President Obama’s call during a press conference yesterday to end a tax breaks for private jet owners has been met with derision and confusion by many the right, with most Republicans lawmakers dismissing it out of hand as just another tax hike. “Republicans weren’t having it,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

On MSNBC this afternoon, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) dismissed ending the tax break as just “code for much broader, large tax increases,” saying that the jet tax break is “not the issue we’re debating here.” Watch it:

Sen. Marco Rubo (R-FL) meanwhile, told the National Review that Obama was suggesting corporate jet owners earn too much money. “[D]on’t go around telling people that the reason you are not doing well is because some rich guy is in a corporate jet or some oil company is making too much money,” he said. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) spokesperson defended the tax break without really addressing the issue on its merits, quipping to reporters, “Interesting that he keeps pointing to corporate planes and oil/gas.”

Conservative media outlets took up the same line, dismissing Obama’s call as an empty “metaphor” and the “latest class warfare catchphrase.” The Wall Street Journal wrote a gleefully condescending blog post yesterday called, “Note To Obama: $250,000-a-Year Earners Can’t Afford Jets,” in which it sought to educate Obama about taxes. The only problem? The author assumed Obama was referring to the Bush cuts — he was not and the esteemed paper was forced to run a correction at the bottom of the story

But not only are Rubio, Crapo and the rest defending a tax loophole for the most fortunate Americans, they’re completely misunderstanding it. As hard as it to believe, the private jet tax break is no “metaphor” or “code” for people making too much money — it is an actual loophole in the tax code that applies to private jets and not commercial ones. The provision, created in 1987, allows corporate jets to be depreciated over a five-year period rather than the seven-year period required for commercial ones. It has been defended and supported by Republicans since.

The more sophisticated conservative defense of special tax breaks private corporate jets, advanced by the Hertiage Foundation, among others, is that it was created by the stimulus package. As ThinkProgress’ Matt Yglesias explained, this myth too is bunk.

While closing the loophole wouldn’t raise enough money to solve the deficit problem by any means, it points to the absurdity of much of the spending in the tax code and would surely be a step in the right direction. The conservative response to ending it, meanwhile, speaks to the priorities of their tax cut “theology” — fewer taxes for the wealthy above all else.

In addition to releasing a radical budget that dismantled Medicare while likely raising taxes on the middle class, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has suggested a radical reworking of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps). Under his plan, which would simply block grant SNAP to state governments, “SNAP would largely lose the ability to respond to rising need, forcing states during economic downturns to cut benefits or create waiting lists for needy families.”

In order to build support for his dismantling of the food safety net, Ryan has been spreading falsehoods regarding SNAP. Case in point, during a question and answer session hosted by the Spolight on Poverty and Opportunity, Ryan claimed that SNAP is “rife with fraud“:

Help us figure out how to reform these programs so they can grow at more sustainable rates and so that they really work. Help us reduce the redundancy and the duplicativeness of programs. Help us figure out how to make sure that these things are actually getting the assistance to the people who really need them.

Look at SNAP for example. You know we get all these reports. We get hearings and GAO and reports about how the SNAP program is rife with fraud, how it’s not getting the assistance to the people who need it, how there’s no incentive to – we’ve got a guy who won a lottery that’s on the program you know. Help us figure out how to reform these programs so that they can work better.

Listen here:

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, SNAP errors are currently at an all-time low, with errors accounting for less than three percent of the program’s cost:

To ensure that benefits are provided only to eligible households and in the proper amounts, SNAP has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program and, in recent years, has achieved its lowest error rates on record. In fiscal year 2009, even as caseloads were rising, states set new record lows for error rates. The net loss due to errors equaled only 2.7 percent of program costs in 2009. There is no evidence that program errors are driving up SNAP spending.

During the recession, SNAP has been critical for reducing poverty and pumping money into local economies. So in order to push his radical revamp of the program, Ryan is simply inventing reasons to attack its current structure, which is actually functioning quite well.

After the longest recession since WWII, many Americans are still struggling while S&P 500 corporations are sitting on $800 billion in cash and making massive profits. Now, economists from Northeastern University have released a study that finds our sluggish economic recovery has almost solely benefited corporations. According to the study:

“Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income. …The absence of any positive share of national income growth due to wages and salaries received by American workers during the current economic recovery is historically unprecedented.”

The New York Times adds, “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available.”

So as average wages fall, and nearly 14 million people remain unemployed, America’s economic recovery has almost entirely benefited corporations. This development adds another chapter to the decline of the middle class, whose incomes are shrinking and wages are stagnating. Last year, top executives’ salaries increased 27 percent, while workers’ salaries increased only 2 percent. At the moment, income inequality in America is the worst it’s been since the 1920s, as the richest 1 percent make nearly 25 percent of the country’s income.

–Sean Savett

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) is evidently going to stand with McConnell on this one. “We have long said that TAA — even this scaled-back version — should be dealt with separately from the trade agreements, and that is how we expect to proceed,” a spokesman for Boehner said. And according to Reuters, at least four of the 11 Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee will vote against the South Korea Free Trade Agreement if it includes aid for displaced workers:

At least four of the 11 Republicans on the panel say they will vote against the South Korea deal if the White House sticks to a plan to include in the implementing legislation renewal of a retraining program for U.S. workers who lose their job because of foreign competition.

Those opponents include the panel’s top Republican, Senator Orrin Hatch, who is up for re-election next year and is under pressure from the Tea Party conservative movement to take a tough line on spending. Aides said Republican Senators Jon Kyl, John Thune and Tom Coburn would vote against the South Korea pact if the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, or TAA, is included in the bill, while other Republicans on the panel are considering that.

Leaving aside the merits of these particular trade deals, any expansion of trade is going to produce winners and losers. The GOP, however, only wants to acknowledge the former, while ignoring the latter, pushing through trade deals while neglecting those who inevitably wind up on the short end of the stick.

Today, nearly three-quarters of a million teachers, immigration officials, court workers, and other unionized civil servants in the United Kingdom are on a 24 hour strike. These workers are protesting harsh austerity policies by the right-wing British government that will ask poor and middle class Britons to sacrifice in the form of pension costs and pay cuts, but leave the rich largely untouched. Al Jazeera English interviewed some of the strikers and filed a video report about the action. Watch it:

An individual may not accept or hold a position in the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia if he —
(1) advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government;
(2) is a member of an organization that he knows advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government;
(3) participates in a strike, or asserts the right to strike, against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia; or
(4) is a member of an organization of employees of the Government of the United States or of individuals employed by the government of the District of Columbia that he knows asserts the right to strike against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia.

Additionally, in many parts of the United States, public employees who work for municipalities or states are also prohibited from striking. In states as diverse as Washington, New York, and Wisconsin there is a broad framework of laws that prohibits most strikes by most public employees.

Some British conservatives, fearing the rights that public employee unions have in their country, are already calling for changing the United Kingdom’s strike laws to make it more difficult for workers to exercise their power. It seems they would prefer their workers to be as relatively powerless as their American counterparts.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner

“We’re not going to default even if there is no debt-ceiling increase,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) said in an interview. “The fact is we’ve got to cut spending and we’ve got to cut it now.”

Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio), a former White House budget director, said that in any given year there’s enough federal revenue to cover the government’s debt service payments. “This is not so much a question of default as whether we’re going to use this opportunity to get our fiscal house in order,” Mr. Portman said.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.), who wrote a separate letter to the Obama administration, said the administration was acting irresponsibly by not developing a contingency plan in case Congress fails to raise the limit. The first-term senator said that 2012 revenues would be more than enough to cover interest on the debt, as well as Social Security, and essential defense, security, health and safety spending. “It doesn’t have to be a crisis if we plan for it,” Mr. Johnson said Wednesday on Fox News.

As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner explained in a letter yesterday to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) — who is making the same argument regarding the debt ceiling — “this ‘prioritization’ proposal advocates a radical and deeply irresponsible departure from the commitment by Presidents of both parties, throughout American history, to honor all of the commitments our nation has made.” Indeed, forcing the Treasury to prioritize payments means that someone is getting stiffed, and thus U.S. creditworthiness would be undermined. While Treasury might be able to get away with only skipping payments to government contractors and vendors initially, eventually important programs will be on the chopping block.

In fact, if the borrowing limit is actually hit on August 2, Social Security could be the first casualty, as $23 billion in Social Security payments are due on August 3, while the government would collect only $12 billion in revenue that day, as a report released yesterday by the Bipartisan Policy Center found. As the BPC put it, if the debt limit isn’t increased, “handling all payments for important and popular programs (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, active duty pay) will quickly become impossible.”

Even House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted that short-term failure to raise the debt ceiling would mean cuts to “vital programs.” The GOP, however, is sticking its fingers in its collective ears, believing that having the U.S. miss payments to people whom it has promised to pay will have no effect on its creditworthiness or the wider economy.