The Georgia Dome is a world-class sporting facility that serves the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons and often hosts the Southeastern Conference basketball tournament, the SEC football championship, an annual bowl game, and the NCAA Tournament. In 2013, it’s slated to host the NCAA Men’s Final Four — college basketball’s biggest event — and it’s been home to two NFL Super Bowls. Judging by the fact that major events keep coming back, the place is in fine shape.

In the eyes of its inhabitants, though, the Georgia Dome is old, crumbling, and wholly inadequate, and if the Falcons and the city of Atlanta get their way, the Dome won’t stand much longer — even though it’s only 20 years old. According to new plans announced by the city of Atlanta and the Falcons yesterday, the Dome will soon be replaced by a $950-million, state-of-the-art facility with a retractable roof. The Georgia Dome — built a measly two decades ago — will be imploded, and taxpayers will be footing at least part of the bill, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

The new plan comes with a higher price. A GWCC-commissioned study released Wednesday put the cost of a new retractable-roof stadium at $947.7 million, up from the $700 million estimated last year for an open-air stadium. Under either plan the public-sector contribution would be an estimated $300 million from an extension of the hotel-motel occupancy tax, passed by the Georgia Legislature in 2010, according to Frank Poe, executive director of the GWCC Authority, the state agency that operates the Dome.

The hotel-motel occupancy tax was originally passed to help finance the construction of the Georgia Dome. It was supposed to expire in 2010, but when the owners of the Falcons threatened to pursue a new stadium in the Atlanta suburbs, the Georgia legislature rushed to extend it so as to keep the team downtown. The extension included an agreement that the Falcons could pursue a new stadium on the same site. Less than two years later, they’re doing exactly that.

The recession and a sluggish economic recovery, meanwhile, crunched Georgia’s state budget and forced deep cuts into areas like education. The state owes local school districts more than $5 billion collectively — Atlanta-area school districts are millions of dollars short. In 2011, the state cut $403 million from its education budget after taking cuts of $300 million and $275 million in the previous two years.

The Falcons want a new stadium because they feel they’re missing out on the riches that come with new skyboxes and luxury suites — amenities the Georgia Dome lacks compared to newer NFL facilities. Still, the team’s value has increased nearly $300 million since owner Arthur Blank bought it in 2002. If the Falcons want a new stadium, they should build one. They just shouldn’t come to taxpayers asking for help.

House Republicans have touted their budget as a prescription for economic growth that will return the United States economy to prosperity. In reality, as ThinkProgress has documented, the GOP budget slashes social spending on programs that protect the most vulnerable while giving more than $3 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest among us — and even after all that, it not only fails to reduce the national debt but actually adds to it.

More than 60 percent of the spending cuts in the GOP budget would come from programs that benefit the poor, including food assistance, Women, Infant, and Children programs, and potentially even tax credits that have huge effects on poverty and hunger. Those cuts would undoubtedly not only hurt adults in struggling families, but harm children as well. According to a new report from the Half In Ten project at the Center for American Progress, millions of children will lose assistance from a number of services, as the following infographic shows:

As Half In Ten’s Melissa Boteach noted yesterday, the GOP budget would also boot nearly 280,000 children from school lunch programs, even while protecting a massive tax break for multimillionaires.

Under the guise of creating economic prosperity, Republicans have pursued a tax-and-cut ideology with reckless abandon over the last two years, taking the axe to vital social safety net programs while also cutting tax rates on the wealthy. The casualties of the Republican agenda, however, are not numbers on a chart — they are poor kids who are struggling to survive.

Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde (R) has been a staunch opponent of the Buffett Rule, the minimum tax on millionaires co-sponsored by likely Democratic Senate nominee Rep. Tammy Baldwin, since beginning his campaign. Sticking with Republican talking points, Hovde has called the rule a “political gimmick” that “does nothing to balance the budget.”

But in a 2009 interview on CNBC, Hovde appeared to have a different take on raising taxes on the rich, as Daniel Bice from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

During a March 2009 appearance on CNBC-TV, Hovde – CEO of Washington-based Hovde Capital Advisors and chief investment officer of private-equity firm Hovde Acquisition LLC – offered a widespread critique of President Barack Obama and congressional spending.

“And then you look over on the tax side,” the millionaire money man said (beginning at the 7:25 mark). “Look, I have no problem with me getting charged higher taxes. I’ve been blessed in my life. And I’ve been very fortunate.”

Watch it (at 7:25):

Hovde’s remark sure sounds like an implicit endorsement of raising taxes on the rich — which the Buffett Rule would do — but at an appearance this week, he assured local media that it was not. Instead, it was a call to end another egregious tax loophole that largely benefits the wealthy. “I’m almost certain that discussion was in regards to, you know, I would be willing to pay more in taxes from the standpoint [of] ‘get rid of the carried interest,’” Hovde told the Journal Sentinel.

Republicans by-and-large oppose closing the carried-interest loophole, which allows wealthy money managers to lower their tax rates, even though it would raise more than $4 billion a year from just the wealthiest 25 hedge fund managers in America. Hovde might be onto something, though — even if Republicans in Congress support the carried-interest loophole, a vast majority of Americans think it should be closed.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) today faced further backlash from religious groups after attempting to use Catholic social teaching to justify the House Republican budget. Ryan spoke this morning at Georgetown University in Washington, where he was met by faculty members and religious groups who protested his budget’s drastic cuts to programs that help the poor.

About 90 members of Georgetown’s faculty, including two dozen Jesuit priests, signed a letter telling Ryan that he is “profoundly misreading Church teaching” and that his budget would have “devastating consequences” for poor Americans:

However, we would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few. As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has wisely noted in several letters to Congress – “a just framework for future budgets cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons.” Catholic bishops recently wrote that “the House-passed budget resolution fails to meet these moral criteria.”

Small protests also occurred outside the speech, where Georgetown students held up signs that read, “Stop the war on the poor.” Catholics United, a progressive group, unfurled a 50-foot banner asking Ryan, “Were you there when they crucified the poor?”

As ThinkProgress has noted, Ryan’s budget appears to ignore Catholic social teaching, and religious leaders, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have criticized its cuts to programs that help the poor as “unjustified and wrong.” The backlash is similar to what Ryan faced last year, when religious leaders hammered him for adhering more closely to the policies of anti-government, anti-religion author Ayn Rand — who Ryan said inspired him to enter politics — than to the teachings of the church. Before today’s speech, however, Ryan backtracked on his admiration of Rand, saying, “I reject her philosophy.”

House Republicans made it clear earlier this year that they had no intention of upholding the debt deal reached in 2011, despite a vow from President Obama that he would veto any appropriations bills that attempted to cut more spending than was agreed upon last August and a pledge from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that the deal would be upheld in the Senate.

After earlier indications that they would make substantial cuts to domestic programs to preserve defense spending, the House Appropriations Committee made it official yesterday, setting a spending level $27 billion below the level agreed to in the debt deal. The committee, bowing to the GOP’s more conservative wing, will make deep cuts to food assistance, financial regulations, and a host of other programs, setting up the potential for a government shutdown when the fiscal year ends in October, Politico reports:

The House begins with a total of $1.028 trillion for discretionary spending, $19 billion below the $1.047 trillion target set last summer and $15 billion below what was enacted just months ago for the current 2012 fiscal year. Republicans would also go $8 billion over the caps set in the Budget Control Act for defense spending, and the result would be a net reduction of more than $27 billion from all other appropriations.

This translates into an added cut of about 5 percent, with the burden falling chiefly on a half-dozen domestic spending bills affecting nutrition programs, transportation, financial regulatory agencies, natural resources, and especially the labor, health and education bill cited by Dicks.

After GOP leadership worked with Democrats to form the debt deal last year, the party’s conservatives have seemingly wrangled control back from Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). House Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers (R-KY) opposed efforts to break the deal but went along at Boehner’s urging in attempts to assuage more conservative members — even still, four conservatives pushed Rogers to cut as much as $97 billion from the debt agreement.

Senate Republicans, despite McConnell’s stated position last week, are now making similar rumblings. South Dakota Sen. John Thune (R) said Wednesday that the Senate GOP may back House Republicans in setting lower spending limits, saying, “I think we’ve got to be as aggressive as we can in trying to rein in the cost of government, the growth of government.” With White House officials reiterating the president’s veto threat, however, 2012 is shaping up similarly to the summer of 2011, when Republicans repeatedly pushed the government to the brink of shutdown and nearly caused its default before striking a debt deal at the last minute.