In another example of the misplaced priorities that are showing up in budget negotiations across the nation, New Hampshire House and Senate negotiators agreed to a budget Thursday that cuts cigarette taxes while raising state college tuition fees and laying off state employees:

“Republicans in the House said the tax cut to $1.68 per pack will spur business at stores along the state’s borders. Critics said it will cost the state $12 million a year in revenue, and that tobacco companies will pump up prices by a dime to negate the break meant for smokers.”

Senate negotiators initially opposed the cigarette tax cut and a bill to lower the cigarette tax rate was voted down in a Senate committee earlier this session. However, House Speaker William O’Brien (R) reportedly “insisted on the tobacco tax cut,” and “leaned on his team to get the measure included in the budget, after negotiators had already agreed to shelve the plan.”

While house negotiators fought to include the tobacco tax cut in the budget, New Hampshire legislators were faced with a $42.5 million budget deficit. Yet “the budget also raises no taxes or fees,” according to Senate Finance Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Morse, R-Salem.

So how did negotiators balance the budget?

“The budget cuts $115 million from charity care aid for hospitals and close to half the state’s support for the university system. (It takes) steps toward privatizing the corrections system, cuts pensions for some, and (results in) higher health care costs for retirees…The plan (also) eliminates nearly 1,100 state government positions. (As a result), more than 200 active workers will get laid off.”

So state negotiators felt it was more important to cut cigarette taxes than help its citizens pay for medical care or education? Those are sad priorities.

– Sean Savett

Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Recently, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (R) proposed a set of huge new tax cuts that would cost more than three times as much as the Bush tax cuts. His plan to reduce the top individual income tax to the lowest rate in post-war history, cut the corporate tax rate by more than half, and completely abolish taxes on capital gains, dividends, and massive estates would mainly benefit the extremely wealthy. In fact, these tax changes would be even more skewed towards the rich than the Bush tax cuts were.

Using analysis from the Tax Policy Center, we put together the accompanying chart showing just how tilted the Pawlenty tax cuts would be. Nearly 40 percent of the entire benefit of Pawlenty’s plan would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans. The next richest 9 percent would enjoy 25 percent of the total benefit. In other words, under the Pawlenty plan, the richest 10 percent of Americans would reap significantly more than the bottom 90 percent combined:

This distribution is even more slanted toward the very top and away from the middle than the Bush tax cuts were. While the Bush tax cuts delivered 27 percent of their total value to the richest 1 percent, Pawlenty’s plan would give them about 40 percent. The middle 60 percent of Americans got about one-third of the total value of the Bush tax cuts, and would get less than one-fourth of the value of Pawlenty’s.

The Bush tax cuts were an utter failure at promoting economic growth, job creation, or shared prosperity. They succeeded only in turning a budget surplus into a huge deficit. You might think that after such a colossal failure, conservatives would be forced to admit that tax cuts for the rich aren’t a magic economic elixir. Perhaps they’d even start coming up with some new ideas for boosting the economy. But if Pawlenty’s plan is any indication, conservatives seem intent on repeating the mistakes of the past – only bigger.

Last year, a bi-partisan majority in Congress approved a new food safety law, the first significant upgrade of the nation’s food safety system since 1938. The bill was so non-controversial that it was approved by unanimous consent in the Senate. But House Republicans have been threatening to defund the new law through the appropriations process.

Following through on that threat, House Republicans approved a bill yesterday that would cut $87 million from the Food and Drug Administration, as well as $35 million from the USDA’s food safety and inspection service. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) explained that the House GOP is okay cutting food safety funding because the food industry “self-polices”:

“Do we believe that McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Safeway and Kraft Food and any brand name that you think of, that these people aren’t concerned about food safety?” Kingston said on the House floor. “The food supply in America is very safe because the private sector self-polices, because they have the highest motivation. They don’t want to be sued, they don’t want to go broke. They want their customers to be healthy and happy.”

Just this week, four people, including two children, were sickened by E. Coli in Washington state. But even without some of the high-profile food recalls of last year — including those of salmonella-contaminated eggs and E. coli-contaminated spinach — there is a significant public health justification for upgrading the nation’s food safety system. Currently, one out of six Americans suffers from a foodborne illness every year, with 128,000 of those resulting in hospitalization. Ultimately, 3,000 people die from foodborne illness each year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The new food safety law gives the FDA the ability to force recalls, which it currently is barred from doing, and do more to inspect food coming into the country. At the moment, just one percent of imported food coming to U.S. ports is inspected.

Finally, the bill will actually save taxpayers money in the long-run. “The costs of failing to overhaul the food-safety system would ultimately exceed the legislation’s implementation costs,” said Erik Olson, director of food programs at the Pew Health Group. According to Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project, foodborne illness costs the U.S. $152 billion annually.

As ThinkProgress Economy editor Pat Garofalo noted last week, GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Michelle Bachmann (MN) has assembled a tax plan that would involve a massive corporate tax cut and tax increase on the working poor. Meanwhile, Bachmann would continue to cut taxes on the richest income-earners among us.

But Bachmann’s plan would do even worse things than simply continuing to hand out tax cuts for the rich and corporations. As Dan Baneman of the Tax Policy Center found, Bachmann’s proposal to repeal taxes on capital gains would actually remove 23,000 millionaires from the tax rolls altogether. Meanwhile, the Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman estimates that “this largess would add about $25 billion to the deficit in one year.”

This is particularly shocking in light of the fact that the richest Americans are currently paying the some of the lowest effective tax rates in American history. As this chart from from Wealth for the Common Good shows, the top 400 taxpayers — who have more wealth than half of all Americans combined — are paying lower taxes than they have in a generation, as their tax responsibilities have slowly collapsed since the New Deal era as working families have been asked to pay more and more:

Although it is impossible to surmise their exact intentions, it appears that Bachmann’s campaign is operating under the notion that the rich in America don’t have it good enough and that expanding the deficit is not a problem — as long as you’re continuing to cut taxes for the richest Americans.