As ThinkProgress has been reporting, congressional Republicans forced the Federal Aviation Administration to partially shut down over the weekend over a series of anti-union demands. The FAA has been reauthorized without controversy more than 20 times, but this time, House Republicans insisted on including a provision that would make it harder for airline workers to join a union. The shutdown resulted in 4,000 employees being immediately furloughed, halted $2.5 billion in airport construction projects, and is costing the government about $200 million a week — or $61 per airline ticket.

But the shutdown has been good for some parties — namely, the airlines:

Airlines are tossing consumers aside and grabbing the benefit of lower federal taxes on travel tickets.

By Saturday night, nearly all the major U.S. airlines had raised fares to offset taxes that expired the night before.

That means instead of passing along the savings, the airlines are pocketing the money while customers pay the same amount as before.

American, United, Continental, Delta, US Airways, Southwest, AirTran and JetBlue all raised fares, although details sometimes differed. Most of the increases were around 7.5 percent.

By all accounts, the shutdown should have lowered ticket prices for consumers since the travel tax temporarily expired and airlines no longer have to give part of the money they collect to the government. Instead, airlines have used the shutdown as an excuse to raise prices. Airlines like US Airways that have hiked up prices declined to say whether prices will go back down if Congress revives the travel taxes.

A few airlines are passing the tax break on to consumers, including Virgin America, Frontier Airlines, and Alaska Airlines.

Spending less on wars only counts when Republicans do it.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) today unveiled a plan to raise the federal debt ceiling that would include $2.7 trillion in spending cuts and no new revenue. Of the $2.7 trillion in cuts, about $1 trillion would come from “winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Republicans have reacted to this by claiming that those savings aren’t real savings. As Time Magazine’s Jay Newton-Small reported:

House Republicans gripe that $1 trillion in Reid’s proposed savings aren’t actual “cuts,” but phantom money that was never going to be spent on the two wars. “It’s like me saying, I’m not going to buy 10 Cadillacs over the next 10 years: look I saved $100,000,” said one GOP aide.

However, the GOP found these savings to be completely adequate when they were included in the House Republican budget, authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). As the Center on Budget and Priorities noted, about $1.3 trillion in savings in the Ryan budget “comes simply from taking credit for spending less in future years for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Ryan derided these cuts as “phantom savings,” and then proceeded to include them in his budget anyway.

“It’s an accounting gimmick in effect, I know they rationalize that well, that appeared in the Ryan budget too,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). “It was as wrong in the Ryan budget as it is in this. […] Republicans, I don’t believe in the Senate, will support a bill that purports to cut spending if that’s the kind of the spending that it purports to cut.” However, nearly every Senate Republican, including Kyl, voted for those very cuts when they voted to approve the Ryan budget. “Of course we support it,” Kyl has said of the Ryan budget. But now that those savings are included in a Democratic plan, they suddenly cease to count.

As the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen noted today, Democrats have bent over backwards to craft a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, only to be rebuffed at every turn by congressional Republicans who have been insisting that any deal include no new revenue and some cockamamie conservative policies (like a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution). To date, the GOP has turned away at least six different versions of Democratic plans to raise the debt ceiling.

Last week, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) walked away from a deal that would have involved $4 trillion in deficit reduction, with $1.2 trillion (just 30 percent) of that coming from new revenue. As the Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden noted, this deal from Obama is significantly to the right of other deficit reduction proposals — including the plan outlined by the so-called Gang of Six and the one developed by the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission — and is even to the right of his original framework for raising the debt ceiling:

The infographic above shows that the president’s latest offer to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is heavily titled toward spending cuts. In fact, the president’s offer contained about $1 trillion less revenue than the recent proposal from the so-called Gang of Six, a group that includes three Republican senators and three Democratic senators. It also represents significant movement from the president’s original debt reduction framework, which itself was already more conservative than the recommendations from the chairs of the debt commission (Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson) last December.

Unfortunately the Republican leadership still turned the president down despite his willingness to offer cuts to programs Democrats traditionally defend and to agree to much less revenue than all other bipartisan deals.

It’s worth noting that Republicans walked away from a deal offered by congressional Democrats under which 83 percent of the savings would come from spending cuts and just 17 percent from revenue.

Today, Boehner and Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-NV) unveiled competing plans for raising the debt ceiling. Reid’s, which the White House has endorsed, would cut spending by $2.7 trillion (inclusive of $1 trillion from “winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”), add no revenue, and make raising the debt ceiling again unnecessary until 2013. Boehner’s plan includes $1.1 trillion in cuts and raises the debt ceiling through April.

Throughout the debate about raising the federal debt ceiling, Republicans have denied deal after deal because Democrats insist on adding new revenues to trillions of dollars in spending cuts. Republicans have opposed repealing oil and gas subsidies, removing a tax loophole for corporate jet owners, letting the Bush tax cuts expire, and all other forms of revenue Democrats have suggested. Raising taxes in a weak economy, they argue, is unthinkable — even if conservative patriarch Ronald Reagan did just that.

But there is one tax increase some Republicans seem to favor: raising taxes on the working poor, senior citizens, and other low-income Americans.

While they fight the expiration of the budget-busting Bush tax cuts, Republicans have continually cited a report that shows that 51 percent of Americans don’t pay income taxes, even admitting that middle- and lower-class Americans need to shoulder a larger burden in deficit reduction efforts. Here is a sample of Republicans who have made that argument:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT): In a May 5 appearance on MSNBC, Hatch said, “The place where you’ve got to get revenues has to come from the middle class,” saying the poor needed to understand “that there’s a civic duty on the part of every one of us to help this government to, uh, to be better.” On the Senate floor July 7, Hatch said the poor “need to share some of the responsibility” for deficit reduction.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): Cornyn also cited the report on the Senate floor July 7, when he said Congress needed to address tax reform to make the system “flatter, fairer, and simpler.” He then cited the report, saying, “51 percent — that is — a majority of American households — paid no income tax in 2009. Zero. Zip. Nada.”

Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN): Coats echoed the talking point last weekend, saying “everyone needs to have some skin in the game.” He added: “I realize that some with low incomes and not much money are not paying much in taxes. Nonetheless, we all have a stake in this country and what needs to be done. I think it’s important that this burden not just fall on 50 percent of the people but falls on all of us in some form.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA): Cantor was among the first Republicans to begin hitting this particular talking point, doing so in April on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “We also have a situation in this country where you’re nearing 50 percent of people who don’t even pay income taxes,” he said.

Republicans, of course, ignore why most of the 51 percent do not pay income taxes and the myriad ways in which they are subject to other forms of taxation. The majority who do not pay federal income taxes simply do not make enough money to qualify for even the lowest tax bracket. But they do contribute through payroll, state, and sales taxes. Less than a quarter of Americans don’t contribute to federal tax receipts, and the majority of those are students, the elderly, or the unemployed.

Meanwhile, the richest Americans are paying less than they were a generation ago, leaving the United States with one of the largest income gaps in the industrialized world.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is reportedly working on a plan that would raise the federal debt ceiling while pairing $2.7 trillion in spending cuts with no new revenue in an attempt to break the impasse that has settled over the debt ceiling negotiations. Republicans have (for the most part) been adamant that revenue not be a part of any deal to raise the debt ceiling.

One of the main thrusts of the GOP’s argument is that the economy is still to weak to handle a tax increase, even on the richest Americans or corporations making record profits. “Tax hikes would only hurt job growth,” according to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH). “It is counter-intuitive to think you impose taxes on people right now and businesses if you want to get Americans back to work,” added House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. “There’s a rule that even Obama abided by in 2009 that you don’t increase taxes during a recession,” quipped Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

However, these Republicans might want to check the record of the conservative icon, former President Ronald Reagan. As Reagan’s first budget director, David Stockman, told Bloomberg News that Reagan did exactly what the Republicans are campaigning against:

“That put the lie to the current arguments of Republicans that the economy is too weak to bear a tax increase” because “the next year 3.5 million jobs were created,” said Stockman, who says tax increases are now needed to help reduce the deficit. “When the Republicans rhetorically say now, ‘Who would raise taxes in a recession?’ the answer is Ronald Reagan.”

Reagan signed his 1982 tax increase into law in September 1982, even though the early 1980s recession didn’t end until November 1982. Following that tax increase, as former Reagan economic official Bruce Bartlett has pointed out, gross domestic product “grew 4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984 – an exceptionally strong performance. The stock market had one of its best years ever in 1983…The unemployment rate fell from 10.6 percent in December 1982 to 8.1 percent by December 1983 and 7.1 percent in December 1984.”

According to the Treasury Department, “Reagan’s tax increases now would bring in about $300 billion a year, if the increases were measured against today’s economy.” But today’s Republicans have gone to the mat over preserving tax cuts for millionaires, tax loopholes for corporate jet owners, and tax subsidies for hugely profitable companies.

As congressional negotiators continue to debate the contents of a deficit reduction package, discussions are reportedly tilting toward a deal that will include spending cuts but no revenue increases.

Over at the Campaign for America’s Future, the Institute for Policy Studies’ (IPS) Sam Pizzigati notes that one way to very easily tackle U.S. debt going forward would be to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to levels more closely matching mid-20th century rates. Pizzigati cites an IPS paper from last spring to make the argument that if corporations and households making more than $1 million paid the same rates as they did in 1961, our debt would virtually disappear in a decade:

Some numbers — from an Institute for Policy Studies report released this past spring — can help us better visualize just how monumental this political failure has been. If corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961, the IPS researchers found, the federal treasury would be collecting an additional $716 billion a year. In other words, if the federal government started taxing the wealthy and their corporations at the same rates in effect a half-century ago, the federal debt to investors would almost totally vanish over the next decade.

As ThinkProgress has previously reported, the richest Americans are paying their lowest taxes in a generation. Additionally, Center for American Progress experts Michael Linden, Seth Hanlon, and Jordan Eizenga have shown that the United States is actually very low-tax compared to other developed countries.

House Republicans, including Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), were calling for repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law even before it had passed. Once they achieved a majority, House Republicans worked to undermine the law by cutting the budgets of financial market regulators and trying to slow down the implementation of several of the law’s provision.

And Wall Street evidently appreciates the effort, donating heavily to Boehner over the first half of this year. As Bloomberg News reported, “three of the five biggest sources of Boehner’s campaign cash this year are employees of three Wall Street investment houses, a shift from the 2010 election cycle when such contributors weren’t ranked among his top 10 donors”:

Employees at the New York hedge fund Paulson & Co. contributed $61,050 to Boehner’s campaign account, more than any other company. New York-based Moore Capital Management LLP employees gave $53,000, while those at Cantor Fitzgerald LP donated $45,000.

No one from any of those companies donated to Boehner for his 2010 re-election campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group that tracks political money. [...]

Boehner received most of the donations from Paulson & Co., Moore Capital and Cantor Fitzgerald in June, the same month the House voted along party lines to cut the budget of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is writing most of the new derivatives rules, and the House Appropriations Committee voted to limit funding for the new consumer protection bureau.

As Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) told ThinkProgress last week, the GOP’s refusal to fund the financial regulators implementing Dodd-Frank is impacting them “enormously.” “They can’t do the new duties. They can’t even carry out some of the old ones,” he said.

Wall Street has been spending almost as much to influence the implementation of Dodd-Frank as it spent trying to block the law. The Center for Public Integrity has found that “the Street and other financial institutions engaged about 3,000 lobbyists to fight Dodd-Frank – more than five lobbyists for every member of Congress – and have hired almost the same number to delay, weaken, or otherwise prevent its implementation.”

And part of Wall Street’s strategy seems to be keeping the speaker’s campaign coffers stuffed. Boehner’s office last week called Dodd-Frank one of the factors “holding back our economy.”