Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

2012 GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich is outdoing his Republican rivals in promising enormous tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans. According to an independent analysis by the Tax Policy Center, Gingrich’s plan would violate basic notions of fairness by requiring middle-class families to pay higher tax rates than millionaires.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with it. Gingrich’s plan is by far the most fiscally reckless plan to be released by a major 2012 contender. The magnitude of the tax cuts he is proposing to the wealthy and corporations would drive the debt to unprecedented and dangerous levels even if federal spending is cut drastically.

Gingrich has not proposed specific levels for federal spending, so to analyze the effect of his plan on the debt, we assumed that he adopts all of the draconian spending cuts in House Budget Committee Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget. Gingrich originally dismissed the Ryan budget as “right-wing social engineering,” but later said he would vote for it.

The spending levels in the Ryan budget are unrealistically and irresponsibly low. And yet Gingrich’s tax giveaways are so enormous that there wouldn’t be nearly enough revenue to fund even this extreme conservative vision of government.

The Gingrich plan would reduce federal revenues by $1.28 trillion below CBO’s baseline, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, resulting in revenues of about 13.2 percent of GDP. That is an absurdly low level. Unsurprisingly, therefore Gingrich’s plan would pile up debt shockingly fast. Ultimately, Gingrich’s plan would:

– Result in perpetual trillion-dollar deficits: The budget deficit is expected to be 6.2 percent of GDP in the current fiscal year, but projected to decline in the coming years. With Gingrich’s tax plan in place, however, deficits would be even higher in perpetuity. In the best year under his plan, fiscal year 2015, the deficit would be $1.2 trillion, or 6.6 percent of GDP. Annual deficits would continue to mount, reaching $2 trillion in just over a decade. Again, this assumes that drastic spending cuts also take place.

– Explode the debt to historic levels: Under the Gingrich plan, the publicly-held debt would double by 2019, and triple by 2024. By the end of a second Gingrich term as president, the debt would reach $25 trillion, or more than 100 percent of GDP. The United States will have added about $12.5 trillion in debt during that period, with no end in sight.

– Commit the United States to trillion dollar interest payments on the debt: By enacting a tax plan with grossly inadequate revenues, the U.S. would be committing to pay ever-increasing sums of money to creditors like China. Under Gingrich’s plan, by 2021 the United States would be paying more than $1 trillion every year just in interest on the debt. Interest on the debt would represent nearly a quarter of all government spending.

Of course, if Gingrich can’t get spending down to the Ryan level, his deficits would be larger and his debt higher. In short, Gingrich’s tax plan simply cannot be taken seriously. As fiscal policy goes, it is every bit as ridiculous as his nutty proposals to replace school janitors with child laborers or colonize the moon.

In January, San Francisco will officially be the first U.S. city to have a minimum wage of above $10, nearly $3 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. And San Francisco is not the only place where workers will see a little extra pay in 2012 due to a minimum wage increase, helping them weather tough economic times.

It would actually take a minimum wage of about $9.92 today to match the buying power of the minimum wage in 1968. But according to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the Tea Party favorite, this doesn’t matter because only bad workers get stuck making minimum wage, whereas everyone else quickly makes more because of the magic of the market:

JOHNSON: Bottom line: when you’re a good worker you don’t stay at minimum wage for long. Trust me on that. It’s not universal. It’s not universal, but trust me as an employer, as an employer I certainly didn’t want to lose good employees. And so you actually have a better marketplace. And so if your employer is not paying you good wages and you’re a good worker, you go look for other places. Now that’s hard to do, that’s hard to do when we have such high levels of unemployment. But, again, I would get back to we don’t have a very attractive place for business investment.

Watch it:

But it’s simply not true that only bad workers wind up making minimum wage for substantial amounts of time. In fact, a study by economists William Carrington and Bruce Fallick found that a “nontrivial” group of already disadvantaged workers spends large amounts of time making minimum wage:

[W]e identify a nontrivial fraction of workers that spend substantial portions of their post-school career on minimum or near minimum wage jobs. For example, we estimate that more than 8 percent of workers spend at least 50 percent of their first 10 post-school years working in jobs paying less than the minimum wage plus $1.00. We find that workers with such minimum wage careers are largely drawn from demographic groups with generally low wages: women, minorities, and the less-educated.

These workers hail from populations that already face the short end of the stick when it comes to employment, and their time making minimum wage is no indication of their work ethic. Research by Center for American Progress chief economist Heather Boushey has confirmed this data, finding “that over a third of prime-age adults (aged 25-64) in minimum wage jobs remained in them three years later.”

Even during tough economic times, increasing the minimum wage can play a key role in making life better for many workers (without, as conservatives always claim, causing job loss). But Johnson and other conservatives would rather demonize those workers doing the best they can in a system that prevents many workers from ever moving up. (HT: The Uptake)

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) has consistently advocated for steep budget cuts that compromise public safety and essential government services. For instance, he signed into law a budget that slashed education funding by $900 million. Instead of lawnmowers, one school district had to resort to using sheep to cut grass.

Now, The Patriot-News reports that the state’s proposed budget cuts could force the Pennsylvania State Police to layoff 500 state troopers. As a result, Pennsylvanians who call 911 for emergency assistance may have to wait days before the police can respond:

Imagine calling 911 for the Pennsylvania State Police and not seeing a trooper for hours, even days.

It’s a scenario that state lawmakers and troopers foresee if the department’s budget is cut 5 percent next year, forcing what would be the first layoffs in the state police history.

An internal department document obtained by The Patriot-News forecasts the potential for 400 to 500 trooper layoffs under a budget proposal to trim the department’s spending. That’s approximately 10 percent of the nearly 4,400 troopers currently employed by the department. The cuts would also force stations around the state to close.

The department provides full- or part-time police service to two-thirds of the state’s municipalities and is relied upon by virtually all police departments to provide specialized services such as DNA, drug and ballistics testing.

This likely budget scenario will require the state police to close five barracks, freeze civilian hiring, and eliminate cadet academy classes until at least July 2013. The police will also be hard-pressed to replace the 150 troopers who typically retire each year, as well as the 1,500 troopers who will become eligible for retirement in the next five years.

Pennsylvania State Troopers Association president Bruce Edwards said, “I don’t want to sugarcoat it. That’s what is going to happen.” Edwards says Pennsylvania could have a public safety disaster on its hands.

Corbett could have avoided making many of these damaging cuts by simply ending a special interest tax break for corporations and natural gas companies. Of the top 15 gas producing states, Pennsylvania is the only one that doesn’t tax companies that use fracking to extract natural gas. The tax could give the state $400 million annually. But the governor, who received more than $835,000 from oil and natural gas companies during his campaign, has only offered to support a completely inadequate one-time fee, proving his loyalty to corporate profits over public safety.

The Tax Policy Center yesterday released its analysis of 2012 GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s “flat” tax plan, which calls for an optional 15 percent personal income tax, as well as the elimination of taxes on capital gains and inheritance. According to TPC, Gingrich’s plan would give millionaires a $600,000 annual tax cut, letting them pay a lower tax rate than middle-class families.

Overall, Gingrich’s plan gives half of its benefits to the richest one percent of taxpayers. And as it turns out, this is nothing new for Gingrich.

In 1998, Gingrich released a plan to spend $1 trillion of the surplus engineered under President Clinton on a tax cut. A Citizens for Tax Justice analysis released at the time found that Gingrich’s plan would have given 60 percent of its benefit to the richest two percent of taxpayers, while giving middle-class families a whopping 75 cents in tax relief per week:

The fact that Speaker Gingrich’s suggested tax cuts are so heavily tilted toward the very top of the income scale makes his plan even more troubling. Our analysis of the three key tax changes the Speaker has mentioned finds that:

– 60 percent of the tax cuts would go to the two percent of taxpayers making more than $200,000 a year.

– The average tax cut in the over $200,000 group would exceed $17,600 per year.

– In contrast, less than 5 percent of the Speaker’s tax cuts would go to the 70 percent of taxpayers making less than $50,000 a year. The average tax cut for these taxpayers would be only $39 a year, or 75 cents a week.

It seems that in the last 13 years, Gingrich has decided that the major flaw in his plan was not giving a big enough tax break to the rich, so he upped the ante with his latest proposal, even as more evidence comes out showing that tax cuts for the rich don’t actually trickle down to help the rest of the economy. It’s worth remembering that Gingrich warned in 1993 about the horrifying effects President Clinton’s tax policy would have on the economy — instead, Clinton’s policies helped usher in the longest sustained period of economic growth in the nation’s history, with 23 million jobs created.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) made news early in his presidential campaign for declaring Social Security, one of the federal government’s most popular and successful programs, unconstitutional. He hit the headlines again just two weeks later when, during a campaign stop in Iowa, he called it a “Ponzi scheme.”

But now, as part of a million dollar ad buy meant to resuscitate his campaign before the Iowa caucuses, Perry is attempting to pitch himself as a defender of Social Security. Decrying Washington’s “political correctness,” Perry claims he isn’t allowed to say that “Washington insiders are bankrupting Social Security,” an interesting claim given his apparent desire to fully dismantle it:

PERRY: Washington is the capital of political correctness, where double speak reigns and truth is frowned upon. You can’t say that congressmen becoming lobbyists is a form of legal corruption or that we give aid money to countries that oppose America. Or that Washington insiders are bankrupting Social Security. You and I know it’s true, but not politically correct. I’m Rick Perry, an outsider who will overhaul Washington and tell you the truth.

Watch it:

Perry first declared Social Security unconstitutional in August, telling The Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano that the Founding Fathers weren’t “thinking about a federally operated program of pensions” when they drafted the Constitution. He then made the infamous Ponzi scheme remark two weeks later. He’s also offered support for a privatization plan that has been a proven failure.

Perry isn’t the only Republican who has targeted Social Security in the past, but is trying to paint himself as a defender of the program now. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) also called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, yet claimed (inaccurately) that Democrats were bankrupting the program last week. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (R), a proponent of privatization, made the same false claim.

Perry and his Republican friends continue to ignore basic facts about Social Security and its future. Despite Perry’s claims, Social Security not going bankrupt — it has a $2.6 trillion surplus and is fully solvent for at least another 25 years — and it’s long-term viability isn’t hard to fix. The problem is, Perry and his GOP colleagues continue to willingly ignore the easiest way to ensure Social Security’s solvency for the next three-quarters of a century.