Another Republican candidate has refused to sign the radical anti-tax pledge authored by activist Grover Norquist and pushed by his group, Americans for Tax Reform. The pledge has played a major role in the GOP’s tax intransigence over the last several years.

Republicans who disavow the pledge, however, are growing in number, and New Jersey state Sen. Joe Kyrillos (R), who is running against Sen. Bob Menendez (D) this year, has joined the list. Asked on Fox News this afternoon if he would sign Norquist’s pledge, Kyrillos said bluntly, “I don’t sign pledges”:

HOST: Would you sign the pledge? No new taxes?

KYRILLOS: I don’t sign pledges.

HOST: So you wouldn’t sign it?

KYRILLOS: I don’t sign pledges. But I’ve been in the state senate a long time, and I don’t vote for broad-based income or sales taxes or broad-based taxes of any kind, and I’m not going to do it now. But you know what? I want to go into this thing open and honestly and deal with it in a forthright way.

Watch it:

Though it’s a positive sign that Kyrillos is rejecting Norquist’s pledge, his insistence on opposing broad-based tax increases still runs counter to a “wide consensus” among economists that the U.S. will need to increase tax rates to reduce its debt in the future.

And though there are an increasing number of Republicans taking on Norquist, the GOP’s refusal to even consider tax increases continues to cause problems for the American economy. A year ago this week, Standard and Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit rating for the first time in history, blaming the decision specifically on the Republican Party’s refusal to consider new revenue.

Last week, in what Reuters called “a rare show of bipartisan unity,” the Senate Finance Committee approved a package of so-called tax extenders by a 19-5 vote. The extenders package contains a variety of expiring tax provisions that are regularly renewed.

The senators on the committee were slapping themselves on the back for achieving some modicum of tax reform — with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) even saying, “By doing this, we’ve come a long way toward functionality” — but the package includes several problematic provisions, including:

– A tax break for NASCAR;

– A tax break for producing rum;

– The extension of two provisions that help corporations offshore their profits and avoid taxes.

Citizens for Tax Justice noted that, if Congress actually allowed the latter two corporate tax provisions to expire, “many U.S. companies will have much less incentive to send their profits (and possibly jobs) offshore.” Overall, the bill would spend $40 billion next year on special interest tax breaks.

The tax code is absolutely plagued by preferences and subsidies, which are essentially spending programs that are administered through the tax code. These tax expenditures total $1 trillion every year. However, senators on the Finance Committee seem content to celebrate their work, even after leaving some of the most egregious examples of these giveaways untouched.

Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon has released an analysis of her jobs plan purporting to show that it would save $1.7 trillion over nine years for the federal government. However, the campaign has thus far refused to release the economic models backing up its assertion:

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon, as part of her jobs plan, has an analysis that claims to produce a “positive (federal) budgetary impact of nearly $1.7 trillion over 9 years,” but her campaign has failed to produce the economic models to back it up.

Steven Lanza, a professor of economics at the University of Connecticut and executive editor of The Connecticut Economy, said it would be impossible to verify that conclusion without the models.

The budgetary impact of McMahon’s plan was done by John Dunham and Associates of New York, which has accolades on its website from the Beer Institute, the American Meat Institute and others for lobbying analyses he did for their trade associations. [...]

Dunham, when contacted at his office in Brooklyn, N.Y., said he was happy to share the models he used to support his analysis of McMahon’s jobs plan, but said they were now the property of her campaign, which has failed to produce them after numerous requests.

The particular firm McMahon used, as the New Haven register noted, has done other analyses that independent experts have cast serious doubt upon, including a “tax calculator” used by McMahon.

But during her last run for the Senate in 2010, McMahon didn’t seem overly concerned with getting the details regarding her policy positions right. But she would surely personally benefit from her current set of prescriptions, which would allow her to pay a tax rate lower than many middle-class families.

Rupert Murdoch is evidently not a fan of paid sick leave. Over the weekend, the media mogul trashed the New York Times for its editorial supporting New York City’s paid sick leave bill, arguing that small businesses shouldn’t be required to let employees take a day off if they’ve got the flu or have to stay home to care for a sick child.

Murdoch, who owns two other New York papers and so may have a vendetta against the Times, posted his thoughts over Twitter:

Somebody needs to stand up to NYT which today editorialises strongly for absurd city council actions which will truly hurt small businesses

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) August 5, 2012

Following on Murdoch’s comments, the New York Daily News editorial board also came out against the sick day initiative, praising City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D) for opposing the bill.

The proposed law would require any business in New York City with over 20 employees to give a total of nine paid sick days a year; for those with 19 or fewer employees, five paid sick days would be required.

The people who are most affected by a lack of paid sick days are low-income people who work hourly wage jobs. Single mothers, in particular, are hit hard when they risk losing money, if not their job, to take care of a sick child.

Studies suggest that employees who get paid time off end up healthier. Indeed, access to paid sick leave leads to a decrease in occupational injuries. Plus, when sick employees have paid time off, they don’t risk losing their job or their wages by taking a day to recover, and thus they don’t show up to work sick, possibly spreading disease to coworkers and causing an overall drop in productivity.

During an interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger yesterday, Mitt Romney said that the Federal Reserve should not enact a new round of stimulus aimed at boosting the still-sluggish economy, even as he admitted that the Fed’s first round of so-called “quantitative easing” did some good:

BORGER: Should — should the Fed intervene at some point?

ROMNEY: Well, I think the Fed’s first action, in quantitative easing, was effective to a certain degree. But I believe that the QE2, the second round of easing — I don’t think it had the impact that they were hoping for. And I’m sure the Fed is watching, will try and encourage the economy. But I don’t think a massive new QE3 is going to help this economy.

The Fed itself announced last week that, though it “anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only slowly toward levels that it judges to be consistent with its dual mandate,” no new action will be taken. This is consistent with the Fed’s actions over the last few years, when it has tolerated high unemployment, even as inflation, the other half of the Fed’s mandate, has stayed low:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a speech today that, “even though some key aggregate metrics — including consumer spending, disposable income, household net worth, and debt service payments–have moved in the direction of recovery, it is clear that many individuals and households continue to struggle with difficult economic and financial conditions.” But still, the Fed is standing pat.

As ThinkProgress’ Jeff Spross detailed, Republicans have warned that the Fed’s actions would spark inflation, which has never actually materialized. Romney now seems to be jumping on board with a similar message, saying that the Fed should not take all available steps to bring down the jobless rate.