Last week, 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty revealed that he is a true believer in voodoo supply-side economics, saying on Fox News, “Keep in mind, whether it be the Bush tax cuts, the Reagan tax cuts, or other tax cuts, they always produce an increase in revenue. There’s no dispute about that.”

This belief in the “tax fairy” — that revenues always increase after tax cuts, all evidence to the contrary — is pervasive among conservatives. Today, 2012 GOP candidate Herman Cain appeared on Fox News and showed that he is also a believer in the supply-side myth, claiming that “the American people have been lied to” when told that tax cuts cost something:

Unfortunately, the American people have been lied to about tax rates costing money. If you look at the decade of the ’60s, when JFK was able to get some dramatic cuts, tax revenues increased over 50 percent. When Reagan did it in the decade of the ’80s, tax revenues increased over 50 percent.

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There’s definitely some lying going on here, but it’s all coming from Cain. As this graph shows, the 1981 Reagan tax cuts and the 2001/2003 Bush tax cuts were both followed by drops in revenue:

In fact, revenues did not increase over 50 percent during Reagan’s term; they increased by less than fifteen percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. But more importantly, revenue dropped after Reagan’s tax cut, and went back up after Reagan raised taxes in the face of an ugly deficit. Revenues also fell for two years following the Kennedy tax cut (enacted after his death).

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote, “The revenue track under Reagan looks a lot like the track under Bush: a drop in revenues, then a resumption of growth, but no return to the previous trend. This is exactly what you would expect to see if supply-side economics were just plain wrong: revenues are permanently reduced relative to what they would otherwise have been.”

Last week, Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) — the usually ultra-conservative governor who signed Arizona’s controversial immigration law — called a special session of the state Legislature in order to extend unemployment benefits that were about to expire. “Extending benefits for the unemployed is the right thing to do both for our local economy and for Arizona families,” Brewer said. “With the state unemployment rate still at 9.3 percent –- and even higher in many rural areas — we can’t pretend there aren’t thousands of our fellow citizens who remain jobless and in need of assistance.”

This welcome move, however, ran into a wall of opposition from Brewer’s own party. After failing to vote to extend benefits on Friday night, the state legislature met again on Monday, but adjourned without extending benefits. Their justification — in addition to repeating the false Republican claim that benefits encourage people not to look for work — was that they wanted extended benefits to be paired with corporate tax cuts:

House Speaker Andy Tobin, R-Paulden, said any aid for the long-term unemployed should be paired with policies that would stimulate job growth. In the Senate, President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said he and many of his fellow Republicans want tax cuts scheduled to begin in 2013 to take effect now. “We want to see immediate relief for businesses,” he said. “We need jobs now.”

“Eventually we have to quit paying unemployment benefits,” said Republican state Sen. Ron Gould. “And when does it stop being unemployment benefits and begin just being cash assistance?” For the record, Arizona’s unemployment benefits are the second lowest in the nation.

Due to the inaction on the part of Arizona Republicans, 15,000 Arizonans will see their benefits disappear at the end of the week. Another 30,000 will lose their benefits in the next few months.

All of this comes at a time when Arizona’s unemployment rate is 9.3 percent. As we’ve documented, unemployment benefits are key to combating poverty and significantly help to boost the economy at the same time.

“I’m disappointed the Legislature was unable to muster the support needed to extend federal assistance for jobless Arizonans,” Brewer said after legislators adjourned. “I remain concerned and deeply saddened for those families whose unemployment assistance will shortly expire, especially in this uncertain job market.”

Today, the House is debating the Republican’s 2012 Agriculture Appropriations Bill, which, as we’ve been documenting, slashes funding for food assistance, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from accessing aid. In addition to lopping more than $800 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the GOP’s bill would cut $38 million from the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSIP), as well as $63 million from the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAB).

The CSFP provides food assistance to 600,000 low-income families every month, 96 percent of whom are seniors, while the TEFAP “provides our nation’s emergency food bank network with food commodities and storage and distribution support.” We previously noted that the cuts to WIC are roughly equivalent to the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires alone for just one week.

As it turns out, the cuts to CSIP and TEFAB, according to Half in Ten’s Melissa Boteach, are equivalent to the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires alone for just one day:

Adding insult to injury, at the same time that they’re slashing food assistance to ribbons, House Republicans plan to increase defense spending by $17 billion.

Today, the Republican-controlled House will begin another onslaught on programs designed to help low-income and middle class families. The GOP quite literally wants to take food from the mouths of children, cutting $47 billion — or 10 percent — from domestic programs, to pay for more defense spending. In negotiations to reach a debt ceiling compromise, Republicans have declared defense cuts “off the table,” even though Pentagon spending is notoriously bloated and Secretary of Defense Gates and other top generals have admitted spending should be curtailed:

But the GOP-dominated chamber will soon resume its budget-slashing ways as it kicks off debate Tuesday on a food and farm spending bill that cuts aid for low-income pregnant women and their children and slashes a key overseas food aid program by about one-third below this year’s funding.

At the same time, the Appropriations Committee is set to approve a $649 billion measure that slightly boosts the Pentagon’s operating budget [...]

Once money is added for programs like defense, veterans and homeland security, spending on domestic programs like food aid for the poor, education, health care and housing subsidies falls to levels where lawmakers are going to find it difficult. After a $17 billion increase for the Pentagon is factored in, domestic agencies and foreign aid programs would absorb cuts of $47 billion that would translate into cuts averaging about 10 percent.

Essential programs on the chopping block include the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and Commodity Supplemental Food programs, which both help low-income people get nutritional food. Hundreds of thousands of people will be cut from the programs if House Republicans get their way. WIC “provides healthy foods like milk, eggs and infant formula to about 9 million poor mothers and pregnant women and their children,” and would absorb a $868 million cut under the GOP bill, which falls $1.3 billion short of what’s needed to adequately fund the program with food prices on the rise.

The GOP measure also calls for cuts to food safety programs, a childhood obesity initiative backed by First Lady Michele Obama, and food aid for senior citizens:

The bill also cuts a program that delivers food to low-income senior citizens 23 percent below current levels. The popular Food for Peace program, which uses taxpayer dollars to buy U.S. commodities and ships them to deprived areas in Africa and elsewhere across the globe, would absorb a $457 million cut of almost one-third. The White House says that would translate into 1.1 million fewer people getting U.S. food aid.

Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) spoke out against the GOP’s callousness, saying, “Tightening our belts is one thing. But people who depend on supplemental food programs, like WIC, or food stamps, or school lunches, have belts that are already cinched.”

Yesterday, the White House blasted the proposed deep cuts to food programs, saying it would leave children and mothers hungry, but stopped short of threatening a veto.

During CBS’ GOP town hall on the economy, which aired this morning, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) claimed that only $46 billion of the roughly $800 billion Recovery Act meaningfully stimulated the economy:

COBURN: First of all, every dollar the federal government spends doesn’t get the same bang for the buck in the economy. [...] So if we’re going to spend money as the federal government we ought to spending it where we get an economic multiplier of two or three dollars. The problem with the stimulus bill, there was only $46 billion out of almost $900 billion that actually had any productive change in terms of economic multiplier.

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While Coburn didn’t specify what that $46 billion was spent on, it was likely a reference to $46 billion in transportation spending inserted by the Senate. Either way,it’s clear what he was not referring to — tax cuts. At the demands of conservative lawmakers, $288 billion in tax cuts and benefits were included in the Recovery Act. These tax breaks accounted for over a third of the entire package, but apparently Coburn didn’t see them as very stimulative, as there’s no way he was referring to the tax cuts, which were six times larger than his $46 billion figure.

But Coburn is absolutely right. At the the time the Recovery Act was being debated, many economists warned against devoting too much of the package to tax cuts because their stimulative effect is far smaller than that of federal spending. For every dollar the government spends on tax cuts (except for payroll tax cuts, which were included in the Recovery Act), it generates less than one dollar in economic growth. But for every dollar in government spending on things like highway construction, up to $2 dollars or more is created in economic growth.

Coburn’s critique of the stimulus is surprising, as it sounds more like that of liberal economist Paul Krugman than one of the Senate’s most conservative members. But his assertion that tax cuts don’t stimulate the economy is even more startling, consider that the GOP’s entire economic plan relies on that assumption. Coburn is a devout follower, if not a high priet, in this conservative tax cutting “theology,” but perhaps the cuts in the Recovery Act don’t count since they went to working families and small businesses, instead of the wealthy and corporations.

Last night, seven of the Republican 2012 presidential hopefuls participated in a debate in New Hampshire, and as the Wall Street Journal noted, the candidates used the occasion to “[press] for the dismantling of government regulations drawn up over 40 years.” Indeed, the candidates unveiled a deregulatory zeal, proposing to repeal everything from environmental and labor protections to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and regulations included in the Affordable Care Act. Here are some highlights:

NEWT GINGRICH: The Congress this year, this week, ought to repeal the Dodd-Frank bill, they ought to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley bill.

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-MN): What we need to do is pass the mother of all repeal bills…and I would begin with the EPA, because there is no other agency like the EPA. It should really be called the job-killing organization of America.

RICK SANTORUM: This president has put a stop sign against oil drilling, against any kind of exploration offshore or in Alaska and that is depressing. We need to drill.

GINGRICH: And one of the things Congress should do immediately is defund the National Labor Relations Board.

HERMAN CAIN: If the federal government continues to do the kind of things that this administration is trying to do through the backdoor, through the National Labor Relations Board, that’s killing our free-market system.

Watch a compilation:

Despite a financial crisis caused in large part by deregulation, climate change wreaking havoc on the country, and plummeting unionization coupled with plummeting incomes, the GOP still seems to believe that the government has no role in setting rules of the road or enforcing any sort of standard to guard against corporate greed or environmental devastation. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) even seemed to imply that the government should privatize disaster relief, responding to a question about FEMA by saying, “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”

But not every statement uttered by the candidates was anti-regulation. Cain replied to a question about whether the government has a role in food safety by saying, “The federal government should be doing food safety, yes.”