Presidential candidate and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) called for reductions in federal funding for higher education Wednesday, saying that support should be transferred to states instead. The Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa’s student newspaper, reports:

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said Wednesday that the federal government should reduce higher-education funding and leave that support to states.

Speaking to Kirkwood Community College officials and eastern Iowa business leaders on the Kirkwood campus on the fourth day of a tour around the state, the GOP presidential nomination-hopeful said colleges ought to partner with local businesses to prep grads for the workforce.

Santorum is apparently ignoring the reality facing many states, which have reduced funding for state colleges and universities in the face of growing budget deficits. In California, for example, legislators slashed millions of dollars from the University of California and California State systems, forcing those schools to raise tuition. As Washington Monthly noted today, public universities in 11 states saw their states reduce support by more than 5 percent this year.

While Santorum wants federal benefit reductions, tuition is skyrocketing across the country, and the amount of student debt accrued during a four-year degree program continues to increase. At Penn State University, Santorum’s alma mater, the average graduate in the class of 2007 left the university with more than $26,000 in debt.

Cutting federal support for public colleges and universities may sound like a good idea in Santorum’s small government world, but those cuts will inevitably get passed down to states — and, more importantly, to students — who are already falling behind an increasingly expensive higher education system.

Throughout negotiations over whether to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans have maintained that it would be worse to raise the limit without significant spending cuts than to not raise the limit and risk the country’s first-ever default. This is, of course, not true.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) made the rounds of local media outlets today to push the GOP message, but ran into some trouble with the facts when he claimed that credit rating agencies like Standard & Poor agree with Republicans during a radio interview with KTRS in St. Louis:

BLUNT: If you read any of the rating agencies — Standard & Poor and the other agencies — they don’t say we’re in trouble because of the debt ceiling or that we might default, they say we’re in trouble and we could be downgraded as an economy to invest in, in our bonds and everything, because we’re spending way too much money relative to our abilities to produce goods and resources.

Listen here:

In fact, the exact opposite is true:

Standard & Poor’s would cut the U.S. credit rating to its lowest level and Moody’s Investors Service said it will probably reduce its ranking if the government fails to increase the debt limit, leading to a default.

S&P would lower its sovereign top-level AAA ranking to D, the last rung on its scale if the U.S. can’t pay its debt, John Chambers, chairman of the company’s sovereign rating committee, said today. Moody’s said it would probably assign a position in the Aa range, or within three steps of its highest level.

An executive for the third major rating agency, Fitch, told Rueters, “If we reach the second of August without a lifting of the debt ceiling, Fitch would assign a rating watch negative to the U.S. sovereign ratings.”

When facts get in the way of the narrative, Blunt just changes the facts. Meanwhile, several Republican lawmakers, including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), have suggested that default would actually be good for the U.S., despite the credit rating agencies’ dire warnings.

Last week, Republicans boycotted a Senate Finance Committee markup of three pending free trade agreements due to their opposition to an expanded Trade Assistance Adjustment program being included within the deals. TAA aids workers who are displaced by international trade, and Republicans allowed the expanded program to expire back in February.

Making it clear that GOP opposition to helping the workers who are inevitably hurt by expanded international trade isn’t confined to the Senate, House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee refused earlier this week to even include TAA in their version of the trade deals at all. And when House Democrats proposed an amendment to insert TAA into the agreement, the GOP voted it down:

In the House, Democrats offered an amendment to include TAA in the Korea bill, but the effort was defeated by Republicans. The panel then approved the pact with Democrats voting no.

Last year, 280,000 workers were aided by trade assistance, with nearly half of them receiving aid under the expanded program that the GOP allowed to expire. And Republicans realize that the program is helpful to workers, as several of them have supported their constituents’ petitions to obtain benefits.

Expanding trade is going to produce winners and losers, so it is imperative that any expansion of trade include help for workers who wind up on the short end of the stick. Even 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said recently that he supports aid for workers who lose their jobs due to trade.

But the GOP has obstinately opposed providing such assistance, with Republican leaders saying that they will actively oppose free trade deals that include aid for workers. As Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) — a staunch advocate of TAA — put it, Republicans “continue to want to do free trade on the cheap.”

Our guest bloggers are Zane Farr, an intern with the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s American Worker Project, and Karla Walter, senior policy analyst with the AWP.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing yesterday attacking a proposed National Labor Relations Board rule to standardize the union election process. The common sense proposal doesn’t specify a time frame for elections, but recommends a number of changes that would help put an end to delay tactics used by employers or unions and create a more level playing field in the workplace.

But committee Republicans and the anti-union witnesses — including Michael Lotito from Jackson-Lewis,one of the oldest and largest union avoidance law firms in the nation — argued the rule would limit employers’ free speech and prevent workers from having enough time to make informed decisions:

Workers would have to make decisions on representation based only on what, if anything, the union or fellow workers told them. Such information would be incomplete at best, misleading at worst…By depriving employees of views that are likely to be very different from the union’s, and information about the union that the union may be reluctant to divulge, the NLRB would impinge on employees’ right to make a free and informed choice.

Lotito’s comments about communicating with workers is interesting in the context of this hearing given the advice his employer has doled out. Jackson-Lewis, Mr. Lotito’s firm, has posted memos on its website for prospective titled “Time Is On Your Side” about the benefits of delaying the certification election.

But the NLRB election process gives ample opportunity for employers and unions to educate workers — according to CAPAF’s David Madland — and this wouldn’t change under the provisions of the proposed rule:

[R]esearch demonstrates that employers already communicate well before elections occur. Employers’ views on unions are commonly incorporated into new-hire orientations, according to numerous academic and advocacy group reports. Even when employers don’t start their campaigns upon hiring, their communications often start long before the filing of the petition.…In fact, much pre-election communication crosses the line into illegal intimidation of workers.

Indeed, research released last month from respected academics Kate Bronfenbrenner and Dorian Warren finds that almost half of all serious violations of the National Labor Relations Act — such as illegal harassment, coercion, or firing — occur before the petition is filed.

Unfortunately, 35 percent of all union elections are called off in the face of endless delays and often illegal employer opposition according to research by John-Paul Ferguson of Stanford Business School. The proposed rule won’t fix every barrier facing workers trying to organize, but it’s a modest, common-sense step to help make the union election process fairer. Despite all this, House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN) said he will use “everything in our toolbox” to prevent the reform from coming online.

The Washington Post set off a political firestorm earlier this week when it reported that President Obama will reportedly be seeking changes to Social Security as part of a wider debt ceiling deal with Congress.

This morning, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) hosted a press call with reporters about their opposition to including Social Security and Medicare in debt ceiling negotiations. ThinkProgress asked Sanders if he thinks including regressive cuts to these programs in a debt ceiling deal would hurt Obama politically and what tactics he would be willing to use to stop such a deal. He said that including such cuts would “obviously” hurt President Obama in the next election and that he would do “everything” that he can to defeat such a package.

At another point in the call, a Washington Post reporter asked Sanders if he’s convinced that a debt deal that includes Social Security would be unable to pass the Senate. Sanders responded by saying that senators have told him that they are not willing to vote for a “piece of crap” deal and that the White House is in for a “serious surprise” if it expects the Senate to approve any package it hands down:

REPORTER: In your view, if this debt limit deal includes any changes in Social Security, are you convinced that that will not be able to pass the Senate?

SANDERS: Again, it’s hard for us to talk about 99 other people. But I think there really is a disconnect, and I think Sheldon made this point when he was speaking, between what the White House is doing and rest of the Senate. What I can say is that I have heard, including from people that you might not expect to hear it from, that if they bring from the Senate a piece of crap which really comes down heavy on working families, and the elderly, and the sick, and the children, and they expect me to matter of factly vote for it, they have another thing coming. So I think the White House is for a serious surpise if they think everybody in the Democratic caucus is going to willy nilly follow the President and vote for anything he brings forth.

Listen to it:

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.

Earlier this week, the conservative Weekly Standard started circulating an article claiming that the 2009 Recovery Act (i.e. the stimulus) cost $288,000 for every job it created and that the Obama administration’s own economic analysis of the Recovery Act shows that doing nothing over the last six months would have been preferable to continuing stimulus spending. These claims have quickly caught on with Republicans, who have uncritically tweeted and repeated them.

GOP 2012 presidential hopeful Rick Santorum hilariously botched his attempt at repeating the numbers, claiming that President Obama has created “only 240 million jobs” (which would mean that the labor force expanded by nearly 100 million people, solving the unemployment crisis). Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), another GOP presidential contender, did slightly better today during an interview on Fox, but still spread severe falsehoods regarding the stimulus and job creation:

BACHMANN: We found out last week that the average cost of a job was $278,000 for a government job under the stimulus and even the President’s own numbers say had the President done nothing we would have seen 288,000 jobs created this week. Instead, we’re losing jobs.

Watch it:

As TPM’s Brian Beutler pointed out, the claim that Obama’s own economic advisers found that the economy would be better absent the stimulus is a “fundamental misreading of the data“:

Over the past six months, and even before then, the stimulus has been winding down, and the fact that it’s now responsible for the existence of fewer jobs than it was six months ago is a function of that phase-out, and the (slowly) recovering economy, not of its inherent ineffectiveness.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press has rightly called the sort of math the Weekly Standard employed to manufacture its cost-per-job “highly misleading.” But that didn’t stop Bachmann from jumbling the two incorrect claims together into one mess of misinformation.

Plus, even though today’s jobs number was dismal, the economy is not losing jobs, as Bachmann claimed. In fact, tepid but continuing job creation in the private sector is being offset with job hemorrhaging within the public sector, making weak jobs numbers look disastrous. But this is exactly the sort of jobs trajectory that Republicans say they want.