Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) yesterday, in a move that many in the media deemed conciliatory, said that House Republicans are open to raising more revenue for the federal government, as long as it comes “as a byproduct of growing our economy, energized by a simpler, cleaner, fairer tax code, with fewer loopholes and lower rates for all.”

Believing that lower tax rates will magically raise revenue thanks to a growing economy is a favorite conservative fantasy. (It’s been dubbed believing in the “tax fairy.”) Today, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) responded to Boehner’s speech by calling it “a Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale“:

Schumer derided the theory that substantial revenues can be raised without increasing the tax burden on the wealthy.

“Part of his speech he talked about dynamic scoring, this idea if you cut taxes you increase revenues,” Schumer said.

“It’s about time we debunked that myth, it’s a Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, dynamic scoring. You may remember Rumpelstiltskin was the fairy tale figure who turned straw into gold,” he added, making reference to the popular German children’s tale from the 19th century.

Many studies have shown “that tax cuts do not come anywhere close to paying for themselves over the long term.” Greg Mankiw, chair of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, called those who believe that tax cuts will result in a revenue increase “charlatans and cranks.” “There is no serious research evidence to suggest that” tax cuts pay for themselves, Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin agreed. But Republican leaders still claim that such a thing will happen, all evidence to the contrary.

During the last stages of the campaign, Mitt Romney falsely tried to claim that American manufacturers like Chrysler were moving production to China. As it turns out, at least one company is planning the opposite move: Foxconn Electronics, the notoriously exploitative Apple Inc. manufacturer, is reportedly testing the waters to open new plants in US cities. Foxconn attracted scrutiny earlier this year when its abusive labor practices in Chinese and Taiwanese factories were exposed in a series of New York Times articles.

According to Chinese newspaper DigiTimes, Foxconn is conducting evaluations in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities to possibly open plants focused on LCD television production. The company is also discussing a partnership with Massachusetts Institute of Technology that would bring American engineers to China and Taiwan to learn Chinese and study product design processes.

Foxconn became a household name in the US after a mostly exaggerated and false This American Life segment detailed its mistreatment of workers. Despite the mythology presented in the episode, certain core facts were verified. Foxconn workers live in overcrowded company dorms, working shifts of 12 or more hours, and risk serious injury in appallingly dangerous working conditions. As many as 137 employees fell ill after being forced to clean iPads with toxic chemicals, and 17 Foxconn workers committed suicide in the past five years. The company has also been accused of forcing student interns to assemble iPhones.

Under pressure, Foxconn raised wages for employees and reduced hours, but its still far from meeting basic labor standards. After the company admitted it was struggling to meet demand for the iPhone 5, rumors of a strike over “overly strict demands” emerged.

While the company’s US factories would need to comply with American labor regulations, Foxconn continues to ignore Apple’s health and safety standards abroad with little consequence.

Recent nonpartisan reports have shown that the Bush tax cuts for the rich — those on income above $250,000 — don’t boost the economy. Republicans have been none too pleased with those findings.

In fact, Senate Republicans helped quash a report from the Congressional Research Service that found tax cuts for the rich are more effective at spurring income inequality than economic growth. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) yesterday touted a methodologically-flawed report to defend the high-income tax cuts.

Today, the Congressional Budget Office gave the GOP one more piece of evidence to ignore. CBO updated its analysis of the scenarios that make up the so-called “fiscal cliff” and found that extending all of the tax cuts would boost the nation’s economy by “a little less” than 1.5 percent of gross domestic product. Extending all of the tax cuts other than the high-income Bush tax cuts, meanwhile, would boost the economy by 1.25 percent, CBO found:

Extending all expiring tax provisions other than the cut in the payroll tax and indexing the AMT for inflation—except for allowing the expiration of lower tax rates on income above $250,000 for couples and $200,000 for single taxpayers—would boost real GDP by about 1¼ percent by the end of 2013. That effect is nearly as large as the effect of making all of those changes in law and extending the lower tax rates on higher incomes as well (which CBO estimates to be a little less than 1½ percent, as noted above), primarily because the budgetary impact would be nearly as large (and secondarily because the extension of lower tax rates on higher incomes would have a relatively small effect on output per dollar of budgetary cost).

Republicans have ignored the previous studies showing that growth would hardly be affected by the expiration of the tax cuts for the wealthy. But in addition to those reports, evidence from the last 30 years shows that the GOP’s tax cut-ideology doesn’t boost growth: the economy has grown more absent the party’s supply-side economics than it has when Republicans are instituting new tax cuts for the rich.

As the nation races towards the fiscal cliff, Republicans are again attempting to ensure that the high-income portion of the Bush tax cuts are preserved, instead of expiring at the end of the year as scheduled. President Obama, meanwhile, has promised to veto any extension of the tax cuts for the rich.

Multiple studies have shown that the high-income cuts, despite Republican claims, don’t have a substantive effect of job creation or economic development. House Republican leadership is ignoring those studies, though, and is instead pushing a flawed analysis conducted by financial firm Ernst & Young (and backed by the Chamber of Commerce) that claims the expiration of the high-income tax cuts will cost 700,000 jobs.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) cited the study in a Wednesday speech where he drew a line on taxes that sounded similar to the one taken by the party’s failed presidential candidate:

The independent accounting firm Ernst and Young says going over part of the fiscal cliff and raising tax rates on the top two brackets will cost our economy more than 700,000 jobs.

Ernst and Young also confirms many of those hit with the rate increase will be small business owners – the very people both parties acknowledge are the key to private sector job creation.

Today, Boehner highlighted the study on Twitter:

Ernst & Young says POTUS’ #smallbiz tax hike will destroy 700K+ jobs. Raising tax rates is a nonstarter j.mp/RiyYiD

— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) November 8, 2012

The claim that the expiration of the high-income cuts would have a disproportionate effect on small businesses has already been widely debunked, given that only 3 percent of businesses that file as individuals for tax purposes exceed the $250,000 threshold.

But the study also has major methodological errors, as Citizens for Tax Justice noted in July. The biggest issue is that Ernst & Young assumed the expiration would have a far larger impact on the labor market than do other non-partisan analyses. The study also absurdly assumed that every penny raised by the tax cuts expiring would be spent. As CTJ noted, “While [the study] does not explain any reason for this assumption, the effect of it is to eliminate the possibility that the additional revenue will increase private investment by reducing the deficit’s ‘crowding out’ effect.”

CTJ also pointed out that President Bush’s own Treasury Department found that in the long-term the extension of the high-income cuts would have “essentially no beneficial effect on the U.S. economy at all.”

When they’re not expressing shock over the growing participation of women, Hispanics and African American voters in the election, Republicans are reacting to President Obama’s victory by acknowledging the party’s shortcomings in appealing to non-white voters. Some members of the GOP, like former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, are even suggesting that the party should cut a deal with Democrats and pass comprehensive immigration reform to win votes from the growing Latino population.

But in acknowledging the nation’s changing demographics, Republicans and conservative pundits are also advancing a new pernicious narrative: America has permanently shifted from a white male-dominated electorate, to a new crop of minority voters who support Democrats because they are dependent upon government:

– BILL O’REILLY: “The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?” [Fox News, 11/6/2012]

– RUSH LIMBAUGH: “It’s just very difficult to beat Santa Claus. It is practically impossible to beat Santa Claus. People are not going to vote against Santa Clause especially if the alternative is being your own Santa Claus. [The Rush Limbaugh Show, 11/7/2012]

– SEAN HANNITY: “One other thing that we need to come to terms with as a result of last night. What appears to have happened is that the liberal welfare state in this country has now grown. More and more Americans have become dependent on that welfare state. As they have, they have found themselves siding with the party of government.” [Fox News, 11/7/2012]

– STUART VARNEY: “With Obama’s victory, the takers have taken over. The makers are clearly in the minority.” [Fox Business, 11/7/2012]

Conservatives are doubling down on Romney’s claim that 47 percent of Americans refuse to take “personal responsibility and care for their lives” — though the argument is highly misleading. In fact, to the extent that Americans are growing dependent upon government, Republican voters are raking in a greater share of the benefits.

The recession has pushed more lower-income Americans to rely on government assistance like food stamps, but “nearly 70 percent of all benefits of these programs go to white people.” Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that the overwhelming majority “of counties with the fastest-growth in food-stamp aid during the last four years voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 2008.” These included Republican strongholds like King County, Texas, where 96 percent of voters supported Romney.

More than 90 percent of the population has turned to government programs at one point or another, ranging from Social Security pay outs to government grants or contracts — including the traditional Republican block of higher-income voters. Top earners disproportionately benefit from the a plethora of government tax breaks that deplete the government of revenue in the same way that access benefits do. According to a study from the Tax Policy Center, the top 1 percent of income earners, those who take home in excess of $400,000 a year, account for almost a quarter all tax breaks, saving more than $250 billion a year in taxes. Meanwhile, the bottom 60 percent of wage earners take in just over 20 percent of annual tax breaks, or approximately $217 billion in breaks each year. Exit polls show that Americans earning an income of $250,000 or more (around the top 2 percent of earners) “voted for Romney approximately 1.5:1.”

Wall Street, after giving more to President Obama during the 2008 election than to his opponent Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), flipped during the 2012 election to give the vast majority of its campaign donations to Mitt Romney. As Matt Phillips outlined at Quartz, “individuals affiliated with the banking and finance industries overwhelmingly channeled money towards the Romney campaign,” and now have precious little to show for it:

Folks in the financial industry were decisive in placing their chips on the Republican challenger during this year’s presidential race. And, just to be clear, they lost. [...]

From the hedge fund and private equity industries, more than 82% of the donations went to Romney, $5.7 million. From commercial banks, roughly $4.2 million, or 75% of donations, went to the Republican candidate. By comparison, in 2008 hedge funds and private equity sent nearly 60% of their donations to Obama. And just shy of 58% of donations from individuals tied to commercial banks went to the then-Democratic candidate in 2008.

This shift makes sense, considering Romney’s desire to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform law signed by Obama in 2010.

Instead, Wall Street not only has Obama in the White House, but Elizabeth Warren, one of the staunchest bank critics, is headed to the Senate after Wall Street backed her opponent, Scott Brown. The financial industry also favored unsuccessful Senate bids by Dodd-Frank opponents Josh Mandel (OH), Tommy Thompson (WI), Richard Mourdock (IN), and Rick Berg (ND).

Now, Dodd-Frank, assuming that House Republicans don’t entirely cut off funding to financial regulators, will continue to move ahead. Large parts of the law have not yet been implemented, including important reforms to derivatives and the Volcker Rule, which is aimed at reining in risky bank trading.

According to Businessweek, Wall Street is turning its attention next to the so-called “fiscal cliff,” and to lobbying for Erskine Bowles, who helped craft the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan, to be the next Treasury Secretary.

In 2010, House Republicans took the nation to the brink of a debt default due to their intransigence on taxes, refusing to raise the debt ceiling without receiving spending cuts in return. When Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating, it pointed to the fact that Republicans had resisted any increase in revenue.

At the time, Republicans demanded spending cuts equivalent to the amount the debt ceiling would be increased; while they didn’t get that, they did receive cuts that cost about one million jobs and lowered economic output by about 2 percent. Now, with another debt ceiling increase necessary in early 2013, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is already taking it hostage again, demanding entitlement cuts in return for ensuring that the nation doesn’t default on its debt:

Resolving the issues surrounding the fiscal cliff, especially the replacement of the sequester, and the next debt limit increase (likely necessary in February) will require that the President get serious about real entitlement reform. While it is unrealistic for us to expect the President to embrace our vision of Medicare reform or Obamacare repeal, it is equally unrealistic for the President to continue to insist that Obamacare is off the table, or that Medicare and Medicaid require nothing more than some additional provider cuts. We will measure entitlement savings on the basis of whether they are sustainable and whether they actually bend down the cost curve.

Keeping the U.S. from exceeding its debt limit doesn’t allow for new spending; it just ensures that the U.S. will faithfully pay its bills. Taking it hostage unnecessarily harms the economy, as this chart shows:

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), meanwhile, opened negotiations over the so-called “fiscal cliff” yesterday by marching out the same sort of tax plan that Mitt Romney embraced and that Boehner tried to push for during the 2010 debt ceiling debacle.