Republicans have been kvetching today about the fact that, as of Sunday, the U.S. will have the highest statutory corporate tax rate in the world following a scheduled cut in Japan’s corporate tax. “The United States is a world leader in countless ways. ‘World’s Highest Taxes’ is a title we should give up as soon as possible,” wrote Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) in a Fox News op-ed.

“This isn’t an April Fool’s Day joke; as of April 1, the United States of America will have reached the inauspicious position of having the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) in a statement “I want America to be number one in many things, but having the highest corporate tax rate is definitely not one of them.”

This is constant refrain from Republicans, who then blame the supposedly high U.S. corporate tax rate for discouraging job creation. But as we’ve noted time and time again, while the U.S. has a high statutory corporate tax rate (meaning the rate on paper), U.S. corporations actually pay incredibly low taxes due to the ever-proliferating loopholes, credits, and deductions in the tax code and the use of overseas tax havens.

U.S. corporate taxes that were actually paid (the effective rate) fell to a 40 year low of 12.1 percent in fiscal year 2011, despite corporate profits rebounding to their pre-Great Recession heights. The U.S. both taxes its corporations less and raises less in revenue from corporate taxes than its foreign competitors:

Politico’s Ben White also pointed out that Japan has a value added tax, so it isn’t actually true that the U.S. will have the highest corporate tax rate on Sunday. As billionaire investor Warren Buffett has said, “it is a myth” that U.S. corporate taxes are high. “Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness,” Buffett added.

Of course, it is theoretically possible to lower the U.S. corporate income tax rate while simultaneously raising revenue to help reduce the federal deficit by closing loopholes and cracking down on tax havens. But Republicans have absolutely no interest in that.

The jackpot for the upcoming Mega Millions lottery drawing has grown to a whopping $640 million. This sky-high total has some state legislators hoping for a big payday via the tax bill that would come from one of their residents taking home the prize. “I’d love it if a Rhode Islander wins,” said Rep. Helio Melo, the chairman of his state House’s Finance Committee.

If a Rhode Islander were lucky enough to win, the state’s take would be more than $20 million. But the fact that state legislators are giddy at the prospect of a lottery-financed tax windfall merely shows how foolhardy it is that states depend on lottery revenue at all. As Elizabeth Winslow McAuliffe pointed out in Public Integrity, “while lotteries were initially perceived as fiscal saviors, they have not generated the anticipated revenue.” Many states earmark their lottery revenue for a specific purpose, most often education, but it turns out that that formula isn’t workable:

The educational “bonus” appears to be nonexistent. Miller and Pierce (1997) studied the short- and long-term effect of education lotteries. They found that lottery states did indeed increase per-capita spending on education during the lottery’s early years. However, after some time these states actually decreased their overall spending on education. In contrast, states without lotteries increased education spending over time. In fact, nonlottery states spend, on average, 10 percent more of their budgets on education than lottery states (Gearey 1997).

The National Gambling Impact Study Commission has found that “there is reason to doubt if earmarked lottery revenues in fact have the effect of increasing funds available for the specified purpose.” The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government also found that “new gambling operations that are intended to pay for normal increases in general state spending may add to, rather than ease, state budget imbalances.”

As Citizens for Tax Justice put it, “it becomes a case of diminishing returns as neighboring states introduce new and better lotto games. Then, states either lose business to another state or hit a ceiling for how many lotto tickets a population can buy. That is, as a revenue source, it’s a short or medium term quick fix but not a long term solution.”

And then there’s the simple fact that the lottery is, in essence, a regressive tax, with about a 38 percent tax rate (a rate usually reserved for the very richest Americans). According to the Bloomberg News “Sucker Index,” residents of Georgia are doing the most damage to their own finances through the lottery, followed by residents of Massachusetts.

The government programs that comprise America’s social safety net have had a profound effect on working families and the unemployed, particularly throughout the Great Recession and the slow economic recovery that has followed. But tax credits, which often go overlooked in discussions on how to prevent poverty, also have a huge impact on working families.

Many working families are now being led by single mothers or women who are primary breadwinners, and according to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, two primary tax credits are responsible for keeping millions of women and girls out of poverty each year. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which benefits low-income workers, kept an estimated 3.4 million women above the poverty line in 2010. Add in the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and the number of women who avoided poverty swells to nearly 5 million, CBPP found:

The numbers rise when you include a second federal income tax credit — the less well-known CTC, which provides up to $1,000 per child for working families: together, the CTC and EITC kept 4.9 million women and girls above the poverty line in 2010, including more than 800,000 just by the Recovery Act’s expansions of both credits.

As CBPP’s Arloc Sherman noted, research shows that the EITC continues to help women even after they retire. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the EITC helps boost Social Security retirement benefits for women, since those benefits are based on prior income history.

Unfortunately, the newly-adopted House GOP budget could end many tax breaks in order to finance a massive tax cut for the rich, though Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) refuses to say which breaks would be eliminated. If the GOP and Ryan continue their history of targeting programs that benefit the poor to pay for tax breaks for the rich, however, beneficial tax credits like the EITC and CTC could be at risk.

In response to a question from ThinkProgress at a policy summit yesterday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) not only attempted to defend the tax cuts for millionaires in his new budget, but also dove into greater detail about why he so drastically cuts support programs for poor and low-income Americans:

RYAN: With respect to these programs you mentioned. They’re growing at unsustainable rates. Food stamps have quadrupled over the last ten years, and that’s in excess of the recession. We have to remember that if we just keep these programs on this unsustainable path, then they will crash. Then we’ll have a debt crisis. Then we will not be able to service these people, because under a debt crisis you’re cutting indiscriminately across the board in a very ugly way… So what we’re saying is let’s get ahead of this problem, let’s pre-empt a debt crisis, and let’s get these programs working better so that they’re growing at a more sustainable rate.

It’s not clear what Ryan means by “quadrupled… in excess of the recession.” From 2000 to 2008, before the recession began, spending on food stamps (otherwise known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) went from $18.3 billion to $39.3 billion — barely doubling. By 2011, it had increased to $77.6 billion. That is closer to a quadrupling from 2000, but this includes the effects of the recession.

More importantly, SNAP spending as a matter of dollar amounts does not indicate whether the program is sustainable. What counts on that score is spending as a percentage of GDP, or what share of the wealth produced annually by the American economy is required to fund the program.

In 2000, SNAP accounted for 0.19 percent of GDP. By 2008 that had risen to a slightly larger small slice of 0.27 percent of GDP. It then spiked to 0.52 percent in 2011 as a result of the recession. But over the coming years, as the economy recovers and fewer Americans will be in need of economic assistance, it’s projected to drop back below 0.3 percent.

It’s also worth noting that Ryan is pushing catastrophic cuts to SNAP and similar programs as the answer to, well, catastrophic cuts that Paul Ryan fears are coming. According to CAP Senior Fellow Donna Cooper, the cuts to food stamps in the House Republican budget would “force America’s poorest families to forgo as many as 8.2 billion meals a year,” with the loss in grocery sales causing the elimination of about 184,000 jobs.

The U.S. has the weakest labor protections in the industrialized world, and is the only developed nation that doesn’t guarantee workers some sort of paid sick leave. Lost productivity due to sick workers attending work and infecting other employees costs the U.S. economy $180 billion annually.

Yesterday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) released the Rebuild America Act, and one of its many provisions would ensure that all workers have access to paid sick days. Inevitably, proposals of this sort draw the ire of Big Business, which claims that every policy meant to aid workers will drive up costs and increase joblessness. But as David Madland noted yesterday, that simply isn’t the case:

The aftermath of the Great Recession has cultivated a fear that policies that support workers and their families will subsequently constrain business profitability and cause employers to lay off workers or close their doors entirely. Contrary to fears from the business community, the passage of paid sick days legislation in San Francisco (the first city to enact such a law) did not hamper job growth. In fact San Francisco created more jobs and experienced more economic growth after passing the law than the surrounding counties without such legislation.

According to a study in the American Journal of Public Health, a lack of paid sick days led to millions of additional cases of H1N1 flu in 2009. Since the federal government hasn’t acted, several cities have passed paid sick day requirements of their own (though Republicans in Wisconsin overrode Milwaukee’s law last year). Harkin’s bill — in addition to its myriad other strong proposals — would end America’s shameful rein as the only developed nation that forces workers to choose between their health and their job.

House Republicans officially passed Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) radical budget yesterday without a single Democratic vote. Today, during an interview on Fox and Friends, Ryan was asked by Fox’s Steve Doocy whether anybody is “getting shortchanged” by the budget. Ryan, of course, neglected to mention those who would inevitably be harmed by his eviscerating of the social safety net, pointing only to federal employees who would see their pay cut:

DOOCY: But is somebody, is anybody getting shortchanged with the big cuts you’re making?

RYAN: Well, to me it’s more than a campaign document, it’s a governing document. It’s showing the country specifically how we can save and strengthen Medicare, how we can get our budget balanced and our debt paid off, and how we can grow our economy. Yeah, we’re cutting $5.3 trillion out of the President’s budget. We’re cutting every government agency, we’re taking money out of every government agency because we have to make them do more with less, we’re cutting federal pay, we’re cutting federal employee workforce, we’re restrengthening and restructuring the safety net so that we get people back to work, on their feet instead of having a welfare state. So we’re cutting all over the place.

Watch it:

To hear Ryan tell it, no one will be hurt by the budget except federal employees, because agencies will magically be able to “do more with less.” But here’s what Ryan’s budget would actually do in practice:

– Eliminate food assistance for eight million low-income Americans.

– Eliminate Pell Grants for more than one million low-income students.

– Increase health care costs for seniors by $5,900 per year.

– Cause 47 million Americans to lose their health insurance in ten years.

– Push 14 million Americans out of Medicaid.

Overall, 62 percent of the cuts in Ryan’s budget come directly from programs that aid low-income Americans, while non-defense discretionary spending, which encompasses everything from food inspection and education to veterans benefits, would fall to its lowest level in 50 years. But perhaps Ryan doesn’t consider any of this being “shortchanged.”