ThinkProgress filed this report from the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa.

Conservative legislators and talk show hosts have falsely repeated one of their favorite claims — that poor people don’t pay enough in taxes — multiple times throughout the debt and budget debates, as they attempt to deflect Democratic attempts to ask corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share. The claim has been distorted in multiple ways, whether it’s that nearly half of Americans don’t pay taxes or that the top 1 percent shoulders 40 percent of the nation’s tax burden.

Either way, the claims are false. And today at the Iowa State Fair, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich refused to play along, blowing up the conservative talking point by correctly stating that nearly all Americans pay taxes in some form:

KEYES: There’s been a lot of discussion on the number of people who aren’t paying income taxes. Do you think people are paying enough in taxes?

GINGRICH: Well, first of all, virtually everybody pays taxes, ’cause if you go to work, you pay into Social Security and Medicare taxes. We have property taxes. Most states if you buy something, you pay a sales tax. So I don’t find too many Americans who think that they are under, or they are not being taxed enough. [...]

It’s technically true of the income tax. It’s not true of taxes in general.

Watch it:

Gingrich is correct. As ThinkProgress has repeatedly noted, Americans who are not subject to the income tax — primarily senior citizens, students, the unemployed, and the poor — do pay taxes in other forms, whether through payroll taxes, sales taxes, or state income taxes. Less than a quarter of American households do not contribute to federal tax receipts.

As for the richest one percent of Americans, they’ve continued to see their tax rates fall, even as income inequality continues to grow to unfathomable levels.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)

This week, the Republican leadership named its six members of the fiscal super committee; as we detailed, the GOP’s choices are not-so-super. All six Republicans have taken the Americans for Tax Reform anti-tax pledge and support a constitutional balanced budget amendment (though Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) may be wavering as to whether or not they’re willing to raise revenue through tax reform).

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) — who the GOP decided to tap as the super committee’s co-chair — has left little doubt as to where he stands on budget matters, calling Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid “cruel Ponzi schemes.” He constantly repeats false claims about the deficit and debt and “falsely characterized the debt limit fight as a consequence of spending policies enacted by President Obama and past Democratic congresses.” There’s little reason to believe that he is willing to cut the sort of deal that would reduce deficits over the long-term in a balanced way, ensuring that the rich and corporations pay their fair share.

Yesterday, the Public Campaign Action Fund provided one more reason to be pessimistic about Hensarling’s role on the committee, noting that his number one campaign donor makes its money aiding and abetting tax dodging and outsourcing:

Hensarling’s number one career donor, for instance, are the employees and PAC of accounting giant KPMG, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. His campaign committee has received $62,250 from company donors.

A few years ago, “KPMG — one of the ‘Big Four’ that dominate global accounting work — admitted it helped wealthy individuals in the US evade tax on billions of dollars of income between 1996 and 2002.” The company agreed to pay “$456 million in fines, restitution and penalties as part of an agreement to defer prosecution of the firm, the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service announced today.”

In 2011, KPMG was rated second place in the “World’s Best Outsourcing Advisors,” by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, “the leading professional association for organizations and individuals involved in transforming the world of business through outsourcing, offshoring, and shared services.”

Corporate tax revenue has plunged to historic lows, and corporate tax reform would be a fantastic way to raise additional government revenue, if the committee found the will to do so. But it actually makes sense that a tax dodger would be Hensarling’s top donor as, in his view, corporate tax avoidance is a good reason to cut the corporate tax rate.

Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND)

During the current August recess, several GOP congressman have felt the heat at town hall meetings from constituents angry over the GOP’s intransigence on tax increases. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was jeered for supporting huge corporate tax cuts, while Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) was told that taxes should go up because “big corporations and the rich have to pay their fair share.” One constituent had a simple message for Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL): “Let’s tax the rich.”

Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND) faced a similar backlash at a town hall in Fargo yesterday, where he was criticized for signing the Americans for Tax Reform’s anti-tax pledge, popularized by the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist:

Several residents grilled Berg for signing the pledge and for his refusal to consider tax increases, specifically for the wealthiest Americans, like him.

“You work for North Dakota residents, not some guy from another state,” West Fargo resident Don Frost said.

Berg was also grilled for supporting the GOP’s push for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution (which former Reagan economic adviser Bruce Bartlett called “mind boggling in its insanity“), as residents rightly noted that approving such an amendment would do nothing for the economy in the short-term (and would be incredibly problematic in the long-term):

However, several residents criticized Berg’s position, saying the amendment won’t solve immediate problems – like getting unemployed Americans back to work.

“The balanced budget amendment is like trying to drain a lake to save a drowning person,” West Fargo resident Darrel Lund said. “People are in trouble now.”

While most of the GOP caucus is dedicated to Norquist’s anti-tax pledge (which says that no additional revenue can ever be raised by the government, for any reason), Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) publicly disavowed the pledge this week. “I don’t care to be associated with it. It’s too constraining,” he said.

Jefferson County, Alabama, may decide to declare bankruptcy today — in what would be the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States history — as it tries to grapple with the fallout of a financing deal with JP Morgan that has left it financially crippled. JP Morgan conspired with a slew of other banks to charge Jefferson County tens of millions of dollars in unnecessary fees; the mega-bank saddled Jefferson County with a predatory swap deal that has driven the county hundreds of millions of dollars into debt.

But as Bloomberg noted today, this “sleaze” deal hasn’t slowed down JP Morgan’s municipal bond business at all:

Yet while JPMorgan’s deals denuded Jefferson County, the company has emerged with its municipal-debt underwriting business unscathed. During the past two years, public officials from California to Massachusetts hired the New York-based bank to arrange $64.7 billion of bond offerings, making it the third- largest underwriter in the market for state and local securities, according to Bloomberg data.

In fact, as Jefferson County tilts on the brink of bankruptcy, JP Morgan is pulling in record profits. In 2010, the bank made $17.4 billion, and during the previous quarter this year, it “reported the biggest quarterly profit in its history.”

As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi put it when describing JP Morgan’s actions in Jefferson County, “Here you can see a trail that leads directly from a billion-dollar predatory swap deal cooked up at the highest levels of America’s biggest banks, across a vast fruited plain of bribes and felonies — ‘the price of doing business,’ as one JP Morgan banker says on tape — all the way down to [one resident's] sewer bill and the mass layoffs in Birmingham.” Jefferson County was forced to furlough 1,000 workers last month in a desperate attempt to save money and avoid bankruptcy.

Since the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) agency lopped one “A” off the U.S.’s AAA credit for the first time, Republican politicians and pundits have been quick to blast the White House for the downgrade. Labeling it “Obama’s downgrade,” GOP lawmakers like Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) blamed Obama’s “failed economic policies” as the root cause. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) insisted that he “warned the President that his plan didn’t cut spending enough but he didn’t listen.” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) even viewed the downgrade as “a vindication of [the GOP's] actions.”

S&P, however, takes the exact opposite view. In fact, the credit agency cited almost every stance the GOP took during the debt ceiling debacle as a reason for the downgrade.

– Tax Increases: During debt negotiations, Republicans obstinately refused to even consider tax increases as part of the deal. On the day S&P announced the downgrade, the agency repeatedly slammed “the majority of Republicans in Congress” for continuing “to resist any measure that would raise revenues,” which, it complained, seems to be a priority that has “dropped down on the menu of policy options.” Contrary to GOP delusion, S&P indicated that it would improve the U.S.’s credit rating if “the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for high earners lapse from 2013 onwards, as the Administration is advocating.”

– Balanced Budget Amendment: Though considered one of “the worst ideas in Washington,” Republicans are continuing their efforts to pass a balanced budget constitutional amendment (BBA) and even suggested that the downgrade would not have happened, or would be reversed, if a BBA were passed. S&P head John Chambers, however, publicly denounced the idea and indicated that a BBA would hurt, not help, the U.S’s creditworthiness. “We think that fiscal rules like these just diminish the flexibility of the government to respond,” he said, adding that S&P would question a BBA’s “credibility.”

– Default Denial: Despite a deluge of warnings from numerous economists and experts, several Republican “default deniers” simply did not believe that failing to raise the debt ceiling would result in negative economic consequences. “The case has not been made that this is an absolute necessity,” said Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI). “I don’t think it’s going to have an adverse on the economy” or “be disruptive to the economy per se,” said now-supercommittee member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA). Yesterday, S&P senior director Joydeep Mukherji noted that this level of skepticism about “the serious consequences of a credit default” was yet another reason for the downgrade. “That a country even has such voices, albeit a minority, is something notable,” he said. “This kind of rhetoric is not common amongst AAA sovereigns.”

That the downgrade is a result of this Tea Party trifecta has forced many Republicans to do what they do often: ignore the facts. Responding to S&P’s default denial charge, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) insisted that “no one said [default] would be acceptable.” And, as is her fashion, Bachmann completely disregarded the facts last night in the Iowa GOP debate. “Standard & Poor’s essentially proved me right,” she said.

It is widely expected that Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) will be announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination to be president of the United States this weekend.

In the past, Perry has staked out extreme views on a number of economic issues. Last year, he called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” and claimed that Americans who are children today will never receive their benefits. He also used this same smear for the Medicaid and Medicare programs.

In an interview with Newsweek’s the Daily Beast last fall that was just published today, Perry expanded further on his belief that these programs are Ponzi schemes:

INTERVIEWER: In Fed Up!, you criticize the progressive era and the changes it produced: the 16th and 17th Amendments, Social Security, Medicare, and so on. I understand being against these things in principle—of longing for a world in which they never existed. But now that they’re part of the fabric of our society, do you think we should actually do away with them?

PERRY: I think every program needs to stand the sunshine of righteous scrutiny. Whether it’s Social Security, whether it’s Medicaid, whether it’s Medicare. You’ve got $115 trillion worth of unfunded liability in those three. They’re bankrupt. They’re a Ponzi scheme. I challenge anybody to stand up and defend the Social Security program that we have today—and particularly defend it to a 27-year-old young man who’s just gotten married and is trying to get his life headed in the right direction economically. I happen to think that the Progressive movement was the beginning of the deterioration of our Constitution from the standpoint of it being abused and misused to do things that Congress wanted to do, and/or the Supreme Court wanted to implement. The New Deal was the launching pad for the Washington largesse as we know it today. And I think we should have a legitimate, honest, national discussion about Washington’s continuing to spend money we don’t have on programs that we don’t need.

A Ponzi scheme is an economic arrangement where the money paid into the system by later entrants is paid right back out as benefits to earlier entrants. None of these social insurance programs that Perry mentioned fit this definition. They benefit those who pay into them with guaranteed benefits. One has to wonder if Perry will be able to get away with maligning these popular programs on the campaign trail.

Last night, during both the GOP presidential primary debate and a post-debate interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that S&P’s downgrade of the United States creditworthiness vindicated her position that the debt ceiling should not have been raised. “Standard & Poor’s essentially proved me right,” she told Hannity, after telling the debate audience that the S&P downgrade came about because the agency said “we don’t have an ability to repay our debt”:

We just heard from Standard & Poor’s, when they dropped our credit rating and what they said is we don’t have an ability to repay our debt. That’s what the final word was from them. I was proved right in my position. We should not have raised the debt ceiling.

Watch it:

After this performance, it’s blatantly clear that Bachmann has no idea what S&P said, because just about every word out of her mouth regarding the agency’s decision was incorrect. For starters, S&P never said “we don’t have an ability to pay our debt.” After all, the agency still rates the U.S. as AA+, meaning it has a “very strong capacity to meet financial commitments.” One S&P analyst characterized the difference between AA+ and AAA as just “degrees of excellence.”

Furthermore, the reasons that S&P issued the downgrade — as it clearly laid out in its release on the subject — were the use of the debt ceiling as a political football and GOP intransigence on taxes. As National Journal put it, “It’s hard to read the S&P analysis as anything other than a blast at Republicans.”

A Standard & Poor’s director added one more justification to the mix yesterday, saying “that one reason the United States lost its triple-A credit rating was that several lawmakers expressed skepticism about the serious consequences of a credit default”:

Without specifically mentioning Republicans, S&P senior director Joydeep Mukherji said the stability and effectiveness of American political institutions were undermined by the fact that “people in the political arena were even talking about a potential default,” Mukherji said.

“That a country even has such voices, albeit a minority, is something notable,” he added. “This kind of rhetoric is not common amongst AAA sovereigns.”

Of course, one of those people expressing skepticism about the severe consequences of not raising the debt ceiling was none other than Michele Bachmann.