Nearly 70 percent of Americans now say that cutting the deficit is an important goal for 2012, with 84 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of Democrats, and 64 percent of Independents rating it as their top priority. There’s a major problem, though: when asked about specific programs, wide majorities almost always favor either increasing spending or maintaining the current level, according to the Pew Research Center.

On education, for instance, 62 percent favor increases and 25 percent favor maintaining the current level. More than 90 percent favor either an increased level or the current level of spending on veteran’s benefits; and more than 80 percent favor increasing levels or maintaining the current level on college financial aid, public school spending, Medicare, and Social Security. The only program that even gains a plurality of support for reduced spending levels is aid to the world’s needy, as the following chart from Pew shows:

Of course, cutting aid to the world’s needy would do virtually nothing to reduce the deficit. Though Americans think it represents anywhere from 10 percent to one-third of the federal budget, in reality, it makes up less than one percent of federal spending.

By contrast, Americans actually do support one way to reduce the federal deficit: raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. (HT: Sarah Kliff)

Democrats in the New Jersey state legislature have twice passed a millionaire’s tax, only to see it vetoed by Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) both times. But they’re going to give it another go this summer, hoping that the third time is the charm:

Assembly Majority Leader Lou Greenwald, a Democrat from Voorhees who has attracted pointed criticism from the governor, said both chambers will present plans to increase taxes on earnings over $1 million. He said the surcharge would raise about $800 million, all of which would be used to pay for property tax credits for senior citizens who make less than $150,000 and other homeowners with incomes under $75,000.

Christie has vetoed virtually the same plan in each of the past two years, and he has been pushing a plan to reduce income taxes by 10 percent over three years.

Christie has been attempting to implement an income tax cut that would primarily benefit the wealthy, but New Jersey’s revenue projections came in much lower than expected.

Christie’s justification for vetoing the tax is that millionaires will flee New Jersey to escape it. However, study after study has shown that simply isn’t the case. Steve Roth at the economics blog Angry Bear has shown that millionaires simply don’t congregate in low-tax states, noting that “of the 12 states with the highest concentration of millionaires, 10 (83%) have above- or at-trend (in this case, median) income tax rates”:

Even Christie’s chief economist once backed a millionaire’s tax to address the Garden State’s budget woes, but his boss appears no closer to changing his mind.

An independent report (PDF) commissioned by the city of Oakland concluded that the crowd-control tactics that the Oakland Police Department used to subdue Occupy protesters last year were “outdated, dangerous, and ineffective.” This report comes on the heels of last month’s report from a different outside monitor that reached the same conclusions.

In its 180-page report, The Frazier Group consulting firm outlined the internal issues plaguing Oakland’s police department, ranging from too much command turnover to limited funds to a lack of compliance with the national standards for police conduct. The consultants concluded that the October 25 clashes between Occupiers and police forces — when police attempted to subdue protesters with rubber bullets, flash grenades, and smoke bombs, injuring an Iraq War veteran in the process — were due to a combination of these factors:

Aircraft accident investigations frequently reveal that airplane crashes are caused by a series of cascading events, not a singular problem. We at Frazier Group feel that this analogy appropriately describes our observations within the Oakland Police Department. Years of diminishing resources, increasing workload and failure to keep pace with national current standards and preferred practices led to the cascading elements resulting in the flawed responses noted during the events of October 25, 2011.

There have also been investigations into the use of excessive force against Occupy protesters in cities other than Oakland. After the infamous pepper spray incident at an Occupy protest at the University of California-Davis, two outside reports also concluded that the police’s use of force was “unreasonable.”

Though he has been one of Mitt Romney’s most visible supporters, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) took aim yesterday at both Romney’s Super PAC and one Romney’s most controversial talking points. In an interview on PBS’s NewsHour, McCain told Judy Woodruff that because casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson makes a huge portion of his profits from a casino in Macau, his massive spending in support of Mitt Romney and other right-wing candidates is a form of foreign money influencing American elections:

WOODRUFF: This question of campaign money, highlighted today by the announcement that there’s a huge amount of money coming in from one donor in the state of Nevada.

MCCAIN: Mmmm hmmm. Mr. Adeleson, who gave large amounts of money to the Gingrich campaign and much of Mr. Adeleson’s casino profits, that go to him, come from this casino in Macau.

WOODRUFF: Which says what?

MCCAIN: This which says that obviously, maybe in a round-about way, foreign money is coming into an American campaign, political campaigns.

WOODRUFF: Because of the profits that the casinos in Macau…

MCCAIN: Yes, that is a great deal of money. And, again, we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization that Teddy Roosevelt had that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and that corporations are not people. That’s why we have different laws that govern corporations than govern individual citizens. And so to say that corporations are people, again, flies in the face of all the traditional Supreme Court decisions that we have made — that have been made in the past.

Watch the video:

Romney, of course, said in August that “corporations are people, my friend,” a claim that he and his campaign surrogates have vigorously defended since.

Adelson gave $10 million to the pro-Romney Restore Our Future Super PAC this week — after giving millions more to fund a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC’s attacks on Romney during the GOP primaries. According to Forbes, Adelson and his wife are willing to spend a “limitless” amount in order to defeat President Obama.

Though it is illegal for non-citizens to spend any money to influence U.S. selections directly, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United ruling left the door wide open for the American employees of American subsidiaries of foreign owned corporations — and even sovereign wealth funds — to spend millions or billions from their corporate treasuries on “independent” expenditures.

President Obama will announce a new immigration policy today that will allow some undocumented youths to avoid deportation and receive work permits to remain in the United States. Students in the U.S. who are in deportation proceedings or those who would have qualified for the DREAM Act and have yet to come forward to Department of Homeland Security officials will not be deported and will be allowed to work in the United States.

Though exact details of the plan are still unclear, it could benefit as many as one million undocumented students living in the country, and it will almost certainly have tangible benefits for the long-term health of the American economy.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the DREAM Act — which Republicans blocked in 2010 — would increase federal revenues by $1.7 billion over the next 10 years, reducing federal deficits by $2.2 billion over that time. DREAM-eligible students would generate between $1.4 and $3.6 trillion in taxable income over the course of their working lives, according to a study by UCLA’s North American Integration and Development Center.

DREAM-eligible youth could also help fill the 16 million shortfall of college-educated workers that is expected to hit the U.S. by 2025, and with 31.5 percent of science and engineering graduates coming from Latino backgrounds, Obama’s decision could add 252,000 new scientists, engineers, and technical workers to the nation’s dwindling supply in those fields.

The decision will help raise wages for American workers too. “As long as a cheap, compliant pool of undocumented labor is available, employers have every reason to take advantage of the situation, keeping wages as low as possible,” Cristina Jimenez wrote in the American Prospect in 2010. “Only when undocumented immigrants have the ability to exercise complete workplace rights will they help exert upward pressure on wages and labor standards that will benefit other workers.”

These benefits are obvious even to leading Republicans. “The economy will be better when that [undocumented] kid is able to fully realize his potential and break the pattern of his parent’s illegal activity,” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said in 2010. Obama’s decision isn’t just good because it protects young adults who have spent most of their lives establishing homes in the United States, it’s good because it will help our struggling economy too.