Yesterday, Missouri lawmakers began a special session during which Republicans will try to pay for a business tax cut by eliminating a tax credit that benefits more than 100,000 senior citizens and disabled people.

Missouri Republicans are just the latest in a long list of state legislatures that are funding more corporate tax breaks on the backs of low- and middle-income residents. In this case, Republicans are targeting a property tax credit that helps offset higher rent for some of the state’s most vulnerable citizens:

At stake is a tax credit that provides up to $750 for lower-income elderly and disabled people. Called the “Circuit Breaker,” it is designed to be an offset for the property taxes included in the rent paid by people with incomes of $27,500 or less. The tax credit costs $53 million annually. Repeal is part of a package that also would impose limits and sunset dates on credits targeted to developers. The Circuit Breaker tax credit is the only credit slated for repeal.

“The real issue is that many people with disabilities simply can’t own their own homes because they live on a subsistence income,” said Edward Duff of Joplin, a member of the Governor’s Council on Disability. “It really is a sort of parity to offer these renters this shelter.”

Once again, Republicans have shown they are not averse to raising taxes, as long as they are on the poor. The “circuit-breaker” tax credit is such an important aid for low-income residents that 29 other states offer property tax circuit-breakers or similar programs, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Killing the credit would raise taxes on groups including disabed vets and senior citizens by up to $750 a year.

The proposal has drawn criticism from a diverse range of groups, from conservative anti-tax crusaders to liberal groups. Opponents include the AARP, the Association of Retired Missouri State Employees, the liberal-leaning Missouri Budget Project and the conservative United for Missouri, as well as agencies that work with the disabled on the local level.

The Post-Dispatch reports that Republicans have faced such a backlash for trying to repeal the tax credit that the tax-credit package they crafted may be unraveling. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Chuck Purgason (R), has prepared an alternative plan aimed at spreading tax credit cutbacks more equally among low-income residents and developers.

“Republicans are always portrayed as taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and we didn’t want to do that,” Purgason said. However, it’s unclear if there’s enough of a consensus to pass the alternative bill.

On Monday, America celebrated Labor Day, which is set aside to honor American laborers and their unions. Yet a new report from the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) Albert Shanker Institute titled “American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story is Distorted in High School History Textbooks” finds that America’s high school students are not being properly taught about the contributions of organized labor to American history.

The Shanker Institute report surveyed four high school textbooks — The American Vision, American History, The Americans, and American Anthem — published by major publishers that make up a “significant” portion of the American textbook market and found serious deficiencies in the coverage of labor unions. Here are some highlights from the report:

- The Role Of Unions In Winning Broad Social Protections Is Overlooked: The textbooks surveyed failed to record the history of American unions using their political clout to win social protections for all Americans. This overlooked advocacy includes activism on behalf of the “Progressive Era and New Deal reforms, such as the Social Security Act of 1935, Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency.”

- The Role Of American Labor In Battling Human Rights Abuses Abroad Is Ignored: The report notes that the textbooks surveyed failed to mention the “the important role that the American labor movement played in support of the establishment of free and democratic trade unions in post-war Western Europe.” They also ignored the role that unions played in allying with the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa or “numerous other efforts to support free and democratic unions as a bulwark against totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.”

- Labor’s Role In Winning Civil Rights Is Ignored: One of the major omissions of these textbooks is overlooking the role that unions played in the civil rights movement. The contributions of labor leaders to these movements are ignored, and the labor advocacy conducted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is barely covered. There is no mention in any of the textbooks, for example, that AFL-CIO president George Meany paid $160,000 in 1963 for bail to release King and 2,000 other civil rights demonstrators from jail.

- Anti-Union Behavior By Employers Is Glossed Over: The report finds that the textbooks largely ignore the “history of aggressive and at times violent anti-union behavior by employers.” These abuses are “neither addressed as a significant legal problem nor is it analyzed as a serious denial of First Amendment rights.” For example, The Americans praises Andrew Carnegie’s and John D. Rockefeller’s business successes but fails to note their anti-union behavior.

- Major Strikes Are Misrepresented: Historic strikes are “treated as costly failures, as violent, as lacking public support and backfiring against unions.” The “role [of the employer] in provoking strikes through prolonged, unrelenting worker abuse, and employers’ attempts to suppress strikes, often through illegal and violent means, are glossed over.” For example, American Anthem praises Reagan’s firing of PATCO workers, calling it “decisive.”

The report concludes with a set of recommendations for text book publishers. Included among these is including sections on unionism past the 1960′s, which is very lightly covered, and presenting unionism as a basic right.

With more than 1.5 million of his constituents facing poverty, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) decided yesterday was the right day to sign the Midwest’s “toughest welfare time limit” into law. While Michigan already had a four-year restriction on benefits, the new law sets a stricter limit on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) that will leave tens of thousands of residents without assistance on Oct. 1. According to the state’s Department of Human Services, the new policy will kick 29,700 children out of the aid program:

Gilda Jacobs of the Michigan League for Human Services said she expects about 41,000 people to lose their cash assistance payments on Oct. 1 when the state’s new budget year begins. That includes 29,700 children, according to the Michigan Department of Human Services.

“We’re very, very concerned,” Jacobs said. “As the days go by, new people will be meeting the 48-month limit. … More will be falling off that cliff.”

The new law will reduce the number of children and adults receiving cash assistance by nearly a fifth, from more than 221,000 to around 180,000. Enforcing a four-year limit will save the state more than $60 million annually, according to a House Fiscal Agency analysis.

Snyder justifies the new law as a way to “return[] cash assistance to its original intent as a transitional program to help families while they work toward self-sufficiency.” An official in Snyder’s Department of Human Services simply stated, “Michigan can no longer afford to provide lifetime assistance.”

However, while saving $60 million on the backs of children and low-income families, Snyder decided corporations deserved a $1.7 billion tax cut. That is about “$30 in corporate tax cuts for every dollar saved in welfare benefit cuts.” Shifting the burden to low-income families, however, is well-worn territory for Snyder.

11,000 families have already received letters notifying them that they will lose financial help next month. As Jacobs notes, these families who, “through no fault of their own, can’t find a job” will have to fight harder to survive in a state with the third-highest unemployment rate in the nation. And by opting to slash the earned income tax benefit and reduce the availability of unemployment benefits, Snyder and Michigan Republicans are pushing these families off the financial cliff with barely any net to catch them.

The 2012 GOP presidential candidates will meet in a debate sponsored by Politico and NBC News tonight, which is scheduled to be the first debate involving Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The debate comes on the heels of a dismal jobs report, which showed that zero net jobs were created in August, and as the candidates have begun rolling out their job creation plans.

Each and every GOP candidate — from Mitt Romney and Perry to Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain — has called for a reduction in the corporate tax rate. Romney’s economic plan, unveiled yesterday, calls for lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent (at a cost of $900 billion), while Bachmann has called for a cut down to 9 percent (which would cost more than $2 trillion).

The theory behind the GOP’s call for lower corporate taxes is that more cash will free up companies to begin hiring again. However, as we’ve pointed out time and again, corporations are already sitting on record high cash reserves. Corporate after tax profits are currently the highest they’ve ever been since such data began being recorded in 1947. So it is certainly not a lack of funds that is holding companies back. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities’ Jared Bernstein noted on ABC’s This Week:

Right now, let me give you a number that I think is extremely compelling. The corporate profits as a share of the economy were higher in the last quarter, 2011 second quarter, than at any other quarter in the history of the data, after tax, after-tax profits, going back to 1947.

So if you’re going to tell me that these corporations, who are profitable by not selling into this country, selling into other emerging economies, just need another tax break to get ahead, or that deregulation, which, you know, it’s the deregulatory zeal that got us into this mess, is somehow going to get us out, it’s — that’s just wrong.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it, anyone calling for corporate tax cuts to spur job creation, even while corporations are sitting on trillions, “is blind to reality.” Since the GOP field that will be represented at the debate is unanimous in its belief that corporate tax cuts will fix what ails the jobs market, the moderators would do well to press them on this issue.

Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, director of tax and budget policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

According to our new analysis, the economic plan offered yesterday by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney would deliver a massive $6.6 trillion tax cut that would primarily benefit the very wealthy and corporations. After accounting for the added interest costs that we’ll have to pay, the total cost of Romney’s plan grows to $7.8 trillion over the next 10 years.

Romney lays out several tax policies, all of which primarily benefit the super wealthy.

– Extend all the Bush tax cuts: While everyone got a tax cut from President Bush, the extremely wealthy got the lion’s share of the benefit. In 2010, fully half of the entire benefit from all of the Bush tax cuts flowed to the richest 5 percent of Americans. Extending them all (plus indexing the Alternative Minimum Tax to inflation) will cost nearly $4 trillion, not including interest costs.

– Eliminate capital gains taxes for middle income households: Capital gains tax rates are already extraordinarily low, but middle class Americans don’t enjoy much benefit from that. According to the Tax Policy Center, 67 percent of the entire benefit from lower capital gains tax rates goes to millionaires. Romney’s proposal won’t cost much because it won’t benefit many people.

– Cut corporate taxes: Romney’s proposal to cut the corporate rate by about a third would cost more than $900 billion. Needless to say, this cut would benefit mainly the very rich and corporations.

– Eliminate estate taxes: Right now, only the very biggest, richest fraction of a percent of all estates pay any tax at all. Eliminating even this paltry amount would cost about $175 billion, and would, of course, only benefit a few extremely wealthy heirs and heiresses.

These, along with some other tax changes suggested by Romney (repealing the Affordable Care Act, for example) would result in federal revenue averaging just 16.7 percent of gross domestic product. That’s far below the 20 percent of GDP that Romney says he wants to spend (though, of course, he neglected to lay out what he would cut to get there). It’s even below the levels suggested by House Republican Budget, which abolished Medicare as we know it, slashed Medicaid, and still didn’t balance the budget until 2040.

Taken together, Romney’s fiscal policies would be even worse than the House Budget. His spending levels are the same — though he provides few details as to what he would cut to accomplish this — but his revenue levels are even lower. The result would be continued unsustainable deficits and more debt. In fact, Romney’s plan would yield approximately $6.5 trillion in deficits from 2013 through 2021.

Given these facts, it is odd that Mitt Romney also supports an amendment to the U.S. constitution that would require balanced federal budgets. Romney’s plan doesn’t even come close to balancing the budget, instead resulting in unsustainable deficits and growing debt.

So, how does Romney deal with the fact that his own fiscal plan would be unconstitutional if President Romney got his way? He doesn’t. Either he hasn’t done the math, or he’s hoping you won’t notice his numbers don’t add up. Either way, it doesn’t reflect all that well on him or his economic “plan.”

This morning on ABC, Karl Rove said Rick Perry’s extreme views on Social Security — detailed in his book “Fed Up!” — are “toxic” both in the Republican primary and the general election. Rove also dismissed Perry’s response thus far as “inadequate.”

In Perry’s book, released just nine months ago, he writes on page 48 that Social Security is “by far the best example” of a program “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.” On page 50, he says that we have Social Security “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government.”

Rove said Perry’s views amounted to calling for the end of Social Security and replacing it with a state-level program. At the end of August, Perry confirmed to ThinkProgress that he hasn’t “backed off anything in my book.” Karl Rove believes this will be a major problem:

STEPHANPOLOUS: And a lot of questions about how how Rick Perry will handle this test. So much talk about his books and what he’s written in his books, “Fed Up!” Questioning the 16th Amendment, which imposed the income tax. The 17th Amendment, direct election of Senators. And I think he’s gotten the most attention for what he said about Social Security, calling it a Ponzi scheme. Compares it to a “bad disease” that’s been “imposed on us for 70 years.” You know how much trouble that can be for a Republican candidate in a general election. So how does he handle it and must he disavow some of these statements in the book.

ROVE: What they’ve done thus far is, I think, inadequate. Which is to basically say, “look, we didn’t write the book with the presidential campaign in mind.” Well, okay, fine. But they are going to have to find a way to deal with these things. Because, as you say, they are toxic in a general election environment and they are also toxic in a Republican primary. If you say Social Security is a failure and ought to be replaced by a state-level program, then people are going to say: “What do you mean by that?” And make a judgment based on your answer to it. Each candidate has strengths. Each candidate also has challenges. This, for Governor Perry is his challenge. Now he’s got formidable strengths. But this is his biggest challenge.

Watch it:

Perry’s views on Social Security will likely be a major topic in tonight’s GOP primary debate.