Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail have spent much of the year trying to gut social safety net programs vital to the livelihood of America’s poor and elderly citizens. From House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Medicare-ending budget plan to multiple proposals from the GOP’s presidential candidates, conservatives have sought to extract massive cuts from important programs, even while supplying the wealthiest Americans with massive tax cuts.

But Americans continue to rely heavily on safety net programs to stay afloat, according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). Without the permanent safety net programs (including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various assistance programs) and temporary programs included in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (which Republicans have falsely claimed didn’t work), more than a quarter of the country’s population would have fallen beneath the poverty line in 2010, CBPP says:

Our report also shows that if the government safety net as a whole — these temporary initiatives (all were featured in the 2009 Recovery Act) plus safety-net policies already in place when the recession hit — hadn’t existed in 2010, the poverty rate would have been 28.6 percent, nearly twice the actual 15.5 percent.

CBPP’s report comes on the heels of newly-refined poverty measures from the Census Bureau that painted an even bleaker picture of American poverty. According to the new measure, 16 percent of the population, or approximately 49.1 million Americans, lived in poverty in 2010, up from 46.2 million found in the official report released in September. The bulk of that difference comes from seniors, the very people who rely most on social safety net programs. Because the alternative measure takes out-of-pocket medical expenses into account, it found that nearly 16 percent of those over age 65 lived in poverty in 2010, up from 9 percent in the September report.

Yesterday, Jefferson County, Alabama, filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, the final step in a sordid tale involving sewers, credit swaps, and some of the nation’s biggest banks. The bankruptcy became necessary “after an agreement among elected officials and investors to refinance $3.1 billion in sewer bonds fell apart.”

The swap deal that sunk Jefferson County was crafted by the mega-bank JP Morgan Chase (in concert with other banks, including Goldman Sachs). 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.” And while Jefferson County was pushed over the cliff, JP Morgan has bounced back to record profits, and its municipal business has continued “unscathed.”

In a desperate attempt to avoid bankruptcy, Jefferson County furloughed employees and cut back on its police force so much that it no longer dispatched officers to traffic accidents. Of course, Jefferson County officials played their role in the fiasco, accepting bribes in connection with the deal. But JP Morgan was at the forefront, paying off officials, collecting tens of millions in fees, and foisting a risky deal onto the people of Jefferson County when there was no economic reason for it (other than to bolster the bank’s bottom line).

Adding insult to injury, House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) — who represents Jefferson County — not only fought against passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, but is still trying to slow down the regulation of derivatives like those that decimated his constituents’ community, leaving the door open for the same sort of toxic deal to take place again.

Last night’s GOP debate in Michigan focused primarily on the economy, and for the first time, the Republican presidential candidates spent ample time talking about America’s housing crisis, one of the biggest drags on the country’s economic recovery. Few of the candidates had broached the subject before, and when they did, the results were often disastrous, like when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) insisted that the government should not try to prevent foreclosures and allow the housing market to “hit bottom.”

That answer earned Romney a strong rebuke from Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R), who oversees the state with the highest foreclosure rate in the nation. Romney “didn’t fully understand what was going on in the state of Nevada,” Sandoval said, adding that the GOP candidates should examine Nevada’s process, which requires mortgage mediation.

As the debate moderators noted, American homes have lost $7 trillion in value in five years, four million Americans are either behind on their payments or in foreclosure, and a quarter of the nation’s homeowners are underwater. The Republican candidates, however, ignored Sandoval’s advice and paid no attention to those facts, choosing instead to offer no substantive solutions to questions about the housing crisis. ThinkProgress compiled a video of the candidates’ answers, including this exchange between Romney and CNBC senior economic reporter Steve Liesman:

LIESMAN: Governor Romney, we have created 2.7 million jobs since February, 2010. Over that period of time, the housing market has continued to decline. We are at 2003 price levels now.

LIESMAN: If we keep going the way we are going, in four or five years, we’ll be at 1999 price levels. The $7 trillion figure that Maria mentioned could almost double. Are you willing to let that happen in America?

ROMNEY: And exactly what would you do instead? Would you decide to have –

LIESMAN: I’m asking you.

ROMNEY: … well, to have the federal government go out and buy all the homes in America? That’s not going to happen in this country. Markets work. When you have government play its heavy hand, markets blow up and people get hurt. And the reason we have the housing crises we have is that the federal government played too heavy a role in our markets. The federal government came in with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd told banks they had to give loans to people who couldn’t afford to pay them back.

Watch it:

Letting the market work, however, has only created further drags on the American economy. Foreclosures drag down home values for entire neighborhoods, and according to a study highlighted by the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal, “foreclosures were responsible for 15% to 30% of the decline in residential investment from 2007 to 2009 and 20% to 40% of the decline in auto sales over the same period.” Letting the market work has also led to rampant fraud from financial institutions that use robo-signing and fake notarization to speed the foreclosure process.

By trying to pin the blame on the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the candidates are also ignoring basic facts. Fannie and Freddie, to be sure, made mistakes, but it was the private loan industry that triggered the housing crisis. More than 84 percent of subprime loans were issued by private-sector firms, and nearly 83 percent of subprime loans issued to middle- and low-income borrowers were financed by the private loan industry. Wall Street banks then divided up those loans and spread them around the globe, leading to the worldwide financial crisis of 2008.

If anything, the entire Republican platform on how to fix the economy was summed up in the five minutes its presidential candidates spent discussing the housing crisis last night. Instead of acknowledging and addressing clearly-stated facts, the GOP continues to pander to its base with ideas that wouldn’t pass muster in a freshman economics class.

During the debate over the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, Democrats proposed taxing the nation’s biggest banks in order to to build up a fund that would be tapped in the event a mega-bank failed, which would allow the government to take apart a failing firm without using taxpayer dollars. Republicans objected to the fee and ultimately forced it to be stripped from the bill. The GOP also opposed and killed a bank tax that would have been used to pay for the law’s implementation.

As if that wasn’t enough, the Obama administration has repeatedly called for placing a tax on the biggest banks (which it has named the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee); Republicans have steadfastly refused to consider it. But last night, former Gov. Jon Huntsman (R-UT) endorsed just that idea during the Republican presidential primary debate, accurately explaining that placing a tax on the biggest banks would be a way to limit their out-of-control growth:

HUNTSMAN: With respect to the banks that are too-big-to-fail, you know today we’ve got, as I mentioned earlier, six institutions that are equal to 60, 65 percent of our GDP, $9.4 trillion. They have an implied guarantee by the taxpayers that they’ll be protected. That’s not right, that’s not fair for the taxpayers.

Q: So do you break them up?

HUNTSMAN: I say we need to right-size them. [...]

Q: How would you accomplish that? How would you right-size them?

HUNTSMAN: I think we ought to set up some sort of fund. I think we ought to charge some sort of fee from the banks. That mitigates the risk that otherwise the taxpayers are carrying. There’s got to be something that takes the risk from the taxpayers off the table so that these institutions don’t go forward with this implied assumption that we’re going to bail them out at the end of the day.

Watch it:

Huntsman is absolutely right that a fee would help limit the growth of the biggest banks, assuming that the fee grew heftier as a bank accumulated more assets. Such a fee would also help level the playing field between large and small institutions, negating some of the advantages in access to funding that a large bank has. The Congressional Budget Office has said that a bank tax would “improve the competitive position of small- and medium-size banks, probably leading to some increase in their share of the loan market.”

Huntsman has already proposed returning to “the spirit of Glass-Steagall,” the New Deal era regulation that prevented banks from merging traditional commercial banking with investment banking. The bank fee is just one more idea showing that he at least seems legitimately concerned with reining in the power of the nation’s largest financial institutions.

Outstanding student loan debt is projected this year to hit $1 trillion for the first time, while the average college student now graduates with more than $25,000 in debt. Federal student aid has failed to keep pace with the skyrocketing cost of tuition, even as the U.S.’s educational attainment begins to trail that of other developed nations.

According to the Lumina Foundation, by 2025, the U.S. will be short 16 million college educated workers. But according to the GOP presidential candidates, who took part in yet another primary debate last night, the government should deal with these problems by doing away with federal student loans:

REP. RON PAUL (R-TX): The policy of student loans is a total failure. I mean, a trillion dollars of debt, and it’s going to be dumped on the taxpayer?…There’s nothing more dramatically failing than that program…We should get rid of the loan programs.

NEWT GINGRICH: It’s an absurdity. What does it do? It expands the ability of students to stay in college longer because they don’t see the cost.

GOV. RICK PERRY (R-TX): I don’t think the federal government should be in the business of paying for programs and building up huge debt out there.

Watch a compilation:

As ThinkProgress’ Zaid Jilani has explained, “millions of Americans have benefited from the ability to go to school thanks to the federal student lending programs first pioneered in the 1960′s and 1970′s. According to data from the Department of Education, 9,020,465 Americans utilized the federally subsidized student loan program during the last academic year.” Blaming federal aid for rising tuition is a favorite conservative canard, with little basis in reality.

As for the problem of student loan debt, the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal has some good ideas here, including mass refinancing of all student loans “into the current low rates the financial sector enjoys.” Instead of embracing something along those lines — and helping students gain an education that for more and more people is becoming a heavier and heavier burden — the GOP wants to throw the student loan program out altogether and leave students to the mercy of the banks.