Despite their professed devotion to tax cuts, a surprising number of Republican lawmakers are less than thrilled with President Obama’s proposed extension of temporary cuts to the payroll tax as part of his jobs package unveiled last night. While the tax holiday for middle- and working-class Americans is one of the most effective ways to stimulate the economy via tax policy, these conservative lawmakers prefer tax breaks go to those who need them least: corporations and the wealthy.

For instance, Tea Party firebrand Rep. Allen West (R-FL) rejected a payroll tax holiday completely on Fox Business last night, saying it has already been tried and that we should “cut this corporate tax rate” instead. Also on Fox Business, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) said he had a problem with the payroll tax holiday because it goes to “people who are already working.” But in the next breath, Gingrey called instead for a tax break for corporations who have kept money overseas. Watch it:

These supply-side tax cuts do little to help the economy or create jobs, as has been shown time and again, because wealthy people tend to save extra money instead of spend it. When Congress passed a tax repatriation holiday in 2004, as Gingrey wishes they would again, it had none of the intended employment benefits. Corporations merely pocketed their low-taxed repatriated billions and subsequently laid off thousands of workers.

Corporations are not lacking cash, thus, a tax cut, which is aimed at freeing up more money to allow them to expand their workforce, would do little help unemployment. In fact, companies are sitting on trillions in cash, yet are still refusing to hire, as this CNN chart demonstrates:

A payroll tax holiday is clearly an idea that should appeal to Republicans, who claim that cutting taxes and regulations is the only path to economic prosperity. But as they have repeatedly demonstrated in their opposition to payroll tax holidays, it is only a certain type of tax cut they are really interested in — those for the wealthy and corporations, not the middle- and working-class Americans who are the primary beneficiaries of the payroll tax holiday.

This morning, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, dismissed the payroll tax holiday as an act of “class warfare.” He seems to be proving himself correct.

President Obama’s plan to kickstart the economy and put the American people back to work includes investing in the nation’s rapidly deteriorating infrastructure, which, as studies have shown, is in need of as much as $2 trillion in immediate investment just to bring it up to date. In the past, Republicans have agreed that infrastructure improvements are needed, but in the context of economic stimulus and in their effort to remain opposed to anything Obama offers, they have chosen to ignore the nation’s infrastructure and jobs crises. Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t mean either crisis will go away.

Republican leadership has continually blocked efforts by Obama and Congressional Democrats to invest in infrastructure improvements, and as a result, bridges and roadways in their states are crumbling. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, about 12 percent of the nation’s bridges are considered “structurally deficient,” the same rating given to the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed in 2007, killing 13 people. Roughly another 12 percent are considered “functionally obsolete.” In four of the five states represented by Republican congressional leadership, the rate of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges outpaces the national average. ThinkProgress compiled a breakdown of the status of roads and bridges in each of those five states and, where applicable, individual congressional districts:

OHIO: 27 percent of the bridges Speaker John Boehner’s home state of Ohio are either “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete,” while one-fourth of its roads are considered poor or mediocre. At the heart of the Midwest, Ohio’s share of the national highway system has 171 highway bridges that are structurally deficient. 10 of those bridges are located in Boehner’s own district. Indeed, Obama singled out the Brent-Spence bridge connecting Ohio and Kentucky as “one of the busiest trucking routes in North America.” A recent Cincinnati Enquirer investigation into the bridge noted that it “is one of only 15 major interstate bridges in the country labeled by the federal government as ‘functionally obsolete’ for failure to meet safety or traffic flow standards.”

KENTUCKY: More than one-third (34 percent) of the bridges in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state are structurally deficient or obsolete, including the Brent-Spence Bridge. Of those bridges, 108 are located on the national highway system, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Nearly one in five of Kentucky’s roads are in poor or mediocre condition.

VIRGINIA: In House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s home state, 26 percent of bridges are considered structurally deficient or obsolete, 104 of which are on the national highway system. Nearly one in four of the state’s roads are considered to be in poor or mediocre condition. In Cantor’s congressional district, 11 national highway bridges are considered deficient.

ARIZONA: In Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl’s home state, 12 percent of the bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” Of those in the national highway system, 25 are structurally deficient. Indeed, a recent report found that the poor rural roads and bridges in Arizona, where 21 percent of roads are considered poor or mediocre, have earned the state the eighth highest rural traffic fatality rate in the nation.

CALIFORNIA: Home to House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, California is perhaps most in need of infrastructure improvement. Thirty percent of its bridges are “structurally deficient or fundamentally obsolete.” Though a well-traveled state, California has a whopping 976 bridges on its national highways that are structurally deficient; 24 of those bridges are in McCarthy’s district. California ranks 19th in the nation for percentage of rural bridges that are structurally deficient, and two-thirds of its major roads are in poor or mediocre condition.

Even as roads and bridges in their states fall apart, Republicans remain opposed to Obama’s efforts to invest in improvement projects. When progressives and Democrats pushed for more infrastructure spending in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Republicans demanded a bigger emphasis on tax cuts. When House Democrats passed a jobs bill geared toward infrastructure investment in February 2010, Republicans derailed it in the Senate. And unless the GOP undergoes a radical shift in priorities in the next few months, yet another plan that will help solve both America’s infrastructure and jobs crises will die at the hands of Congressional Republicans.

The result, as statistics from these five states show, is that the country continues to watch its infrastructure crumble while leaders in the Republican Party sit idly by, refusing to do anything about it.

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

Despite the president’s clearly stated intention last night to provide a jobs plan that includes measures to fully offset the costs of his proposed job creation measures, the Associated Press posted a surprising “fact-check” story that managed to come to the strange conclusion that his plan will not, in fact, be “paid for.” The AP story confuses several different issues, misunderstands the budgeting process, and generally misses the forest for the trees.

Here’s what bothered the AP about the president’s contention that, “Everything in this bill will be paid for“:

Essentially, the jobs plan is an IOU from a president and lawmakers who may not even be in office down the road when the bills come due. Today’s Congress cannot bind a later one for future spending. A future Congress could simply reverse it…there is no guarantee that programs that clearly increase annual deficits in the near term will be paid for in the long term.

They’re not wrong that future Congresses could, theoretically, undo the savings that are passed to pay for the American Jobs Act, but that’s true of every piece of legislation ever. Future Congresses always have the power to reverse the decisions of previous ones, whether the issue is fiscal or otherwise. To say that president’s plan isn’t paid for just because some hypothetical Congress in the future might change the law is to say that anything Congress ever passes means nothing for the same reason. That’s just silly.

But it seems like the AP fundamentally misunderstands how the budget process works. It seems — though, admittedly it’s hard to tell exactly — like the authors believe that future Congresses have to routinely review all prior spending decisions. While it is true that each year, Congress has to approve a budget, and appropriate funding for federal agencies, that appropriated money makes up only about one third of all federal spending in a given year.

The other two-thirds is spent on programs like Social Security, Medicare, and veteran’s benefits, that have been previously set-up and don’t require congressional appropriations on a year to year basis. If the president’s plan makes changes to these “mandatory” programs — and his speech suggested that it would — it won’t be necessary for future Congresses to approve those changes to realize the savings.

And of course, the AP completely forgot about the other side of the ledger. Changes in the tax code today can produce more revenue in the future, and again, future Congresses don’t need to approve those changes each year. Read more

Last night, President Obama unveiled his new jobs agenda, which includes an extension of the payroll tax holiday for workers and employers, as well as a temporary payroll tax reduction as an incentive for businesses to hire more people. As the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and other experts have found, payroll tax cuts are far more stimulative than many of the other tax cut proposals currently on the table.

Many Republicans are already voicing their opposition to the proposal. Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, spoke with NPR last night and revealed that his party’s opposition to the tax cut is rooted in class. The payroll tax cut, Price explained, is a “good nugget from a rhetorical standpoint, for the class warfare that [Obama] seems intent on fighting”:

SIEGEL: Well, let’s pick apart some of what he asked for today. Continuing the payroll tax holiday, both for employers and employees, Republicans on board with that possibly?

PRICE: Well, it’s a tax reduction in his eyes. In fact, it’s just a shift of the money to pay for Social Security. So, from a policy standpoint, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s a good nugget from a rhetorical standpoint, for the class warfare that he seems intent on fighting. But, you know, whether or not that survives, I don’t know. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from an economic standpoint because the money to pay Social Security recipients has to come from somewhere. If it’s not going to come from the payroll tax, then it’s going to come from the general fund. And so, then you’re just borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

Obama’s plan to pay for the working class tax cuts is to end wasteful tax loopholes for corporations and wealthy investors. Price, who touts himself as a pro-growth tax cutter, is waging his own class warfare: protecting tax subsidies for billionaires to prevent substantive tax cuts for working families.

Americans have been flooded with new jobs plans over the last week, with presidential candidates presenting their ideas and President Obama providing an outline of his version in a prime-time address to Congress last night. But hours before Obama’s speech, Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks (R) took to the House floor to tell both Republicans and Democrats that they were overthinking the jobs issue. Brooks’ “surefire” plan to jumpstart the economy, he said, was to kick out all undocumented immigrants so Americans can have their jobs.

BROOKS: There is a surefire way to create jobs now for American citizens: evict all illegal aliens from America and open up millions of jobs for American citizens. That also forces blue-collar wages up, helping American families afford and pursue the American dream. Unfortunately, the White House chases a different dream — a nightmare that pits unemployed Americans against illegal aliens in a competition for scarce jobs.

Watch it, courtesy of Media Matters:

The math behind this plan is simple, Brooks argued. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, there were 8.3 million undocumented immigrants working in America in 2008, and there are currently about 14 million unemployed Americans. The problem is, the math doesn’t work the way Brooks assumes it does. In fact, economists and labor market experts have reached a consensus that immigrants create at least as many jobs as they occupy and are actually a net benefit to the economy, as the money they make and goods they buy leads to economic growth, a fact acknowledged by former President George W. Bush. According to the Economic Policy Institute, immigrant workers actually have a “small but positive” effect on the wages of native born workers.

Unemployed Alabamians, of which there are plenty, didn’t fill thousands of jobs left open when immigrants fled the state after it passed the nation’s most radical anti-immigration law. Instead, Alabama’s agricultural and construction industries have reported drastic labor shortages, leading to financial problems in agriculture and delays in disaster relief due to construction shortages. But the fact that his discriminatory and xenophobic jobs plan wouldn’t work doesn’t matter to Brooks, an anti-immigration radical who earlier this year said he would “do anything short of shooting” immigrants to keep them out of Alabama.

Last night, President Obama rolled out a $450 billion job creation package before a joint session of Congress, calling for a plan that includes a payroll tax reduction, money for infrastructure and school modernization, as well as help for homeowners and reforms of the unemployment insurance program. “This plan is the right thing to do right now. You should pass it,” Obama said.

But while the GOP leadership has made some conciliatory comments — with Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) saying that “the proposals the President outlined tonight merit consideration” — many Republicans have derided the plan by calling it another stimulus, along the lines of the 2009 Recovery Act:

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-MN): “More stimulus? Do we really need ‘son of stimulus’? We passed a trillion dollars in stimulus. Will billions more do the job? There is nothing new here…I hope Congress doesn’t pass this plan.”

REP. DARRELL ISSA (R-CA): “The failed stimulus and its successor policies have proven that massive government deficit spending is not the solution — it is the problem.” Issa also “poo-pooed the president’s job package, saying it sounds like a ‘second stimulus.’”

SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI (R-AK): “Although the plan we heard tonight sounds a lot like a replay of his 2009 stimulus bill, even the President has now come to realize what Americans have known for some time, it simply didn’t work. $800 billion in federal spending got us where we are today.”

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY (R-AL): “This seems to be nothing more than a son of stimulus proposal that will generate more political rhetoric than jobs. If that is the case, I will firmly reject it.”

REP. ANDY HARRIS (R-MD): “We didn’t hear a whole lot new. This is basically ‘stimulus two.’”

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): “Two and a half years after the President’s signature jobs bill was signed into law, 1.7 million fewer Americans have jobs. So, I’d say that Americans have 1.7 million reasons to oppose another stimulus.”

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN REINCE PREIBUS: “Despite one failed stimulus, the President wants even more deficit spending.”

Of course, all of this criticism is based on the incorrect assumption that the 2009 Recovery Act didn’t work. But as the Congressional Budget Office has continually found, the Recovery Act created or supported millions of jobs, keeping the unemployment rate up to two points below where it otherwise would have been. At its height in the third quarter of 2010, Recovery Act funds were supporting up to 3.6 million jobs.

In June of this year, Recovery Act funding was still supporting up to 2.9 million jobs. This chart tracks the change in employment that occurred following the passage of the Recovery Act:

Thus far, economists have offered “mainly positive reviews” of Obama’s plan, with Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics estimating that “the plan would add 2 percentage points to GDP growth next year, add 1.9 million jobs, and cut the unemployment rate by a percentage point.” Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that the plan will boost growth by 1.5 percentage points, while the Economic Policy Institute said that the plan will create 2.6 million jobs and support another 1.6 million, boosting overall employment by almost 4.3 million.

The reason that unemployment is so high, even with the Recovery Act, is that it wasn’t big enough to deal with the scale of the problem. But to Republicans, the millions of jobs created by the Recovery Act signal abject failure, and therefore Obama’s new jobs plan doesn’t warrant consideration, even as the economy struggles to throw off the chains of the Great Recession.