Among the many other policies it enacted, 2009′s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the stimulus) included provisions that provided over $11 billion in tax credits to low and moderate-income families. These policies were extended late last year, but the new Republican tax plan introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would allow them to expire at the end of 2012. A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice breaks down the details:

The child tax credit: The ARRA dropped the amount of income a household must earn to qualify for this credit — which provides any household as much as $1,000 per child — from $12,500 down to $3,000. The Hatch-McConnell plan would let this extension expire, jacking up the threshold to $13,300 next year. This would deny 8.9 million working families, with 16.4 million children, a total of $7.6 billion in assistance for 2013 alone.

The Earned Income Tax Credit: Most families that qualify for this credit have at least one child. The ARRA increased it specifically for families with three or more children, from 40 percent to 45 percent of their qualifying income. Above a certain level of income, the credit phases out, but the ARRA also pushed that phase-out back to a higher level for married couples. The Hatch-McConnell plan would allow both of these changes to expire as well, for a total loss of $3.4 billion for 6.5 million families with 15.9 million children.

Virtually all of the money from these tax credits go to families earning less than $50,000 a year. They provide a total of $11.1 billion to 13.1 million working families with 25.7 million children. And they would all be scrapped should the GOP tax plan go into effect.

The popular conservative response to those who want to increase the nation’s minimum wage, which currently stands at $7.25 per hour, is that doing so will inevitably kill jobs at small businesses. However, studies have shown that raising the minimum wage does not kill jobs, but most certainly helps workers at the low end of the wage scale.

And according to a report from the National Employment Law Project, many of the companies that employ minimum wage workers could certainly afford to increase wages, since, contrary to popular perception, they are the nation’s biggest corporations. Those companies have largely recovered from the recession:

– The majority (66 percent) of low‐wage workers are not employed by small businesses, but rather by large corporations with over 100 employees;

– The 50 largest employers of low‐wage workers have largely recovered from the recession and most are in strong financial positions: 92 percent were profitable last year; 78 percent have been profitable for the last three years; 75 percent have higher revenues now than before the recession; 73 percent have higher cash holdings; and 63 percent have higher operating margins (a measure of profitability);

– Top executive compensation averaged $9.4 million last year at these firms, and they have returned $174.8 billion to shareholders in dividends or share buybacks over the past five years.

The three largest employers of minimum wage workers, Wal‐Mart, Yum! Brands (Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC), and McDonald’s, all are more profitable than they were before the Great Recession:

House Democrats have been circulating a bill to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour, catching the wage up to the purchasing power that it had in the 1960s.

As Congress moves toward passing a 2012 Farm Bill that would, among other things, deprive millions of Americans of food stamps, gut food safety protections, and prematurely force genetically engineered crops onto the market, a new report follows the money poured into the last Farm Bill.

Food & Water Watch, a food safety non-profit, estimates that special interests including agribusinesses, commodity groups, and food manufacturers spent $173.5 million on the 2008 Farm Bill — more than $500,000 a day during the 110th Congress. This vast sum makes the 2008 Farm Bill one of the decade’s most well-financed legislative fights, more than health care reform ($120 million by the Center for Public Integrity’s estimate) and comparable to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law ($250 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics).

According to the report, many of the lobbyists were former politicians:

Special interests hired an army of well-connected lobbyists to press their case with Congress, including 45 former members of Congress, at least 461 former congressional and executive branch staffers (including 86 that worked for former agriculture committee members or the U.S. Department of Agriculture) and a host of K Street firms.

The former House Agriculture Committee Chairman and Ranking Members that oversaw the 2002 Farm Bill, Larry Combest (R-Texas) and Charlie Stenholm (D-Texas), each received more than $1 million in fees to lobby on the Farm Bill. In 2007, nine of the top 10 Washington firms lobbied on the Farm Bill including Patton Boggs, Akin Gump and Barbour Griffith & Rogers.

Far from being limited to agriculture and trade groups, Wall Street also got in on the spending frenzy, dropping $10.8 million on commodity futures trading rules. Energy interests topped that sum, with $23 million from the fossil fuel, ethanol and biodiesel industries.

While half the money was spent on core farm policies, much of it went to inserting a slew of sweet deals into the bill. For instance, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) inserted a tax break for thoroughbred racehorses estimated to cost $126 million over a decade after the National Thoroughbred Racing Association and Churchill Downs spent $136,000 on lobbying.

Since the drafting of the 2012 Farm Bill started, the money flow has only intensified. According to CQ’s First Street database, 1,063 organizations reported to be lobbying on the farm bill from the beginning of 2011 through the first quarter of 2012, on track to surpass the 1,200 groups that lobbied in 2008 by the end of the year.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) introduced a bill on the Senate floor Wednesday to block President Obama’s plan to allow states to experiment with the work requirements in the welfare program. A companion bill will be brought up in the House by Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI). Sen. Hatch described his bill as a defense of the work requirements in the 1996 welfare reform law:

“Neither the Obama Administration nor any Administration should have the power to unilaterally change the law as it sees fit. Work requirements were an essential part of the landmark 1996 Welfare Reform law and shouldn’t be scrapped at the whim of Washington bureaucrats. This legislation restores critical welfare work requirements so Congress can thoroughly and thoughtfully examine the TANF program in a way that balances states concerns, while ensuring that taxpayer dollars are used to get people off welfare and on a path to self-sufficiency.”

Other Republicans in the Senate have signed onto the bill, and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said that, “President Obama just tore up a basic foundation of thew welfare contract.”

To say the least, this is a questionable description of the new policy. The language of Obama’s memo rules out using welfare funds to help “individuals or families subject to the [Temporary Assistanace for Needy Families] prohibitions on assistance.” Rather, it’s specifically geared towards reducing red tape and seeing to it that people are counted as successes when they find work, not simply when they take on various activities such as job hunting, training, or unpaid work. In essence, the waivers increase states’ focus on actually getting people into jobs.

Support for such flexibility is not new, and it crosses both state and partisan lines. The governor of Utah — Sen. Hatch’s own state — called for such waivers in 2011. So did California, Connecticut, Minnesota and Nevada, the last of which was also under Republican control at the time. In 2005, Mitt Romney, the GOP’s presidential candidate, joined 29 other Republican governors in calling for more flexibility and “increased waiver authority” in welfare policy from the then Republican Congress.

Mitt Romney’s campaign has fired back at questions about his tenure at Bain Capital and his failure to release tax returns by blaming President Obama’s campaign for not wanting to talk about the economy. Given a chance to talk about the economy this morning, though, a Romney adviser failed to deliver specifics about how his plan would boost economic growth while also balancing the budget, as Romney claims he will do.

As ThinkProgress has noted, Romney’s plan to provide a massive tax cut to the rich would blow a hole in the federal budget Romney promises to balance by 2020. When MSNBC’s Luke Russert asked Romney adviser Tara Wall how Romney would offset the lost revenue, she failed to offer any specifics, telling Americans they could instead “research” his plan to find them. When Russert returned to the subject, Wall again failed to deliver an answer, saying Romney’s business experience is the reason he would balance the budget:

RUSSERT: What are the offsets? What are we specifically going to do to balance the budget?

WALL: Well, I believe Americans will hear a lot more about Governor Romney’s plan, and if you want to see in depth what his plan is, you can certainly research that and look at that more in depth. But overall, there have been a number of new regulations, over-zealous regulations, on small businesses enacted by this administration, and we have to look at those things. [...]

RUSSERT: Even with those small business cuts you’re talking about, they’re in the billions. We’re talking trillions with a T. Non-partisan: increase by the debt, Mr. Romney’s plan with these tax cuts, by $2.6 trillion. Why are there no specifics? You guys want to talk about big ideas, you don’t want to talk about Bain and the tax issues. I don’t want to talk about that. I’m asking you specifically: How does Mitt Romney’s plan balance the budget by 2020?

WALL: I think, if you look at the economic numbers, I’m not an economist and I’m not going to play an economist, I think that Mitt Romney has a proven record of bringing economies back. He brought down unemployment as governor, he created jobs as a governor, he was effective as a businessperson overall, and I think you have to apply those concepts. [...] You can’t discount that, and you can’t discount the fact that we have to be able to look at how we begin solving the debt problem and bringing that down, and to do that, number one, is to start with streamlining our tax code, bringing down our marginal tax rate, the regulations that have been overburdensome, and making real true spending cuts.

Watch it:

Despite Wall’s assertions, Americans can’t research Romney’s plan to offset the lost revenue from the tax cuts because he hasn’t yet provided one. He has instead named just a few tax breaks he would end, but those would not generate nearly enough revenue to make up the cost of his tax cuts.

Wall isn’t alone among Romney advisers, though. Multiple members of his campaign — including the candidate himself — have had the chance to describe in detail how his plan would reduce the deficit and balance the budget. But even though the Romney campaign claims to want to talk about the budget and economy, it has nothing to say when they actually become the topic of discussion.

In 2006, the Republican-led Congress passed an unnecessary law requiring the United States Postal Service to prefund its pension benefits for 75 years through a $5.5 billion annual payment. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) is the only one of its kind for a government agency. On August 1st of this year, the Post Office will likely default for the first time in its history on its 2011 pension payment. If Congress does not act, it will also default on its 2012 payment due September 30th.

The requirement has drastically harmed the functions of the agency, which is used by almost every American. In July, USPS began closing offices around the country to meet the annual payment. By the time current downsizing plans are completed in 2014, Americans will see 229 processing plants closed and 28,000 jobs lost. In June, ten USPS employees launched a multi-day hunger strike to protest the cuts.

Without the pension payment, USPS would have a $1.5 billion surplus instead of a $20 billion shortfall. “[T]hese ongoing liquidity issues unnecessarily undermine confidence in the viability of the Postal Service among our customers,” said USPS spokesman David Partenheimer.

Postal Service cuts also threaten to increase economic inequality. A Reuters analysis released in February found that America’s poorest communities “stand to suffer most if the struggling agency moves ahead with plans to shutter thousands of post offices.”

A vast majority of postal offices under consideration for closure are located in rural areas, where poverty rates are higher than the national average. Nearly 90 percent of Americans without broadband access live in rural areas, making USPS cuts especially harmful to the pocketbooks of rural Americans.

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