There is broad economic consensus among economists that the United States will eventually have to raise taxes to pay down the federal debt, economist Betsey Stevenson said in an interview with ThinkProgress. Raising taxes needed to be a part of the equation — along with spending cuts — to pay down the debt if America is going to “provide the goods and services provided by the government that the American public has said they want,” Stevenson said at the Center for American Progress’ conference on the middle class and the economy Wednesday:

STEVENSON: At the end of the day, we need to find a way once we’re out, once the economy’s recovered, we need to find a way to make sure we’re bringing in the revenues necessary to pay for the things that we want. What we often have in the political discussion is people aren’t going to find a way to bring those two things together. So one side might be emphasizing cutting the programs they don’t particularly like, or cutting taxes, but not in a way that’s going to bring those two things together. And you know, I think there’s wide consensus among economists that there is, that we are going to have to do something that involves raising more revenue, not cutting taxes, but in the long run, raising taxes and cutting spending. We’re going to have to do those two things in order to make sure we have a government that brings in the money necessary to provide the goods and services provided by the government that the American public has said they want.

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The “wide consensus among economists” even includes two advisers to the Republican Party’s presidential candidate who supported raising revenues as part of a deficit reduction deal. But while a balanced approach to deficit and debt reduction may be the prescription offered by economists, it isn’t a view widely shared in the GOP. The party continues to oppose higher taxes on the wealthy and has instead proposed slashing tax rates, and during the party’s presidential primary, every candidate said he or she would veto a debt reduction package that contained $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases.

A growing number of Republicans is beginning to recognize that revenues should be a part of the equation, however. Breaking with the pledge they made to anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, Republican lawmakers have begun hinting that they support new ways of finding revenue.

Days after Mitt Romney’s campaign announced his opposition to extending the wind production tax credit, Romney campaigned in Colorado, a swing state that supported 4,000-5,000 wind jobs in 2011. He included one gratuitous mention of renewable energy in his speech that ranked energy as his top priority, saying “I like renewables.” How he plans to grow renewables is unclear, since the production tax credit supports up to 37,000 wind jobs, and is set to expire at the end of 2012.

Iowa Governor Terry Branstad had harsh words for Romney’s anti-wind position, which would affect the state’s 7,000 wind jobs:

“It needs to be continued, not forever, but it does need to be continued for a while and the result is it’s been a very good thing for Iowa in terms of 20 percent of our energy is now generated by wind,” Branstad said.

“We have a lot of farmers that receive rent from having wind turbines on their property and we have a lot of jobs associated with it.” [...]

Branstad blamed “confusion” in the Romney campaign for Romney’s stand against the tax break for wind energy production. [...]

“They don’t understand,” Branstad said. “You’ve got a bunch of people that have put that website together that are bunch of east coast people that need to get out here in the real world to find out what’s really going on.”

Republicans in wind states like Iowa, Utah, and Colorado are seemingly in denial on where Romney stands:

SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY (R-IA) said: “I think people that didn’t know what they were doing said it, because he was over in Poland — he obviously wasn’t thinking about wind energy. I don’t think it’s going to stand. … I don’t think that that’s the real position of the party because they said that they were going to consult me on this stuff, and they haven’t gotten my view.”

SEN. ORRIN HATCH (R-UT), quoted in the Wall Street Journal: ”It’s just one of the things that is still a little cloudy in my mind as to where he really does stand on it.” Mr. Hatch said he thinks that a phase-out of the tax credit–instead of outright elimination–”might be more consistent with Gov. Romney’s feelings anyway as he looks at it thoroughly.”

REP. TOM LATHAM (R-IA) said Romney’s position reflects “a lack of full understanding of how important the wind energy tax credit is for Iowa and our nation. It’s the wrong decision. Wind energy represents one of the most innovative and exciting sectors of Iowa’s economy.”

Romney’s announcement may have initially derailed congressional negotiations on extending the credit, though a bipartisan panel of Senators included a possible extension today.

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The House of Representatives will likely vote today to establish a fast-track process for enacting the tax plan outlined in the House Republican budget, which was authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). Ryan’s tax reform plan would guarantee massive tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, while purporting to hold revenues constant. Therefore, the only way it adds up is with a major middle-class tax increase.

The “tax reform” that Ryan and House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) will try to fast-track through the House is almost the same as presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan. It slashes tax rates paid by the highest-income Americans and corporations, while protecting the tax preferences for investment income that result in people like Romney paying a lower tax rate than many in the middle-class.

It also gives millionaires a tax cut of a quarter of a million dollars. It cuts corporate taxes by more than $1 trillion and gives them new incentives for offshoring jobs. And it purports to be “revenue-neutral” — which means that the middle-class is left to meet the cost of rich people’s tax cuts.

As a study from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center revealed yesterday, Romney’s plan would raise taxes on middle-class families with children by an average of $2,000 and raise taxes on all taxpayers with incomes under $200,000 by an average of $500. (Those estimates are conservative: In filling in missing details, TPC bent over backwards to make Romney’s plan as kind to the middle class as possible, given the hard promises he has made on tax cuts for the rich and corporations.)

A middle-class tax increase is inevitable under Romney’s plan because it’s impossible to pay for Romney’s tax cuts for the rich by reducing their tax breaks. As a result, the TPC study finds, Romney’s plan “mathematically necessitates a shift in the tax burden of at least $86 billion away from high-income taxpayers onto lower- and middle-income taxpayers.”

Ryan and his Republican colleagues use the same sleights of hand that Romney used in trying to hide their middle-class tax hike, including refusing to disclose any information about fundamental elements of their plan like what tax benefits would be eliminated. But the math doesn’t lie: Any tax plan that purports to hold revenues steady while massively cutting taxes for the rich must make up the lost revenue by raising taxes on people who are not rich.

A coalition of faith leaders released a letter ahead of yesterday’s symbolic House tax vote telling Republicans not to allow the expiration of two tax credits that, together, would raise taxes on more than 15 million Americans. In the letter, the faith leaders called for extensions of the 2009 expansions of the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, two provisions Republicans allow to expire in the bill they approved.

The GOP’s plan to let the expanded tax credits expire, the letter said, was “simply unconscionable“:

These tax credits help families meet basic needs, reduce poverty, and remove barriers to work. It is hypocritical for lawmakers who talk about family values to abandon improvements in these effective, family-supporting programs. Failing to extend the improved tax credits would jeopardize the economic security and well-being of more than 15 million families and more than 36 million children within those families. This is simply unconscionable.

As ThinkProgress has noted, the GOP would also allow for the expiration of the American Opportunity Tax Credit, a tax break on college tuition payments that would affect roughly 11 million families. In total, the expiration of all three tax credits would raise taxes on 24 million Americans, 10 times the number that would see a tax increase under the Democratic plan to allow only the Bush tax cuts on higher incomes to expire.

This isn’t the first time that faith leaders have criticized Republican policies. An assortment of faith leaders panned the House GOP’s budget, calling it an “immoral disaster” that “robs the poor.” This summer, Sister Simone Campbell, one of this letter’s signers, led the Nuns On A Bus tour across the country to protest GOP’s cuts to programs that help the poor and middle class.

A decade after enacting massive tax cuts that blew a hole in the federal debt and failed to create job growth, Republicans are once again attempting to hitch the American economy to the supply-side wagon, promising that more tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals will trickle down to the middle- and lower-classes and create economic prosperity. The House GOP passed a full extension of the Bush tax cuts yesterday, a week after Senate Republicans tried and failed to do the same.

Economic evidence shows, however, that the GOP’s reliance on supply-side policies — that is, cutting taxes on businesses and the wealthy in hopes that prosperity for the 1 percent would eventually benefit the other 99 — haven’t worked. In fact, analyzing data from the last three decades, the Center for American Progress’ Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden found that investment, productivity, employment, and overall economic growth were all stronger during the 1990s, when America took a decade-long hiatus from supply-side economics, than they were in the 1980s and 2000s:

This evidence isn’t totally lost on Republicans like Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), a member of last year’s debt supercommittee who admitted that the Bush tax cuts didn’t lead to the job and economic growth his party had promised. But the Republican Party writ large remains attached to these policies, ignoring the economic consensus and proving that is ideology is, as former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (D) said this week, “divorced from the real world.”

Last summer, the House of Representatives set aside arduous debt ceiling negotiations to focus on a longstanding congressional pastime: renaming post offices.

Today, just days before legislators will head home or back to the campaign trail for the August recess, the United States Postal Service will default — for the first time in history — on a $5.5 billion payment meant to fund future retirees’ benefits.

During the 112th Congress, the House has introduced 60 bills to rename post offices. In fact, of the 151 laws produced by this Congress, 17 percent have been to rename post offices. But not one bill geared towards salvaging the Postal Service has reached the floor, and the USPS desperately needs Congressional action to stay solvent.

The Postal Service does not receive taxpayer dollars for operational costs, but is nonetheless under congressional control. The USPS is legally obligated to deliver mail to every single house in the country, including in remote areas where UPS and FedEx won’t venture. And while other private delivery companies have continued to grow and diversify, Congress has stymied the Postal Service from directly competing.

Moreover, a Republican-led 2006 Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), an unprecedented piece of legislation that requires the USPS to prefund its pension benefits for 75 years through the $5.5 billion annual payment. Congress has turned a blind eye here, allowing offices to close and hundreds of thousands of jobs to be lost instead of addressing the pension payments.

Without the one-of-a-kind prefund program, estimates show the USPS would have a $1.5 billion surplus instead of a $20 billion shortfall. Republicans have nonetheless responded to this manufactured crisis by pushing for legislation that would layoff workers.

– Steven Perlberg

The share of the economy made up by low-wage jobs has grown since the Great Recession, and according to one new study, it won’t shrink in the future even as the economy continues to recover. The number of Americans working in low-wage jobs — those that pay wages equal to or below the poverty line — will remain steady over the next decade, according to the Economic Policy Institute, as CNNMoney reports:

Some 28% of workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs in 2020, roughly the same percentage as in 2010, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.

The study defines low-paying jobs as those with wages at or below what full-time workers must earn to live above the poverty level for a family of four. In 2011, this was $23,005, or $11.06 an hour.

The study is the latest to detail the growth of low-wage occupations in the United States. A recent report from the National Employment Law Project found that more than one in four private sector workers now make less than $10 an hour, an even lower threshold than was used in the EPI study. The five industries that are comprised mostly of low-wage workers, meanwhile, are growing faster than the overall American economy.

While the number of low-wage jobs has increased, so has the gap between low-wage workers and the executives who employ them. The federal minimum wage would need to be raised by more than $3 an hour to match the buying power it had in 1968, and overall wages in the U.S. have been virtually stagnant for decades, even as pay for chief executives has risen exponentially. At the 50 companies that employ the largest number of low-wage workers, chief executives made an average of $9.4 million last year.