Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Republican lawmakers completely failed to keep their promise not to “kick the can” down the road when it came to solving the largest budget shortfall in the state’s history. That’s according to a new Associated Press report, which concludes that Perry and the GOP legislature largely balanced the state’s budget through flimsy accounting gimmicks that do nothing to secure Texas’ financial footing.

The self-professed fiscal conservatives resorted to tactics like delaying a $2.3 billion payment to schools by one day to technically push it into the next fiscal year and keep it off the books of this budget. They also “found” $800 million by ordering the state’s accountants to forecast a faster increase in land values to show more property tax income:

Gov. Rick Perry signed a budget that was balanced only through accounting maneuvers, rewriting school funding laws, ignoring a growing population and delaying payments on bills coming due in 2013.

It accomplishes, however, what the Republican majority wanted most: It did not raise taxes, took little from the Rainy Day Fund and shifted any future deficits onto the next Legislature.

The new budget also preposterously assumes there will be no growth in the number of school children in Texas, even though it is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. Experts predict this trick alone will shortchange school districts by $2 billion.

Texas lawmakers had to close an enormous $27 billion budget deficit this year. Amazingly, only about a third of it was caused by the economic downturn. The state has had a chronic shortage of revenue after years of slashing property and business taxes and creating numerous tax breaks and exemptions. Conservative governors have slashed state services to the bone, so there was no more fat to cut from the budget.

As governor for over a decade, Perry’s “fiscal conservatism” has doubled the state’s debt from $13.7 billion in 2001 to $34.08 billion in 2009. He’s refused to raise taxes on the wealthy and brags about not dipping into the state’s substantial Rainy Day Fund. (However, Perry’s fellow Texas Republicans claim Perry has appropriated nearly all the money in the Rainy Day Fund, and have asked him to stop claiming that he preserved it.)

Democrats have fought back against the GOP claim that it was truly a balanced budget. “It’s all smoke and mirrors and misdirection,” said state Rep. Garnett Coleman (D).

Today on the Senate floor, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) broke out the familiar GOP talking points to argue against raising taxes on millionaires as a means of deficit reduction, declaring it tantamount to “rais[ing] taxes on America’s job creators to prevent the economy from recovering from this recession.” But instead of sticking to the same-old song, Inhofe decided to throw in a eye-raising factoid. According to him, President Obama has increased the debt more “than all presidents throughout the history of America”:

INHOFE: President Obama has managed to increase spending by 30 percent — 30 percent. He incurred trillion dollar deficits each year and pushed our national debt up by 35 percent. The statistics that no one seems to care about, and we say it over and over again, that this president has increased the debt more in his two and a half years than all presidents throughout the history of America, from George Washington to George W. Bush.

Watch it:

It’d be a powerful charge — if it were true. Despite the fact that Sarah Palin often repeats the charge, the statement is entirely false. Obama inherited a $10.6 trillion debt in 2009, along with two wars and the worst economy since the Great Depression. Since then, the debt rose by $3.4 trillion which, as Politifact noted, is “far less than what was accumulated by Obama’s 43 predecessors.”

Even assuming Inhofe did not mean the debt from all presidents combined, he’s still wrong. As ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum pointed out, Bush started with a $236 billion budget surplus, yet still managed to add $4.4 trillion to the nation debt.

It’s an often-repeated talking point among Republicans as Washington debates taxes and spending: “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.” It’s recycled, like much of today’s Republican thinking, from President Reagan, but Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) stretched the argument to its breaking point on MSNBC this morning when he said that government revenues are currently at “record” highs:

DEMINT: Four of the last five years, we’ve had record levels of revenue. And next year we have projected the highest revenue levels in history. We don’t have a revenue problem.

Watch it:

The GOP talking point on spending vs. revenue fundamentally un-serious, as both are flip sides of the same balance sheet. But even so, DeMint is just wrong.

DeMint appears to be using nominal dollars to measure revenues, instead of revenue as a percentage of GDP, which is used by all official arbiters on revenue matters, including the Congressional Budget Office. And as a percentage of GDP, government revenue is nowhere near a “record” high. In 2010, it was at its lowest level in more than 60 years, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), at just at 14.9 percent.

Next year, revenues will still be at just 16.6 percent of GDP, several points below the average rates under every president since Franklin Roosevelt, including Reagan. The record high was 20.6 percent in 2000, which coincided with a balanced budget.

This makes sense — on top of lost revenue from the massive Bush tax cuts, the recession devastated economic output and thus the American tax base.

And DeMint seems to know this, choosing to qualify his statements about revenue with the odd time frame of five years to completely mislead viewers. He’s right that revenues in terms of dollars were at an all time high at one point in the last five years — 2007 — but he seems to intentionally ignore the fact that revenues fell of a cliff in 2009. In terms of actual dollars, in 2010, the government brought in $2.16 trillion dollars — down from $2.56 trillion in 2007.

ThinkProgress filed this report from a campaign event in Hampton, New Hampshire

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) continued leveling attacks on the Dodd-Frank financial reform law during two campaign stops in New Hampshire yesterday. According to Romney, who had previously indicated support for repealing the law and has attacked it repeatedly in the early stages of his campaign, tightening regulations on Wall Street financial firms is akin to “pouring molasses” on the economy.

But when a reporter asked him to name what he opposed in Dodd-Frank, Romney failed to offer any specifics, saying only that the bill was “massive” and repeating the claim that it is causing uncertainty:

REPORTER: Do you oppose all the provisions in the Dodd-Frank bill, or just specific aspects of it, and would you try to repeal Dodd-Frank if you were president?

ROMNEY: It’s 2,000 pages, I’m sure there’s something in there that’s good. I’ll be happy to take a look and perhaps line-by-line at some point lay out the provisions that I think are unfortunate. But it is so massive that many of the people in the financial industry simply don’t know what it will entail when all the regulation is completed. These kind of massive reworks of major industries cause those industries to retrench, and at the very time we need them to step forward, they have pulled back. So I’ll give you more detail as the campaign goes on, but this bill was too overreaching and too massive and has contributed to a slowdown in lending.

Watch it:

Romney’s lack of specificity on what he dislikes about Dodd-Frank begs the question: does he oppose what is actually in the law, or does he oppose it simply because the idea of regulating the industry that played a large role in bringing the American economy to the brink of ruin runs counter to his party’s, and Wall Street’s, platform?

Romney has consistently defended Wall Street from attacks and recently held a Wall Street fundraiser that netted his campaign $1 million. Top Wall Street executives oppose the law, and Republicans have listened, attempting to gut it during budget negotiations and, like Romney, falsely blaming regulators for creating “uncertainty” in the market, even as bank profits have skyrocketed.

Repealing Dodd-Frank, meanwhile, would prevent a host of new consumer protections from taking effect and would allow the nation’s largest financial institutions — including those at the center of the 2008 financial crisis — to operate just as they did before the crash. That apparently does not matter to Romney, who instead chooses to pretend the financial crisis never happened by fighting to repeal Dodd-Frank without even reading it.

The GOP is attempting to leverage the threat of default and an economic catastrophe to secure draconian spending cuts while protecting the wealthy and corporations from any tax increases. But according to Bruce Bartlett, a top economic adviser to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, they may have less leverage than they think.

Bartlett asserts that President Obama has the constitutional authority to ensure the validity of the U.S. debt by disregarding the debt limit even if Congress fails to approve an increase:

The essence of the argument involves section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

In my view and that of Prof. Epps, this means that the president would have constitutional authority to take extraordinary measures to protect the public credit and prevent a debt default even if it means disregarding the debt limit, which is statutory law subordinate to the Constitution.

Since my article appeared, I have had the opportunity to do further research on this topic and now feel even more strongly that the Fourteenth Amendment trumps the debt limit.

You can read Bartlett’s full piece, which includes a detailed legal analysis, here.

Bartlett has plenty of company. The same theory has been advanced by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) and hinted at by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

During the negotiations regarding raising the nation’s debt ceiling, congressional Republicans have gone to the mat to defend all manner of unwarranted tax breaks, including those for oil companies and corporate jet owners. Despite the drain on the Treasury caused by these tax breaks — and the negligible benefit they provide — Republicans have threatened to allow the nation to default on its obligations rather than abandon them.

One of the tax breaks upon which President Obama has focused is a provision that allows hedge fund managers — who make billions annually — to receive a substantial tax break. This particular tax break, known as the carried-interest loophole, allows hedge fund managers to treat the money they receive from investors as capital gains, subject to a 15 percent tax rate. Though this money is a paycheck received for services, just like a movie star receiving a bonus if her movie does well, it’s treated as investment income.

Since hedge fund managers are some of the richest people in the country, this tax break actually causes a significant loss of revenue. In fact, according to calculation by RJ Eskow, closing this loophole would raise more than $4 billion per year just from the 25 richest hedge fund managers:

The top 25 hedge fund managers in the United States collectively earned $22 billion last year, and yet they have their own cushy set of tax rules. If they operated under the same rules that apply to other people — police officers, for example, or teachers — the country could cut its national deficit by as much as $44 billion in the next ten years.

That may seem like a lot of revenue to raise from just a few people, but it’s simply what would happen if the income hedge fund managers receive to manage other people’s money was treated the same as income earned by other workers. It would take the combined income of 441,000 middle-class families to equal the income made by just the 25 richest hedge fund managers. The top hedge fund manager at the moment, John Paulson, makes more hourly than most Americans will earn in a lifetime, while paying a lower tax rate. This is an egregious loophole, but the GOP refuses to consider it as part of a deal to avoid default and an economic catastrophe.