A group of corporations known as Win America has spent much of 2011 advocating for a corporate tax repatriation holiday, a period of time in which the typical 35 percent corporate income tax usually levied when overseas funds are brought back to the United States would be lowered in an effort to stimulate job creation and domestic investment. Such advocacy has been quickly adopted by anti-tax Republicans, who have made the holiday a key plank in their economic platform.

The only problem with the proposal, however, is that there is little evidence from past holidays that another such reprieve from the repatriation tax would have a substantial impact on actual job creation. A new study conducted by professors at the University of Texas, Syracuse University, and the University of Houston, in fact, found that the 2004 version of a repatriation holiday had little effect on job creation, aiding corporations that already had the means to create jobs while helping “the corporate rich” get even richer, Accounting Today reports:

The new research finds that the AJCA mostly benefited relatively mature companies that had had the means to invest and create jobs all along without the financial boost provided by the legislation. The legislation did not even significantly advance a less intensely promoted purpose of the bill: to enable companies battered by a recent recession to strengthen their balance sheets.

“In essence, the corporate rich got richer, and, although the corporate needy and financially stretched may not have gotten poorer, they derived relatively little advantage from the bill,” said Mills.

“None of the many studies of AJCA has been able to document the major increase in investments and jobs that was the main selling point for the legislation,” she added. “What they found, instead, was an upsurge in corporate stock repurchases, an activity associated with lack of investment opportunities and of primary benefit to company shareholders rather than to the economy as a whole. Our research nails down a key reason for these findings by focusing on whether companies faced financial constraints.”

The study isn’t the first of its kind. The Congressional Research Service examined the 2004 holiday and found that “little evidence exists that new investment was spurred.” A former Bush economic adviser who worked in the administration during the 2004 holiday said it “didn’t accomplish its stated goals of bringing jobs and investment to the U.S.” Many of the companies that benefited most from the 2004 holiday used the money to fund projects that would have been completed anyway, while others stashed even more money overseas with the hope another such holiday would come along in the future. Several of the corporations that benefited most from the holiday actually shed tens of thousands of jobs.

The Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, studied the idea of a repatriation tax earlier this year and found that it would have a smaller impact on job creation than virtually any of the other proposals put forth in Congress this year.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) last week unveiled what he’s dubbed his “education and jobs budget.” “I have heard loud and clear that Floridians want their money spent on education and jobs, without additional burdens on families and businesses, and this budget accomplishes that,” Scott said.

Scott’s budget does indeed increase education funding in the Sunshine State by $1 billion over last year (while cutting Medicaid by more than twice that amount). However, Scott should be far from proud about this accomplishment, because, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, that extra money still leaves Florida’s education funding significantly below where it was before the onslaught of the Great Recession:

After adjusting for inflation, Governor Scott’s proposal translates into a $59 per-pupil increase in combined state and local education funding. That’s far from enough to counteract the $823 per-pupil decline in funding that hit schools this year, and even further from restoring all the cuts that the state imposed since the recession started. Under the governor’s proposal, per-pupil state and local funding for education would remain over $1,300 or 17 percent below the pre-recession level of five years ago.

Florida is hardly alone in this regard. In fact, 30 states are now spending less on education than they were in 2008. In ten of those states — South Carolina, Arizona, California, Oklahoma, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Wisconsin, Virginia, and Utah — funding has been cut more than 10 percent below where it was before the recession. But Scott shouldn’t be parading around his education funding increase as if its a huge favor to Florida’s teachers and schoolchildren, as they’re already making do with far less than they were just a few years ago.

As the media fixates on the partisan battle over renewing the soon-to-expire payroll tax cut, the imminent threat of a government shutdown seems to have been lost in the mix. In addition to the payroll tax bill, Congress is far from finalizing an omnibus spending bill that will prevent the federal government from shutting down in three days when its current round of funding runs out:

The increasingly contentious tax dispute threatens to derail what had been an emerging compromise on separate legislation to fund the government through next September, raising the specter of a possible government shutdown this weekend if the conflict is not resolved by Friday.

As they’ve repeatedly done before, the GOP is exploiting the imminent shutdown of the government to push its conservative agenda. On the Senate floor today, Majority Leader Sen. Reid (D-NV) listed many of the GOP demands — including rolling back environmental regulations — that are holding up a compromise on a bill to keep the government’s lights on. “I think that everyone can see very clearly that my friends on the other side of the aisle obviously want to have the government shut down,” Reid said. Watch it:

Reid asked for consent to move to a short-term continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government open while Congress finishes its work. But Minority Leader Sen. McConnell (R-KY) objected to a short-term CR, despite the looming shutdown. He also blocked the Senate from voting on the House GOP-passed payroll tax bill, despite saying yesterday that they should vote on the bill “without delay.”

A shutdown would affect 800,000 federal workers and halt many government services. This is the third time this year Republicans are using the threat of a government shutdown to get what they want. Indeed, the fact that these brinksmanship games have become so routine is probably part of the reason this imminent shutdown has been largely overlooked.

Before the Senate took up its vote on a radical Balanced Budget Amendment proposal today, Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R) — a co-sponsor of the bill — called it “one of the most important pieces of legislation to come before the Senate in decades.” Lee is right: the Balanced Budget Amendment he and his Republican colleagues continue to push is important, since it would have tremendous ramifications for an already-struggling American economy, throwing the country back into the depths of recession.

Fortunately, the amendment failed to garner enough votes to advance, falling 47-53 along party lines. But as Republicans continue to talk about the importance of job creation and economic recovery, their repeated efforts to institute cockamamie economic policies like the Balanced Budget Amendment prove that such talk is only lip-service.

As ThinkProgress has reported since the push for such an amendment began earlier this year, the GOP’s Balanced Budget Amendment would have huge consequences for the economy. If it had been in effect this year, it would have pushed 15 million people out of work and doubled the unemployment rate, as Macroeconomic Advisers and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities made clear last month:

If the 2012 budget were balanced through spending cuts, those cuts would total about $1.5 trillion in 2012 alone, the analysis estimates. Those cuts would throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.

The Republican version of the amendment would have capped spending at 18 percent of GDP and required a three-fifths majority in the Senate to raise taxes, thus requiring the budget to be balanced through drastic spending cuts that touched every federal program.

The Macroeconomic Advisers study found that the spending reductions caused by such an amendment would force deep cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, findings that have been backed up by other studies as well. The Center for American Progress’ Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden, for instance, found that such an amendment would require 25 percent cuts in every government program, from the Pentagon to Social Security to education. CBPP, likewise, found that the Senate version would require 25 percent cuts across the board.

Republicans can continue to claim they are the party that cares about protecting Social Security and Medicare. But by pushing so hard, so often for a radical amendment that analysts on both sides of the aisle have called the “worst idea in Washington,” the GOP’s policies will only exacerbate the effects of the last recession while ensuring that future recessions will be even worse.

As Senate Republicans continue to stand against raising taxes on millionaires — even if it means the current payroll tax cut that’s benefiting every working American expires — Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) took to C-Span today to say he believes that, when it comes to discussing the deficit, his “most liberal” colleagues are “more intellectually honest,” due to their willingness to look at both spending and revenue:

All of us are going to give a little something if we’re going to get out of the hole we’re in. Everybody’s going to see something different…I think it’s better for us to take the pain that we’re going to have to take and make sure it’s meted out in the proper order than take much more severe pain. When I talk to my colleagues on the other side, and some of my closest colleagues are the most liberal, I find them more intellectually honest oftentimes, the very people they want to help, unless we change these [government programs] now are the very people who are going to get hurt if we don’t fix it.

Watch it:

Coburn is absolutely a staunch conservative with whom we disagree on most budgetary issues, but to his credit, he has consistently said that new revenue needs to be a part of any realistic deficit reduction package, acknowledging what the vast majority of his Republican colleagues won’t. He has said it’s “pretty stupid and naive” for Republicans and anti-tax zealots like Grover Norquist to think that a budget deal won’t include new revenue, accurately pointing out the depths to which government revenue has plunged in recent years.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus — chaired by Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) — yesterday released the Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act, a plan meant to boost job creation with the economy still struggling. The bill is a package of public works projects, increased infrastructure spending, a reinstatement of the Making Work Pay tax credit, and an extension of unemployment benefits. The bill would also undo the automatic budget cuts scheduled to take place due to the failure of congress’ fiscal supercommittee to craft a deficit reduction deal.

According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the measures in the bill would create millions of jobs over the next two years:

Cumulatively, the five major job-creation initiatives discussed in this analysis would boost employment by almost 2.3 million jobs in 2012 and almost 3.1 million jobs in 2013. These job-creation measures would accelerate employment gains noticeably in the next two years….The Act for the 99% is clearly focused on the aggregate demand slump at hand and would produce measurable declines in joblessness.

The revenue measures in the bill — including new income tax brackets for millionaires, cutting oil subsidies for oil companies, and instituting a financial transactions tax — would not only pay for the job creation measures but would actually reduce the deficit over ten years. As EPI put it, “the Act for the 99% would invest in job-creating policies in the near term while spreading deficit reduction across 10 years. This is the most constructive way for Congress to approach deficit reduction: Create more taxpayers and generate a self-sustaining recovery before pivoting to net fiscal consolidation.”

This bill, which likely won’t receive a moment of consideration on the House floor, would do far more for job creation than any measure since the 2009 Recovery Act, and would do so in a fiscally responsible way. But Republicans won’t even place a tiny surtax on the wealthiest Americans in order to prevent a $1,000 tax hike on the average middle-class family next year, never mind allowing consideration of the Progressive Caucus’ jobs effort.

House Republicans passed their version of a payroll tax cut extension last night, but not before adding a litany of spending cuts and changes to federal programs that they knew Democrats would never accept. The GOP, which still refuses to tax a relatively small number of millionaires to give an extra $1,000 a year to the average middle class family, included cuts to Medicare benefits and the Affordable Care Act and froze federal worker pay for an additional two years.

But as ThinkProgress reported last week, the bill also targets the unemployed, reducing eligibility for unemployment insurance from 99 weeks to 79 weeks. Eventually, the plan will reduce that eligibility down to 59 weeks — and when it does, it will kick more than 3.3 million unemployed Americans out of the program, according to data from the Department of Labor.

In just four states — California, Florida, Texas, and New York — more than 1.25 million will become ineligible for the program. In each of five other states — North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Illinois — more than 100,000 people will lose their eligibility.

Across the country, Republicans have chosen to paint unemployment insurance as a “lifestyle” that creates laziness among those who use it just to get by. The GOP ignores that there are, on average, four applicants for each open job, decrying the unemployment insurance program for incentivizing joblessness, even though those who are eligible for the program remain out of work only 1.6 weeks longer than those who aren’t eligible.

Unemployment insurance, meanwhile, remains one of the strongest economic stimulus tools available to the federal government, as recent studies have shown that failure to extend them would cost the economy $57 billion in the first three months of 2012. That amounts to a loss of 0.38 percent of GDP, equal to the rate at which the economy grew in 2011.

Ten congressional Democrats joined Republicans in voting for the misguided plan. In the eight states they represent, nearly 886,000 people would become ineligible for unemployment insurance, led by the 584,000 that would lose benefits in Rep. Dennis Cardoza’s (D) home state of California. You can see the full state-by-state breakdown here.