman, who until recently was President Obama’s ambassador to China, said that he is very close to officially launching a bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. “We’ve got about all the boxes checked,” he said.

As Travis Waldron laid out, Huntsman has a series of positions that seem like they would put him at odds with the right-wing, including his support for civil unions and his opinion that the 2009 Recovery Act was too small. So Huntsman is banking on his economic record to get him through. During the interview, Huntsman pointed to a tax reform bill he signed in 2007 that moved Utah from a graduated income tax to a flat tax as indicative of his conservative bona-fides:

“I don’t think you grow your way to prosperity through tax increases,” said Huntsman, when asked if Republicans should consider tax increases as part of a solution to the stalemate. “You’ve got to create a framework and environment through tax reform, through regulatory reform” to create businesses and boost job growth, he said…To reinforce his business credentials, Huntsman points to his record in Utah, where he moved the state from a progressive income tax with a top rate of 7 percent to a flat 5 percent tax.

This is exactly the sort of move that might appeal to the conservative base, but as the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy noted, it “sharply reduced” taxes for Utah’s richest residents, making the Utah tax system more regressive. In Utah, the poorest 20 percent of residents pay more than 9 percent of their income in taxes, while the richest one percent of Utahns pay just 4.9 percent.

As Citizens for Tax Justice noted, Utah is a “case study in why states should reject a flat tax,” because the move to a flat tax blew a hole in Utah’s budget. “Although almost all sources of tax revenue are down in the beehive state [for 2009], the number one culprit is the state’s income tax revenues, which have fallen nearly $300 million (to date),” CTJ found.

Huntsman also tried, unsuccessfully, to completely eliminate his state’s corporate income tax, which would have cost the state more than $200 million. However, lawmakers balked at the price tag. So while Huntsman may differ with his party on some issues, on taxes, he is a doctrinaire conservative, looking to keep tax rates on the rich and corporations as low as possible, if not non-existent.

Louisiana, like most states, is struggling with its budget, as the recession continues to take its toll on the state’s coffers. Recent estimates place next year’s budget deficit at a whopping $1.6 billion.

Recognizing the need to raise revenues, the mostly Republican Louisiana Legislature voted earlier this week to renew part of the state’s cigarette tax, which brings in $12 million a year. But Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is expected to veto the legislation this week:

It’s a bad habit that helps bolster the state budget. Smokers in Louisiana pay an extra 36 cents in state taxes every time they buy a pack. But part of that tax is set to expire next year. And while lawmakers voted to renew it, Governor Bobby Jindal is expected to veto the tax extension early this week. “It’s going to be a very tough fight on both sides,” said Clancy DuBos, WWL-TV political analyst and Gambit political columnist.

The segment of the tax that the legislature voted to renew would maintain a tax of 36 cents on every pack of cigarettes bought. If vetoed, the taxes per-pack would fall by four pennies to be 32 cents per pack. WWL-TV covered the debate over the tax. Watch it:

Jindal has until tomorrow to decide to sign or veto the cigarette tax legislation. “I think it’s a mistake to lower the tax on cigarettes,” says House Speaker Jim Tucker (R). “Louisiana is accused of being backwards all the time. This vote (to eliminate the tax) would easily support that position.” Interestingly, while Jindal wants to lower taxes on cigarettes, he has endorsed raising tuition and fees on students.