Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) dusted off one of his favorite talking points on the Senate floor today, calling on the poor and the middle class to shoulder more of the pain of deficit reduction because they don’t pay enough in taxes. After the Senate considered a Sense of the Senate stating that “any agreement to reduce the budget deficit should require that those earning $1,000,000 or more per year make a more meaningful contribution to the deficit reduction effort,” Hatch took to the floor to defend rich taxpayers, whose tax rates are at modern lows thanks to the Bush tax cuts.

Hatch complained that 51 percent of Americans don’t pay income taxes and hinted that what the poor and middle class pay in payroll taxes doesn’t count as a contribution since it goes toward Social Security:

HATCH: I hear how they’re [Democrats] so caring for the poor and so forth. The poor need jobs! And they also need to share some of the responsibility. Now we don’t want the really poor people who are in poverty to pay income taxes. But 51 percent of all households? And that’s going up by the way because of our friend down in the White House and his allies.

Watch it:

As ThinkProgress noted during Hatch’s original rant on this subject in May, when he said the poor and middle class needed to shoulder a bigger part of the tax burden, the 51 percent Hatch cites is made up primarily of people who either don’t have income (senior citizens and students) or people who don’t earn enough to reach into even the lowest tax bracket. And regardless of what Hatch says, they do pay taxes.

Hatch’s position couldn’t be clearer: as the amount of wealth further concentrates toward the top and as those people pay record-low tax rates, it’s the working poor who need to shoulder the brunt of the recession’s pain.

As the Aug. 2 deadline to raise the debt ceiling approaches, Republicans lawmakers are inching closer to the economic cliff over their stubborn refusal to close unfair tax loopholes and raise tax rates on the wealthy. The GOP’s lead lemming is Tea Party leader Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Last night on Fox’s Freedom Watch with host Andrew Napolitano, DeMint blamed the Obama administration for purposefully “burning time” to bring about this fiscal crisis. Urging Republicans to maintain their intransigence on the debt ceiling, DeMint said he’d be “willing to” cause “serious disruptions” in the economy to secure significant cuts and a balanced budget:

DEMINT: The reason the president hasn’t addressed the issue even though we knew it was facing us, and this is the fourth time he’s asked for an increase in the debt limit, he has been burning time — that’s what [Vice President Joe] Biden was supposed to do is get the Republicans behind closed doors — is burn the clock up until we have a crisis. So now we’re at the point where there would have to be some serious disruptions in order not to raise it. I’m willing to do that, I just don’t think we can find enough of Republicans and Democrats to say it’s time to stop spending.

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A brief survey of such “disruptions” include an immediate cut of nearly 40 percent from the federal budget, a 2.3 percent drop in GDP, a freeze on billions in Social Security payments, a disruption of payments for Medicare, Medicaid, and military active duty pay, a “double-dip contraction” in the already fragile U.S. housing market, a severe blow to America’s creditworthiness, an inevitable increase in unemployment, and ultimately, a direct shove back into a recession.

DeMint and his Republican colleagues, however, view all of this as no big deal. Nonetheless, DeMint’s complete dismissal of the looming economic disaster he’s willing to cause will earn him nothing but blame from the American people.

The Federal Reserve yesterday divulged the details of an emergency lending program that were previously undisclosed, following a Freedom of Information Act request by Bloomberg News. According to the data, Goldman Sachs was the beneficiary of “the biggest single loan from a lending program,” which was launched in response to the 2008 financial crisis. (It expanded on an already existing Fed loan program).

Goldman Sachs, on one day alone, received $15 billion from the program, and paid a minuscule interest rate:

Goldman’s loan of $15 billion at an interest rate of 1.16% on Dec. 9, 2008 , was the largest 28-day loan from the Fed. Interest rates on loans to Goldman were as low as 0.01% for $200 million on Dec. 30, 2008. [...] Though Goldman got the biggest single loan, its total borrowings of $53.4 billion were less than for some other financial institutions.

That $15 billion is more than the $10 billion that the mega-bank received from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). But little more than a year later, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd “God’s Work” Blankfein insisted during testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry that Goldman wasn’t relying on government help to get through the crisis:

We never anticipated the government help, we weren’t relying on those mechanisms…That weekend, when we became a bank-holding company, the next day, we capitalized ourselves privately with Warren Buffet, and the day after that we did a capital raise for $5.75 billion…We weren’t relying on that government help.

The program in question was just one in a slew of lending programs the Federal Reserve implemented in 2008. It’s unclear whether Goldman actually needed this particular pile of money or, as the Atlantic’s Daniel Indiviglio put it, the bank was just taking advantage of “a big, ultra-cheap loan.” But the fact remains that Goldman benefited significantly from the programs launched to shore up the financial system, while swearing up and down that it never needed them at all (a claim that analysts dispute).

In return for the favors it received during the financial crisis, as the Los Angeles Times detailed, Goldman has “bolster[ed] its Washington presence significantly, turning a low-key lobbying operation into a sophisticated, high-powered enterprise.” The bank “spent $4.6 million lobbying the federal government last year, more than any other company in the securities industry,” trying to both rebut charges made against it by several congressional reports and undermine the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The political tsunami of the week is the news that President Obama is offering Republicans changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for an agreement to raise new tax revenue and raise the nation’s debt ceiling. While the White House has said it wants “to work with both parties to do so in a balanced way that preserves the promise of [Social Security] and doesn’t slash benefits,” some Democrats are questioning why the program is part of the debt ceiling negotiations at all.

In an interview today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) defended Social Security against those on both sides of the aisle who say deep cuts to the program will reduce the deficit. While acknowledging that responsible reforms can be made to entitlement programs to save money, Ellison refocused the debate on the central problem that seniors and the poor are being asked to sacrifice greatly while the richest Americans are being protected by congressional Republicans:

ELLISON: Social Security actually is not contributing to the deficit. Social Security loans us money. So at the end of the day, all this discussion about how we’re going to cut Social Security is very distressing to me because Social Security isn’t the problem…This is inequitable and regressive…We’re asking the poorest Americans to sacrifice. When are the wealthiest Americans going to step up and do the patriotic thing, which is to contribute to deal with this budget deficit.

Watch it:

White House Budget Director Jacob Lew wrote recently that “Social Security benefits are entirely self-financing. They are paid for with payroll taxes collected from workers and their employers throughout their careers.” Prominent economists like Paul Krugman have debunked the notion that there’s a “Social Security crisis” that demands deep cuts.

Democrats including Sens. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have noted that Social Security “does not add one penny to the deficit.” The Social Security Trust Fund currently holds approximately $2.6 trillion and can pay full benefits through 2037 and close to full benefits for decades after. Very minor tweaks to the system would strengthen Social Security for future generations and bolster the program in important ways.

Nevertheless, conservatives have tried to make entitlement programs a scapegoat for the nation’s deficit, despite the fact that two of the biggest causes of our current deficit are the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and two wars that were never paid for. A recent Pew poll found that 60 percent of Americans believe it is more important to keep Social Security and Medicare benefits intact than to reduce the deficit.

Reports surfaced last night that President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) may be close to reaching a deal on raising the nation’s debt ceiling that would generate as much as $1 billion in new revenues while cutting close to $4 trillion in spending over the next decade. The deal reportedly includes changes to Medicare and Social Security, two vital programs that Americans, and even Tea Partiers, have repeatedly said should not be touched in order to reduce the deficit.

But even as the president puts these popular programs on the table, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) refused to budge on his stance that any debt deal should not include new revenues, saying during an interview with Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson he would not agree to close tax loopholes without offsetting them with tax cuts elsewhere:

CANTOR: If he wants to talk about loopholes, we don’t like loopholes and preferences, it’s not good for overall economic growth. We want to bring down rates and reform the system. But if he wants to plug that loophole, we want to see that offsetting tax cuts somewhere else, because the priority is jobs. It’s about getting people back to work and we’re not for raising taxes, period.

Carlson then asked Cantor if he supported closing loopholes for corporate jet owners and ending oil subsidies specifically. Though he had earlier professed support for cleaning up the tax code, Cantor dodged the question, saying Obama was attacking “millionaires and billionaires” and attempting to raise taxes on small business owners:

CANTOR: Again, I haven’t seen exactly what the president is talking about. But at the end of the day, his talking point is going after billionaires, millionaires and what have you. Again, if you look at what he’s talking about, it’s the same argument we had last November when we had the election, and that is that he and his party want to raise taxes on small business people right now, and that’s something that doesn’t make sense when we’re trying to get people back to work.

Watch the full exchange here:

As long as Republicans ignore reality — that government revenues are at a 60-year-low and closing certain loopholes could drastically change that — it is hard to imagine Obama can compromise in a way that is palatable to both the GOP and the American people.