Congressional Republicans — during both last year’s debate over the pending expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the current negotiations regarding raising the nation’s debt ceiling — refused to consider tax increases on even the very richest Americans. In fact, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) blew up debt ceiling negotiations last week due to his insistence that those making more than $500,000 annually be shielded from any tax increase.

The GOP justification for its position — even with income inequality at its worst level since the 1920s — is that raising taxes on the rich will destroy jobs. “What some are suggesting is that we take this money from people who would invest in our economy and create jobs and give it to the government. The fact is you can’t tax the very people that we expect to invest in the economy and create jobs,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH).

However, history doesn’t back up the GOP’s claim. In fact, as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden found, “in the past 60 years, job growth has actually been greater in years when the top income tax rate was much higher than it is now”:

For instance, in years when the top marginal rate was more than 90 percent, the average annual growth in total payroll employment was 2 percent. In years when the top marginal rate was 35 percent or less — which it is now — employment grew by an average of just 0.4 percent.

And there’s no cherry-picking here. Pick any threshold. When the marginal tax rate was 50 percent or above, annual employment growth averaged 2.3 percent, and when the rate was under 50, growth was half that.

In fact, if you ranked each year since 1950 by overall job growth, the top five years would all boast marginal tax rates at 70 percent or higher. The top 10 years would share marginal tax rates at 50 percent or higher. The two worst years, on the other hand, were 2008 and 2009, when the top marginal tax rate was 35 percent. In the 13 years that the top marginal tax rate has been at its current level or lower, only one year even cracks the top 20 in overall job creation.

Contrary to Republican claims, lower taxes on the rich don’t lead to higher economic growth either.

Several multinational corporations have been waging a lobbying campaign in an attempt to sucker Congress into approving whats known as a tax repatriation holiday. This holiday would allow corporations that have stashed money offshore to bring it back to the U.S. at a dramatically lower rate. (Usually, companies repatriating money pay the statutory 35 percent corporate income tax rate.)

As we documented, several of the companies lobbying for this tax break already pay exceedingly low taxes. One of them — mega-manufacturer Boeing — hasn’t paid any federal income tax in three years. Google, which is also part of the lobbying binge, paid just 2.4 percent in taxes last year thanks to extensive use of offshore tax havens and loopholes. And as Bloomberg noted today, Cisco wants a huge tax break on repatriated earnings despite dodging $7 billion in taxes over the last five years:

Cisco Systems Inc. has cut its income taxes by $7 billion since 2005 by booking roughly half its worldwide profits at a subsidiary at the foot of the Swiss Alps that employs about 100 people.

Now Cisco, the largest maker of networking equipment, wants to save even more — by asking Congress to waive most federal taxes due when multinationals bring such offshore earnings home. Chief Executive Officer John T. Chambers has led the charge for the tax holiday, which would be the second since 2004.

The companies pushing for a repatriation holiday — and the congressional Republicans supporting them, including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — claim the tax break will spur the companies into investing domestically and creating jobs. But Congress tried an identical ploy in 2004, to the exact opposite effect.

The companies that benefited the most wound up cutting jobs, and corporations pushed even more money and investment overseas, in the hopes that another tax holiday would be granted before too long. And 92 percent of the money that the companies brought back went to enriching shareholders and executives, not job creation. Kristen Forbes, who was on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers when the last repatriation holiday was approved, said the holiday “didn’t accomplish the stated goals of bringing jobs and investment to the US.’’ But tax dodging corporations want another one approved anyway, promising that this time things will be different.

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

We’re now just about one month away from the deadline for raising the debt ceiling and the negotiations don’t seem to be going all that well. Congressional Republicans still seem willing to risk all of the really really really dire consequences of hitting that ceiling if they don’t get their way. They are demanding massive spending cuts in return for their votes to raise the limit, and they say they won’t accept even one penny of additional revenue.

Without these spending cuts, they say, the debt will explode to dangerous levels, and that crashing the economy back into a recession is an acceptable risk to take to avoid that outcome. But interestingly, last week the Congressional Budget Office released its official projections of the country’s long-term fiscal situation, and under its baseline assumptions, the nation’s debt is actually very manageable.

It rises from about 70 percent of GDP now to 85 percent by 2036 and 87 percent by 2040. And from there it stabilizes and then actually begins to decline. So why the freak-out over the debt? Because most people don’t believe that the CBO’s baseline assumptions are particularly realistic. The baseline scenario assumes that future budgets will hew to current law — with the Bush tax cuts expiring, for example — and that doesn’t seem likely given the current political situation.

Fortunately, the CBO also calculates what will happen to the national debt if instead of following current law, the federal budget sticks roughly to current policies — extend all the Bush tax cuts, preempt scheduled cuts to Medicare doctors, and refuse to implement the cost savings in the Affordable Care Act. Under that set of assumptions, debt does grow dramatically. By 2036, it would approach 200 percent of GDP. Not good.

But the main reason that the debt spirals up and out of control in that alternative scenario while not doing so in the baseline scenario is revenue. In fact, fully three-quarters of the difference between the debt in the baseline and the debt in the alternative is the result of much lower revenue in the alternative. Higher spending only accounts for one-quarter of the additional debt:

This puts the lie to the frequent Republican refrain that we “have a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” In fact, we have a serious revenue problem. If we continue under current revenue policies, we really will have a debt crisis. On the other hand, if we stick closer to current law revenue levels, we can actually stabilize the debt without having to make damaging cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Of course, the eventual solution to our budget dilemma is going to include both spending restraint and revenue increases. CAP has already described what that might eventually look like. But for now, it’s past time that Republicans put away the false, and misleading, talking point that revenue has nothing to do with our debt troubles.

ThinkProgress filed this report from Story City, IA.

Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain likes to cast himself as the only GOP presidential contender who has not held public office. “Quite frankly, I wear it as a badge of honor that I have not held public office before,” Cain has told reporters. But Cain actually has substantial political experience: one of his most high-profile jobs was a stint as the top lobbyist for the restaurant and fast food industry.

ThinkProgress spoke briefly with Cain, and asked him to talk some about his role waging a pitched battle during the ’90s against a hike in the minimum wage. Cain said he would address the issue during his talk with GOP activists in Story City, Iowa, and spent a few minutes talking about how he once argued with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) over livable wage legislation. After the event, we asked Cain about the current minimum wage:

FANG: Do you think the current minimum wage is too high or even necessary?

CAIN: I don’t think the current minimum wage is necessary because most companies are paying higher than the minimum wage. Now you can’t say everybody’s paying higher than the minimum wage but a lot of companies [inaudible]

Watch it:

As we tried to talk more to Cain, several of his volunteers physically barricaded the door to prevent us from talking to him.

Several Republicans in the last few months have put forth the idea that the U.S. doesn’t actually have to raise the debt ceiling when the nation hits its legal borrowing limit sometime around Aug. 2. “I doubt that it would be disruptive to the economy,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has made remarks along the same lines.

However, other Republicans have admitted that failing to raise the debt ceiling — and thus forcing the U.S. to default on some of its obligations — would spark a crisis, but that the crisis should be welcomed as an opportunity. “By defaulting on the debt, in the short and long term, it could benefit us to go through a period of crisis that forces politicians to make decisions,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA). And during an interview today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said that Americans would actually appreciate the economic consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling:

SCARBOROUGH: But what do you believe though? Do you believe that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, the economy will just keep chugging along normally, or do you believe that it will cause a financial crisis?

PRIEBUS: You know, I don’t know, because we’ve never been there before, Joe. But I do know that, I think –

SCARBOUROUGH: You can make a pretty good guess though? The markets would say ‘yikes’!

PRIEBUS: But the idea that we can’t cover — this is where I have a problem — when you hear people say that we’re going to default on our debts. I mean, we bring in enough revenue in this country to pay our debts, we bring in enough revenue in this country to pay our entitlements, we bring in enough revenue to pay for most non-discretionary spending. It is going to put the clamps on a lot of discretionary functions, it’s going to put the clamps on in Washington, but in some ways, I think that a lot of American voters say ‘well good,’ I hope it does make things uncomfortable.

Watch it:

Failing to raise the debt ceiling in a timely fashion could severely harm economic growth and, if the stalemate went on long enough, could cause a bigger GDP drop than the one that occurred during the Great Recession. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier this month shows that a growing number of Americans now favor raising the debt ceiling, with 46 percent in support and 42 percent opposed (up from 32 percent approval just two months earlier). Credit rating agencies have warned that having the U.S. miss some promised payments even for a few days could negatively impact the nation’s credit worthiness.

Less than three years after receiving $10 billion in bailout money from American taxpayers, Goldman Sachs informed its employees recently that it will fire 1,000 workers in the United States and elsewhere, shifting their jobs to the cheaper Singaporean labor market.

According to Fox Business, Goldman Sachs has quietly informed workers and lawmakers of its plan to outsource 1,000 jobs in an attempt to inoculate itself from the impending blowback:

Goldman is so concerned about the potential for criticism that the firm’s representatives have been alerting staffers of lawmakers in Washington of the hiring spree in recent weeks as a way to mollify any concerns they may have about previously undisclosed plans to add 1,000 jobs to the firm’s Singapore office, according to people in Washington with direct knowledge if the matter. Goldman is concerned about criticism because it is adding those jobs while it is planning what could be a significant retrenchment in its U.S. workforce, these people say.

Goldman Sachs has also worked to protect itself by hiring former Republican Sen. Judd Gregg (NH) as an “international advisor.” It is not unreasonable to assume that Gregg’s 26 years in Washington will help the investment firm’s attempts to placate critics.

The move to shift 1,000 jobs to Singapore is part of an overall effort by Goldman Sachs to cut $1 billion in operating costs over the next year. However, Goldman is firing American workers at a time of record profits for the company, which raked in $2.7 billion in profits in the first three months of 2011 alone.

Goldman’s plan is helped by conservatives in Washington who have prevented Congress from discouraging corporations from outsourcing. Last fall, Senate Republicans voted unanimously against a bill that would have ended tax breaks for companies that shift American jobs overseas.

Many conservatives justify outsourcing by arguing that not only would companies be more profitable by shifting low-skilled work to developing countries, but laid-off American workers would be forced to re-educate themselves for new, high-paying industries. However, this move by Goldman Sachs is particularly troubling for that theory because, according to a source with knowledge of the matter, the 1,000 Singaporean jobs are likely to be “high-paying, skilled positions in sales and investment banking.” Whereas highly educated workers may once have imagined themselves immune from the specter of outsourcing, Goldman Sachs has shown that is not the case.

With today’s news, Goldman joins the ranks of top U.S. corporations like GE, Chevron, Intel, and others who have collectively outsourced over 2.4 million American jobs in the past decade.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) formally kicked off her presidential campaign yesterday, painting herself as a Tea Party candidate who is ready to lead the country back to prosperity (even if her former chief of staff doesn’t think so).

Today, in classic Tea Party form, Bachmann reiterated her long-held belief that a federally mandated minimum wage is a job-killing federal regulation that may need to be abolished.

In 2005, Bachmann told the Minnesota state Senate that abolishing the minimum wage could “wipe out unemployment completely.” When Good Morning America‘s George Stephanopoulos asked her for evidence to back up that claim today, Bachmann struggled to find an answer, initially dodging the question before finally referring to the minimum wage as a regulation that is “inhibiting job growth” and saying it needed to be examined:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me try this one more time. So you’re saying the minimum wage is one of those regulations you’d take a look at? You’d try to eliminate it?

BACHMANN: Well, what I’m saying is I think we need to look at all regulations. Whatever ones are inhibiting job growth, that’s what we need to look at.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And the minimum wage is one of them?

BACHMANN: All regulations, George. I think every department, we have just too much expansion of government, and what we need to do is tamp that down so the American people can keep more of what they make.

Watch it:

Paul Krugman has rebutted conservative arguments about the minimum wage, saying, “In reality, reducing wages would at best do nothing for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary.” As Pat Garofalo found in 2009, almost all of the economic research shows that the minimum wage has little or no effect on unemployment.

Recent statistics show that wages are stagnant and the majority of jobs that are being added are low-wage jobs. But the workers in those jobs making the minimum wage would actually need an increase in the wage to match the buying power of the minimum wage in 1968.

Another recent study in Michigan showed that the current federal minimum wage — a paltry $7.25 per hour — would need to be doubled to cover basic expenses for a single adult worker and more than tripled to cover the same expenses for an adult worker with children.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) — who has been toying with running for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination — continued his media tour today, one again attempting to talk up the Texas economy. During an interview with Fox News’ Glenn Beck, Perry made the ludicrous claim that “government doesn’t create any jobs”:

BECK: Can the government actually create jobs, sir?

PERRY: Actually, what a government can do, it can create an environment where those jobs can be created. Government doesn’t create any jobs. They can actually run jobs away.

Watch it:

Perry himself seems to have a job, and he likely has a slew of aides, secretaries, and other administration officials helping him get through each day. They might be interested to know that, according to their boss, they aren’t actually working.

But it’s not just Perry who claims that government work doesn’t really count as work, and that the government can’t do anything to spur private sector job creation. Plenty of Republicans have tried to make the same claim. As Matt Yglesias responded:

David Petraeus has a job. So does the guy who drove the truck that transported David Petraeus’ uniform to wherever he picked it up. So does the guy who sold that guy his truck’s tires. And so does the guy who served that guy some beer on Friday. And not only do police officers have jobs, but police officers who do their jobs well and make the streets safe create the conditions for economic growth. So do the people who build bridges and the people who man tollbooths.

On a separate note, Perry’s claims about the booming Texas economy have run into a solid dose of reality. As the Austin American-Statesman noted, “while the national unemployment rate is 9.1 percent and the Texas unemployment rate is 8 percent, some 23 states, including New York, have lower unemployment rates.” Between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace in Massachusetts than in Texas, and “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” Perry’s state does, however, lead the nation by having the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs.