National Journal reported last night that a new coalition of corporations has formed, with the goal of pushing the fiscal super committee (tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction) to adopt a lower corporate tax rate:

A group of blue chip companies and business organizations is launching a coalition Tuesday morning to push Congress to lower the corporate tax rate and make it more competitive with America’s trading partners.

The Reducing America’s Taxes Equitably Coalition includes Altria Client Services, FedEx, Verizon, the Association of American Railroads and Walt Disney

“In a global economy where capital is highly mobile, it is simply harder to compete from America,” the companies’ executives wrote in a letter. “A lower corporate tax rate will boost investment in the U.S., bringing more American jobs, innovation and growth.”

But American companies already pay the second lowest taxes in the developed world, once all of the loopholes and deductions in the corporate tax code are accounted for. American corporations are sitting on record amounts of cash, so its unclear why more cash (in the form of tax breaks) would lead to more hiring.

In addition, as the Nation’s Allison Kilkenny noted, two of the companies involved in the coalition — Verizon and FedEx — are already dodging their share of taxes:

Both Verizon and FedEx are multibillion-dollar corporations that pay lower tax rates than you do, and the reason Verizon is able to do this is by creatively redirecting profits to their foreign wireless partner, Vodafone.

Vodafone has been the longtime target of UK Uncut due to its equally unscrupulous tax dodging practices. The company claims a large portion of its revenue should not be subject to British taxation because they reroute the cash through Luxembourg, which has a tax rate of under 10 percent. [...] So here we have an exploitative company, Verizon, channeling its income to another corrupt partner in Britain, all in the name of avoiding taxation.

And then there’s FedEx, a company with a long history of battling the IRS, but which has thus far remained relatively under the radar despite its shady practices. The GAO released a report in 2007 that stated FedEx has twenty-one subsidiaries in jurisdictions listed as tax havens (Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, three in the Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Grenada, two in Hong Kong, three in Ireland, two in Netherland Antilles, Singapore, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Turks and Caicos Islands and the US Virgin Islands).

Several companies, including Boeing and Cisco, have lobbied for tax breaks while engaging in widespread tax dodging. In fact, a whole slew of companies that pay incredibly low U.S. corporate taxes are lobbying for a specific tax break on overseas profit that, when tried previously, did not cause any of its desired effects.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), who was once courted to run for president, attacked President Obama’s plan to raise taxes on millionaires, telling Fox News host Greta Van Susteren last night that Obama’s policies have already created “a lot fewer” wealthy people:

DANIELS: You know, the president keeps ranting on and on about these, you know, millionaires he dislikes so much. By the way, he ought to feel pretty good. There are a lot fewer of them than there were when he became president. Just look at the statistics.

Watch it:

Daniels’ claim plays into the GOP’s new “class warfare” talking point, but if one actually “look[s] at the statistics,” one has to wonder if Daniels thinks it’s opposite day. As the Wall Street Journal reported in late June, there are actually a record number of millionaires now, two and half years into the Obama administration:

According to the annual World Wealth Report from Merill Lynch and Capgemini, the U.S. had 3.1 million millionaires in 2010, up from 2.86 million in 2009. The latest figure tops the pre-crisis peak of three million.[...]

The wealth held by these millionaires also hit a record. North American millionaires had a combined wealth of $11.6 trillion, up from $10.7 trillion in 2009.

According to a different group’s measurement of millionaires, the number of millionaires grew 16 percent in 2009, Obama’s first year in office, and another 8 percent in 2010.

In fact, the growth in the number and wealth of millionaires over the past two years exposes the fallacy of Daniels’ argument — these people don’t need any more help. The growth of the wealthy, and especially the super-wealthy, while the middle- and working-class have seen wages stagnate or drop shows the “two-speed recovery,” which has been good for millionaires but bad for everyone else.

As part of his deficit reduction plan, President Obama has proposed some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, which would come via allowing the Bush tax cuts for the two highest tax brackets to expire and implementing the “Buffett rule,” which stipulates that millionaires and billionaires shouldn’t pay a lower tax rate than middle-class Americans.

Republicans have predictably, blown their collective top over the Buffett rule. And today, they were aided by a bizarre Associated Press “fact-check,” which purported to reveal something disingenuous about Obama’s plan. “President Barack Obama says he wants to make sure millionaires are taxed at higher rates than their secretaries. The data say they already are,” the AP wrote, noting that the average tax rate for those in the highest tax brackets is, of course, higher than the average rate for middle-class or low-income Americans.

This is not surprising, and it certainly doesn’t make the Buffett rule any less relevant. After all, as Center for American Progress Action Fund Director of Fiscal Reform Seth Hanlon wrote, “tons of data — including data cited in the AP article itself — confirm the compelling need for a Buffett rule because large numbers of super-rich individuals are indeed paying lower taxes than middle-class families“:

– 1,470 households reported income of more than $1 million in 2009 but paid zero federal income tax on it.

– The average federal income tax rate of the richest 400 people in the country in 2008 was 18.11 percent. In 2007 it was 16.62 percent. [...] The tax rates paid by the “Fortunate 400” have plummeted since the mid-1990s, when their average effective rates were about 30 percent. [...]

– Due to the so-called carried interest loophole, managers of hedge funds and private equity funds pay 15 percent capital gains rates, and no payroll taxes, on their profits from managing other people’s money. That’s less than what middle-class families pay just in payroll taxes on their wages — let alone what they pay in income taxes.

As Hanlon noted, “AP’s ‘fact check’ misses the point of the Buffett rule. The point is not to ensure that rich people on average pay higher taxes than middle-class people on average,” but “to ensure that all households with incomes above $1 million pay at least what middle-class families are paying.”

This is not the first time this month that the AP’s “fact-checkers” have bungled the facts regarding Obama’s economic plans. At this rate, they should think about opening a new division to fact-check the fact-checkers.

Yesterday, President Obama offered a deficit reduction plan that aims to save $3 trillion over the next 10 years. Half of those funds will be revenue raised from a return to the Clinton administration’s tax rate on those in the top two income tax brackets, as well as the new “Buffett rule” — a minimum tax on those making over $1 million, named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who continually notes that he pays less in taxes than middle-class Americans. Heading off the GOP’s new talking point, Obama noted that this tax policy “is not class warfare. It’s math.”

The release of this plan immediately spurred the natural Republican tax apoplexy, with the GOP presidential candidates decrying tax increases as a surefire way to destroy jobs:

MITT ROMNEY: President Obama’s plan to raise taxes will have a crushing impact on economic growth. Higher taxes mean fewer jobs – it’s that simple. This is yet another indication that President Obama has no clue how to bring our economy back.

RICK PERRY: President Obama’s plan is a bait and switch that offers more than a trillion dollars in higher taxes for a promise of temporary tax relief…Worst of all, the Obama plan fails to provide the certainty employers need to create jobs.

MICHELE BACHMANN: Mr. President – you don’t create jobs by increasing taxes on job creators. The President’s plan to raise taxes on the American people is the wrong policy to create economic growth and jobs and shows he doesn’t understand how to turn our economy around…If Warren Buffett believes he doesn’t pay enough taxes, then he should write a check today to the Treasury, but he and the President shouldn’t enact warfare on the millions of small businesses, on charities and on middle class America with increased tax burdens.

RON PAUL:[W]hen the President starts targeting the so-called rich, he’s really targeting small business owners, so ultimately he’s threatening the little guy. The President’s plan, then, will result in a fatal broadside to the national economy from Main Street on down….A $1.5 trillion tax hike will do nothing to help us out of this mess we’re in, and will more than likely create more problems, lead to less investment, and cause more job loss at a time when Americans of all kinds are hurting.

JON HUNTSMAN: President Obama continues to demonstrate that he has no new ideas on how to create American jobs. For two and a half years he’s been peddling a version of the Buffett Tax Hike as a key pillar of his failed attempt to tax and spend and regulate this country to prosperity. That simply hasn’t worked and it won’t work now.

HERMAN CAIN: Here’s what I can tell [Obama] about math: raising taxes on anyone, no matter their income level, will do nothing to stimulate our economy, create jobs or balance our federal budget. Increasing taxes on the private sector will destroy jobs, further damaging our economy and sending even less revenue to the federal government.

NEWT GINGRICH: In the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression, job creation must be job one for our political leaders. Instead, the president has chosen a path of political gamesmanship and class warfare with a plan that would kill jobs with higher taxes on small businesses and private capital.

Rick Santorum did not release an official statement.

A quick review of the math, however, hollows out what’s left of this GOP talking point. The Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden noted that “in the past 60 years, job growth has actually been greater in years when the top income tax rate was much higher than it is now.” He points out that while the top five years of job growth “boast marginal tax rates at 70 percent or higher,” the two worst years were 2008 and 2009 “when the top marginal tax rate was 35 percent.” In fact, “in the 13 years that the top marginal tax rate has been at its current level or lower, only one year even cracks the top 20 in overall job creation.”

If math is not these Republicans’ strong suit, perhaps they will fare better with history. The stark difference in tax rates between the Clinton and Bush administrations mirrors the stark difference in job creation. After creating 23.1 million jobs, Clinton pushed unemployment rate down to a 30-year low. Job growth under Bush, however, “was the worst in any cycle in more than 60 years.” His policies led to only 2.6 million jobs created.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) toured the Waterloo, Iowa factory of OMJC Signals Inc. yesterday, where she told the workers that her policy plan for building job growth — lower taxes, less government spending, and fewer government regulations — would help companies like OMJC succeed and “grow, grow, grow, grow, grow” in ways they haven’t been able to under President Obama.

There was only one problem. OMJC builds and assembles traffic lights, and its business and profits depend on the types of government investments into roads, bridges, and infrastructure that have been consistently proposed by Obama and Democrats and consistently opposed by Bachmann and Republicans, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

Standing before a row of shiny orange trailers carrying portable solar-powered traffic lights, she said her plans for a smaller government with fewer rules and lower spending would help OMJC Signal Inc. “grow, grow, grow, grow, grow.”

“That’s my goal — to see you succeed wildly,” the Minnesota congresswoman told a gathering of OMJC workers on the plant floor here in the central Iowa town where she grew up.

But OMJC thrives on the kind of road and bridge spending that Obama has promoted as a key remedy to the nation’s economic slowdown. As much as 80% of OMJC’s revenue comes from government, according to the company’s chief executive, Arlen Yost.

OMJC’s owner told the Times that business has remained stable throughout the recession as the government has maintained investments in infrastructure projects in an attempt to spur the economy. But while Bachmann claims she wants to help OMJC “grow, grow, grow, grow, grow,” her voting record tells a different story. Before Bachmann voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, she and her Republican colleagues worked to reduce the amount of infrastructure spending contained in the package. Bachmann and the GOP opposed a Democratic infrastructure spending plan in 2010. And of Obama’s recent jobs plan, Bachmann said it was full of “temporary gimmicks” and that Congress shouldn’t pass it.

Not only would Bachmann’s policies hurt the business she claimed she wanted to help, they continue to hurt the nation she wants to lead. As ThinkProgress has reported, more than a quarter of America’s bridges are rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. In Minnesota, 13 percent of bridges are deficient or obsolete, and nearly a third of the state’s roads are considered poor or mediocre. In Iowa, Bachmann’s birthplace and center of her presidential campaign, 27 percent of the bridges are rated deficient or obsolete, and more than 40 percent of its roads are poor or mediocre. According to recent studies, the U.S. needs as much as $2 trillion just to bring its infrastructure up to date.

Not surprisingly, Republican lawmakers have uniformly come out against President Obama’s plan to pay down the deficit in part by raising taxes on the wealthy. But Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) had an usual attack on the proposal, telling NPR that, like the 2009 Economic Recovery Act, Obama’s new plan is just “more taxes and not enough cuts”:

SHELBY: Oh you mean his big tax increase and all that? Absolutely, I have a lot of reaction to it. We’ve seen this movie before. It’s like the son of stimulus. It’s always more taxes and not enough cuts.

Listen here:

As the Senate Banking Committee’s ranking member, Shelby almost certainly knows that the Recovery Act did not raise taxes. In fact, it cut them by $288 billion, mostly through tax credits for 95 percent of working families. There were zero tax increases in the stimulus package, nor were there any cuts, as the entire purpose of the bill was to jumpstart the economy.

The Boston Globe noted today that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has a habit of lambasting the “failures” of government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has been profiting from investments in the two firms:

On his financial disclosure statement filed last month, Romney reported owning between $250,001 and $500,000 in a mutual fund that invests in debt notes of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, among other government entities. Over the previous year, he had reported earning between $15,001 and $50,000 in interest from those investments.

And unlike most of Romney’s financial holdings, which are held in a blind trust that is overseen by a trustee and not known to Romney, this particular investment was among those that would have been known to Romney.

The investment was also not on Romney’s 2007 financial disclosure form. A Romney aide said the investments were made in the latter half of 2007, after he had filed the earlier disclosure form. That was around the time that the scale of the housing crisis was coming into focus.

As Mother Jones’ Andy Kroll noted, this particular fund of Romney’s “also included investments in Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase. If Romney invested in those banks in the second half of 2007, as a campaign aide says he did, then Romney’s investments benefited from the federal bailout of those banks, which received tens of billions of dollars to stay afloat.”

This isn’t the first time that Romney’s investments have run headlong into his political positions. He owns a significant amount of stock in Boeing, and has been vociferously defending the mega-manufacturer against allegations that it engaged in union-busting. But the investments in both the nation’s biggest banks, as well as Fannie and Freddie, are more egregious because they are not in Romney’s blind investment trust, but in an investment vehicle that he knew about.

During the debate over whether or not to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, many Republicans pushed for adoption of the radical “cut, cap, and balance” plan, which would have led the country into default without the imposition of a federal cap on spending and the adoption of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

The debt ceiling fight has come and gone, but it seems that “cut, cap, and balance” will remain, as Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) told Politico that GOP presidential hopeful Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) will make the plan’s provisions “a centerpiece of his platform“:

Freshman Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), who is helping to set up the the Hill meeting for Perry, is serving as an economic adviser to the campaign. He said Perry plans to make House Republicans’ signature Cut, Cap and Balance approach to the budget this year “a centerpiece of his platform.” Mulvaney added that he hopes to help “put some meat on that bone.”

This plan has some significant problems, the first of which is that a balanced budget amendment is economically bone-headed, as it would force the government to cut spending during an economic downturn, making the downturn worse.

Bill Hoagland, a budget adviser to Republican leaders from 1982 to 2007, called the amendment “a political cheap shot,” while Scott Galupo, a former staffer for Boeher, has called the idea “quite simply, insane.” Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, noted that the amendment is a phony solution to nation’s budget problems that allows Republicans to support a balanced budget while not having to “support anything politically unpopular.”

A cap on spending, meanwhile, bring its own set of problems. “Cut, cap, and balance” stipulates a cap on spending at 18 percent of the economy, a level which the House Republican budget (complete with its elimination of Medicare) doesn’t attain until after 2040.

As the Center for American Progress’ Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden noted, actually getting spending down to that level would require 25 percent cuts in every government program, including the Pentagon and Social Security (or, alternatively, deeper cuts in other programs for every program that gets exempted). No President in the last 50 years, including conservative icon Reagan, has even proposed a budget with spending so low.

As Bloomberg reported this week, Perry “has so far been the least specific about the policies he’d pursue” amongst the GOP’s primary contenders. If his embrace of “cut, cap, and balance” is any indication of the direction in which he’s going, the specifics are not going to be pretty.

Since jumping in the race, GOP presidential front runner Gov. Rick Perry’s (TX) radical views on Social Security have garnered the most attention. And for good reason, as Perry lands far to the right of even his most right-wing opponents in calling the entitlement program a unconstitutional “Ponzi scheme.” A fan of secession, Perry even suggested letting individual states “secede” from Social Security altogether.

But Perry’s extremism is taking focus away from the fact that most of the top contenders also embrace a radical idea: Social Security privatization. As the AP reports, most of the top Republicans running are reviving President George W. Bush’s unpopular plan to create private investment accounts for young workers — believing that “workers could get a better return from investing in publicly traded securities.” Indeed, the idea of risking retirement funds in the stock market — three years after the financial crash on Wall Street — is finding a champion in almost ever Republican candidate:

MITT ROMNEY: The former Massachusetts governor has a well-worn record of advocating to privatize Social Security. In 2007, when Romney was also running for president, he pushed for the creation of Social Security personal accounts three separate times. When a town hall attendee told him such a plan was “privatization,” Romney replied, “you call it privatization. I call it a private account.” He enshrined this position in his 2010 book No Apology, stating “individual retirement accounts would encourage more Americans to invest in the private sector that powers our economy.”

MICHELE BACHMANN: In an interview last year, the Minnesota congresswoman insisted young workers “need to have some options in their life, so that going forward they can have ownership for their own Social Security, their own retirement, something they can pass on to the beneficiary of their choice.” When asked in 2008 how Republicans could promote privatization without frightening seniors, she responded, “I believe that we should ensure that those currently receiving Social Security should continue to do so in its current form, but also give a new generation of workers the right to invest some of their money into accounts of their own.” In 2006, she pledged to vote for “regulated individual retirement accounts.”

RON PAUL: During last week’s presidential debate, Rep. Paul (TX) drew applause for stating, “What I would like to do is to allow all the young people to get out of Social Security and go on their own!” He told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last year that he’d support “turn[ing] this money over and give the individual money like an investment retirement fund that they manage.”

RICK SANTORUM: After writing an op-ed calling to “establish personal retirement accounts” in 2005, the former Pennsylvania senator actually launched his 2012 presidential campaign by reminding everyone that he supports these President George W. Bush-style private accounts. He hedged last month on calling for the immediate creation of accounts, but only because having to additionally pay for Social Security benefits while financing such accounts “is to me just something that we can’t do right now.” “I’d love to be able to do it,” he added.

HERMAN CAIN: In the Tea Party debate last week, the pizza mogul declared, “I support a personal retirement system option in order to phase [out] the current system. We know that this works.”

NEWT GINGRICH: Last year, the former House Speaker endorsed House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to create personal accounts. He believed such a plan would “triple the earnings” for future retirees. He has touted such a plan since 2007.

Jon Huntsman has not specifically called for private accounts but he did say at the Tea Party debate that “I don’t think anything should be off the table.”

A Social Security policy that ties retirement funds to the volatility of the stock market is nothing short of foolhardy. Three years ago, if Bush had succeeded in creating private accounts, an American worker would have lost $26,000 on the market. As ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron notes, millions of Americans who did have a private account like a 401(k) lost nearly everything in the crisis, and Social Security is the only source of retirement funds they have left. The volatility of market behavior in large industrialized economies like ours “illustrates the real potential for decades-long declines that could erode the value of a private retirement account invested in stocks.”

There are better, safer ways to ensure that Social Security is solvent for the next 75 years. But as long as Republican candidates refuse to learn very recent lessons from the past few years, they will cleave to policies that endanger the golden years of millions of Americans.