The chief executive of a company that hosted a campaign event for Mitt Romney today in Virginia agrees with President Obama that tax revenues should be used to help pay for extensive infrastructure improvement projects. He said that increasing gas tax revenues is the smartest way to pay for an infrastructure package that would fix the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges while also putting Americans back to work.

James Parker, the CEO of Carter Machinery, told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that he disagrees with Obama’s plan to pay for infrastructure spending by taxing the wealthy, but that he agrees new revenues are necessary to pay for a comprehensive transportation package:

“I believe that there’s got to be an economic plan to take care of our roads and our bridges,” Parker said. “Half a trillion over five years — over all of the United States.” Parker disagreed with Obama’s proposal to pay for his own infrastructure plan with a surtax on the wealthy, but he did say he favors a “gas tax” to pay for it.

“You have to have tax revenues to make it happen,” he said of his hope for a massive infrastructure plan.

Their difference on revenues aside, Parker’s support for infrastructure spending isn’t much different from Romney’s. Romney said “we’re going to have to make an investment” in infrastructure at a South Carolina campaign event in December. Parker’s plan to spend $100 billion a year over the next five years is roughly double the spending contained in the transportation bill in front of Congress now (Obama also supports higher levels than the Senate bill), but Romney has thus far not outlined a specific spending plan.

Romney also hasn’t offered a specific way to pay for such infrastructure improvements, saying only that paying for infrastructure would “require a new financing setting,” including “toll roads [and] public/private partnerships” in an interview with CNN last September. Given Romney’s support for the anti-tax pledge authored by activist Grover Norquist, however, it would appear that using new revenues, as Parker suggests, is an option that wouldn’t be on the table.

The Republican Party of Texas released its 2012 platform this month, outlining its policies on taxation, education, and a host of other issues related to the economy. Texas Republicans, according to the platform, support eliminating the minimum wage and the prevailing wage, doing away with the Department of Education and Department of Energy, and “reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education” — but those aren’t even the most damaging positions.

Here’s a look at the five most outrageous beliefs Texas Republicans hold:

1) The party opposes almost all forms of taxation: The Texas GOP supports “repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment,” which instituted a national income tax, and instead favors a wildly regressive national sales tax that would hit low- and middle-income Americans hardest. It also favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent and repealing the capital gains tax and the estate tax, the latter of which it claims is “immoral and should be abolished forever.” On the state level, it supports abolishing property and business taxes, and property taxes on inventory, and opposes efforts to institute a state income tax, an Internet sales tax, professional licensing fees, and taxes on real estate transactions. Instead, it supports “shifting the tax burden to a consumption-based tax.”

2) It supports returning to the gold standard: “We support the return to the time tested precious metal standard for the U.S. dollar,” the platform states, echoing Rep. Ron Paul (R), the state’s eccentric congressman and presidential candidate. While returning to “sound money,” as the platform calls it, is popular among far right-wing conservatives, it is “not feasible for practical and policy reasons,” according to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Most economists agree that the gold standard never worked and that returning to it now would have disastrous consequences for the American economy.

3) It supports privatizing Social Security: Given that Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” during his ill-fated presidential campaign, it may be no surprise that the Texas GOP opposes one of the nation’s most successful federal programs. “We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax,” the platform says, ignoring that had such a plan been enacted prior to the Great Recession, it would have cost an October 2008 retiree tens of thousands of dollars (and that was before the market bottomed out in 2009). Millions of Americans lost everything in private accounts during the recession, and Social Security was all they had left.

4) It opposes multicultural education and “critical thinking”: “We believe the current teaching of a multicultural curriculum is divisive,” the platform says, adding that it supports teaching “common American identity and loyalty instead of political correctness that nurtures alienation among racial and ethnic groups.” In Arizona, where Republicans banned multicultural programs, students in those programs actually out-performed their peers. Texas Republicans also believe “controversial theories” such evolution and climate change — which aren’t controversial at all — “should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced.” There’s more: the GOP also opposes the teaching of “critical thinking skills” because they “focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

5) It supports corporal punishment in schools: “Corporal punishment is effective and legal in Texas,” the platform states, adding that teachers and school boards should be given “more authority to deal with disciplinary problems.” Actual research, however, shows that corporal punishment is bad for children and their education. Research shows that corporal punishment is “associated with an increase in delinquency, antisocial behavior, and aggression in children,” according to the American Psychoanalytic Association, which “strongly condemns” the use of such punishment. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents and schools use other forms of punishment because “corporal punishment is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects.”

(HT Jessica Luther)

Update

Texas Republicans also have radical policies on LGBT issues, voting rights, and health issues like sex education, and Jessica Luther has a run down of the entire platform’s extreme positions.

According to a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, states without an income tax received no discernible boost in growth over the last decade compared to states with relatively high income taxes. Lacking an income tax provided no boost to incomes or employment for the nine states that have chosen to abolish their levies, Bloomberg News reported:

The nine states with the highest personal income taxes on residents outperformed or kept pace on average with the nine that don’t tax their residents’ incomes, according to a study of economic output, unemployment and household income by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. [...]

Per-capita economic output increased an average 10.1 percent in the nine “high-rate” states, led by Oregon, which grew 26 percent from 2001 to 2010. New York, Maryland, Vermont, Hawaii and California also grew faster than the 8.1 percent average for the 50 states.

Among states with no income tax, New Hampshire, Washington, Texas, Florida, Tennessee and Nevada had growth rates below the 50-state average, with Nevada’s economy shrinking 2.7 percent during the period. The average growth rate for the nine no-tax states was 8.7 percent. Three no-tax states grew faster than the national average, led by South Dakota and Wyoming at 22 percent.

Median household income declined an average 0.7 percent among the nine “high-rate” states, compared with a 3.5 percent drop in the nine states without such a levy. The study found no difference in the average unemployment rate between the two groups of states.

“Those who don’t believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny anymore, and actually look at facts and data, recognize that since supply-side economics has been implemented in America, the complete opposite of what supply siders had promised has occurred,” said Ralph Martire, executive director at the nonpartisan Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. But that hasn’t stopped several states from attempting to implement supply-side tax cuts as a solution to their economic woes.