House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) will release the third edition of his budget Tuesday, and it will again make drastic changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and federal spending levels. It will also revamp the federal tax code through what Ryan touted as “pro-growth tax reform” during an appearance on Fox News Sunday this weekend. If his past budgets are any indication, such tax reform would dramatically lower tax rates on the wealthy and corporations, costing the government trillions of dollars in revenue.

The House budget, Ryan said, would achieve this “pro-growth tax reform” by lowering tax rates across the board while cutting tax expenditures, as CBS reports:

Ryan also repeated his call for “pro-growth tax reform” that lowers rates across the board by eliminating tax expenditures. “That’s good for economic growth,” he said, “That’s good for job creation and hard-working tax payers, by having less loopholes in the tax code.”

Ryan’s last budget, the Path to Prosperity, amounted to a $3 trillion tax cut for the rich and corporations. Ryan and House Republicans said they would make up for that lost revenue by closing tax loopholes, though they never took that step and it is unlikely there is enough politically-feasible revenue to be gained from doing so even if they tried. When Mitt Romney released a similar tax plan during the 2012 election, a nonpartisan analysis found that to avoid adding to the deficit, it would have to raise taxes on middle class families by an average of $2,000. Past plans included in House Republican budgets adhere to the same basic principles as the Romney tax plan and would almost surely require a similar tax increase.

Ryan promises his budget will balance in 10 years, a decade faster than the 2012 version. But he has only been able to claim balance because he assumes revenue will stay north of 18 percent of GDP, even though his tax plan would reduce it to roughly 15 percent of GDP, according to the Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden. To achieve balance without raising sufficient revenue from closing loopholes — which, again, likely isn’t politically possible — Ryan would be forced to raise taxes on the middle class. To avoid raising taxes on the middle class, his plan to reduce America’s debt would instead add substantial amounts to it.

During his nearly three years in the U.S. Senate, Scott Brown (R-MA) frequently came to the aid of the financial sector — watering down the Dodd-Frank bill and working to weaken it after its passage — and accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash from the industry. Now, the man Forbes Magazine called one of “Wall Street’s Favorite Congressmen” will use those connections as counsel for Nixon Peabody, an international law and lobbying firm.

The Boston Globe noted Monday that while Brown himself will not be a lobbyist — Senators may not lobby their former colleagues for the first two years after leaving office, under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 — “he will be leaning heavily on his Washington contacts to drum up business for the firm.” The position will also allow him “to begin cashing in on his contacts with the financial services industry, which he helped oversee in the Senate.”

Among the lobbying clients represented by Nixon Peabody is Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street behemoth that reportedly skirted the Dodd-Frank rules . Brown received $10,000 in PAC contributions from Goldman and more than $100,000 in contributions from its employees.

Brown was also the deciding vote against the DISCLOSE Act, which would have allowed voters to see which moneyed interests were funding secret political ads. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which reportedly received millions from Goldman Sachs, led the opposition to the bill.

Last month, Brown joined Fox News Channel as a contributor. In his first appearance in that capacity, he lamented that Congress is “dysfunctional and extremely partisan,” and promised to “stay involved” by being “part of the election process back home and other elections throughout the country.”

Even as American corporations are raking in record profits, the largest among them are shifting larger amounts of money away from the United States and into offshore tax havens that allow them to pad their bottom lines even more, according to multiple analyses of legal filings made since the beginning of 2013.

The Wall Street Journal found that the 60 largest companies moved $166 billion offshore in 2012, shielding 40 percent of their earnings from American taxes and costing the U.S. billions in lost revenue:

The amount of money at stake is significant, particularly when the U.S. budget deficit is high on the political agenda. Just 19 of the 60 companies in the Journal’s survey disclose the tax hit they could face if they brought the money back to their U.S. parent. Those companies say they might have to pay $98 billion in additional tax—more than the $85 billion in automatic-spending cuts triggered this month after the White House and Congress couldn’t agree on an alternative.

A similar analysis from Bloomberg found that 83 of the largest American companies moved $183 billion overseas in 2012, bringing the total offshore to $1.46 trillion for those 83 companies alone. Most of the companies, like Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo, have set up subsidiaries in low-tax countries like Bermuda, Ireland, and the Cayman Islands specifically to receive tax benefits. That has ramifications for states, which lost $42 billion in revenue to corporate tax dodging in the last three years alone, and taxpayers and small businesses, who often have to pick up the tab.

And while the debate over corporate tax reform has flared again in Washington, the favorite reform of Republicans and corporate lobbying groups would only exacerbate the problem, making it easier for corporations to push even more money overseas at the expense of revenue and investment that could be made in the United States.

A broad breakdown in societal trust has undermined the idea of a common good that can be served by the collective disposition of resources. Voters trust neither government nor most individuals in society to fairly pursue the common good. Instead, they see both government and individuals as fundamentally selfish and out for themselves, not others.

This view of human nature has been a consensus until recently. That consensus can be traced back to the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, a 1,200 novel that, in essence, advocated the unfettered pursuit of self-interest as the organizing principle for society. Despite the fact that the book became a best-seller, not many critics and intellectuals took it or its thesis seriously at the time. Who could possibly believe that a society based strictly on selfishness could work?

That skepticism was obliterated in the next several decades. One of the key blows was struck by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, whose 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, argued that the gene is the fundamental unit of natural selection and has only one imperative: successfully reproducing itself in competition with other genes. We (and other animals), as bearers of these “selfish” genes, will therefore carry those traits — and only those traits –that help these genes reproduce. Dawkins implied that was all you needed to know to understand human nature, an idea that quickly led to an explosion of selfish gene-based explanations for every aspect of human behavior.

Then, in 1980, Milton Friedman, with his wife, Rose, published Free to Choose, a no-holds-barred polemic in favor of self-interested individuals making “rational”, unregulated decisions and against anything that interfered with this process, especially government action. So, in a powerful conjunction of economics and evolutionary biology, Ayn Rand’s glorification of selfishness gained the imprimatur of serious science. Being selfish was just human nature and should not be fought. Indeed, any attempt to do so was bound to do more harm than good. Thus was the original reaction to Atlas Shrugged turned on its head. Who could possibly believe that a society based on anything other than selfishness could work?

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President Obama will reportedly choose Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney general who oversees the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, to replace outgoing Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Perez, a popular pick among labor and Latino groups, is expected to be nominated this week, according to various news reports. Should he be confirmed by the Senate, Perez will take over Labor at a time when Obama and Democrats are pushing for immigration reform and a minimum wage increase.

Before his current role began, Perez served in Bill Clinton’s Justice Dept., as a city council member in Montgomery County, Maryland, and as the head of Maryland’s state labor department. And while Perez has spent the last four years leading the administration’s challenges to new voter restrictions, his past also includes experience fighting to protect and expand workers’ rights:

Fought worker exploitation and human trafficking: Perez served on the Worker Exploitation Task Force, which sought to protect vulnerable workers, while working in the Justice Dept. under Attorney General Janet Reno. The task force aimed to fight “modern day slavery” that resulted from human trafficking, discrimination in labor markets, and other exploitative practices, according to Senate testimony from former officials. The task force secured multiple convictions involving the trafficking and exploitation of women and children workers, and helped lead to calls around the country for stronger anti-trafficking laws both at the federal and state level.

Pushed for labor protections for domestic workers: Millions of domestic workers in the United States make low wages because they aren’t protected by labor law, a problem Perez sought to address while serving on Montgomery County’s City Council, where he pushed for contractual labor law protections and a minimum wage for such workers. After three years of debate, and after Perez had left the council, those protections became law in 2008 and gave domestic workers contractual labor rights they still lack in most of the United States.

Protected immigrant workers from losing pay: Perez would take over the Dept. of Labor in the middle of Obama’s push for immigration reform, and he has experience dealing with immigration and labor issues. While serving in the Justice Dept., Perez investigated claims that employers were using Alabama’s new immigration law to avoid paying immigrant workers. “We continue to be concerned that certain employers may be using HB56 as an excuse not to pay workers,” he said, adding that he would “throw the book” at employers who weren’t paying workers. “We’re here. We will prosecute you. That is impermissible, period.”

As House Republicans prepare to unveil the third iteration of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget on Tuesday, some rank-and-file members are visibly uncomfortable defending the measure’s reliance on President Obama’s policies to achieve balance in 10 years.

During an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point on Monday morning, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) struggled to explain why the blueprint will include more than $600 billion in additional revenue that was part of the fiscal cliff compromise if Republicans oppose increasing marginal tax rates and overwhelmingly voted against the measure:

RYAN LIZZA (NEW YORKER): Did you vote against the fiscal cliff deal?

CHAFFETZ: Yeah, I did.

LIZZA: Is this budget going to assume the $600 billion in new revenues in that fiscal cliff deal?

CHAFFETZ: Well, we haven’t gotten to the final product. Paul has not yet released it. It potentially will [...] But look, at the end of the day you’ve got to put numbers on a piece of paper and achieve balance. So I think there’s a mix there…

LIZZA: Speaking to America’s frustration, Republicans voted overwhelmingly against a deal that raised $600 billion in revenue, and now it sounds like they’re going to put out a budget that pockets that $600 billion and put that up for a vote. So I think that paradox is — is a little difficult to understand.

Watch it:

Chaffetz ultimately conceded that the GOP lost on the tax issue and is now looking to benefit from the very changes they claimed would hamstring the economy and undermine job growth.

The budget will also likely include Medicare savings from the Affordable Care Act and “adjustments for an expected decline in war spending, a move that could reduce assumed expenditures by up to $600 billion over the next decade.” Ryan has consistently derided war savings as “phantom savings” and promised to restore the Medicare cuts during his vice presidential bid.

Aside from adopting Obama’s policies, the budget will likely assume unrealistic levels of revenue to achieve balance in 10 years.