Atlanta’s city council overwhelmingly approved a plan that would, on its face, spend $200 million in public tax dollars to replace the Georgia Dome, the 20-year-old home of the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons. The dome, despite its seemingly young age, is among the older stadiums in the NFL thanks to a rash of publicly-financed construction across the league in recent years.

On first glance, the Atlanta deal seems like a pretty good one for taxpayers, at least relative to other stadium financing plans. The Falcons are going to cover $800 million of the $1 billion cost as well as some infrastructure improvements and cost overruns. But the $200 million cost to taxpayers is actually much larger, according to Neil DeMause at Field of Schemes, who tallied the public cost at more than $500 million once all the subsidies and costs are included:

Add the $300 million to our original $254 million, and we get a total public subsidy for the project of $554 million.

Could this be off? Sure: growth in hotel tax revenues could be less than what it has been; the financing costs for the stadium could eat up more of the money than I’ve estimated; or half a dozen other uncertainties. But as a best guess for how much the Falcons deal would cost the public, “more than half a billion dollars” is an excellent starting point.

While the Falcons have argued that the Georgia Dome’s age relative to other facilities is a hindrance, it hasn’t had any problem hosting major events lately. It will host the NCAA men’s Final Four in April, and it is the often the home of the Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament, college football classics and bowl games, and the NCAA Tournament. But it is falling behind in the race to host future Super Bowls (which aren’t as good for the economy as proponents often claim) and it doesn’t have enough luxury suites for owner Arthur Blank to maximize revenue, so the Falcons have spent the last year pushing for a replacement.

Today, they got it, even though Atlanta’s education budgets remain drained and such deals almost always turn out poorly for the taxpayers who foot the bill.

A top lobbying group for major chief executives is set to begin a campaign calling on Congress to achieve corporate tax reform that lowers tax rates, shields offshore profits from taxation, and does not raise any new revenue.

Business Roundtable, a collection of CEOs from top business groups, will spend at least hundreds of thousands of dollars pushing to lower the corporate tax rate to 25 percent, while also pushing for the adoption of a “modified-territorial” tax system that exempts most offshore profits from taxation and makes it easier to move even more profits to tax havens, The Hill reports:

The CEO group — which says it will spend well into six figures on the campaign, using both print advertisements and digital outreach — calls for reducing the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, a marker that’s also been laid down by Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Roundtable officials are also pressing for a revenue-neutral corporate reform, meaning the rewritten code wouldn’t bring in more or less revenue than it did before, and the adoption of a modified territorial system, which would shield offshore corporate income from taxation.

A territorial tax system has for years been a top priority of multinational corporations based in the United States, and it has been adopted by top Republicans (including 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney) too. Such a tax system, however, would “increas[e] incentives to shift business operations and reported income to countries with lower tax rates,” according to the Congressional Budget Office, and that’s an incentive American corporations don’t need. The largest companies already have nearly $1.5 trillion sitting offshore, according to recent reports.

And while the lobbying group insists that the package of tax cuts and other reforms should be revenue neutral, the effective corporate tax rate plunged to a 40-year low in 2011 even though corporate profits have hit a 60-year high. Corporations haven’t paid the full tax rate in 45 years, and 26 major companies paid absolutely nothing in taxes over the last four years. Meanwhile, closing corporate tax loopholes that incentivize moving jobs and investment overseas could raise an additional $168 billion in revenue over the next decade.

President Obama yesterday officially named Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez as his pick to head the Department of Labor, and within hours, three Republican senators had already announced their opposition. Perez’s nomination is expected to face fierce opposition from both Senate Republicans and conservative activists, but the former head of the Republican National Committee won’t include himself in the opposition.

Michael Steele, who led the RNC from 2009 to 2011, told BuzzFeed’s Evan McMorris-Santoro that Perez was “going to be a fine secretary“:

While Steele said he and Perez “disagree on some issues philosophically,” he called on his fellow Republicans to confirm him. “Tom is a very passionate guy like I am. He believes in the idea of public service and the president recognizes that and has said he’s going to be a strong voice for the workers of this country as he was for the workers of Maryland as our labor secretary,” he said. “I think a lot of people want you to put on that partisan hat and chew him a new one, but for what purpose? He’s been good at his job and he’s been faithful to the oath that he swore.“

Steele and Perez both served in Maryland’s state government — Steele as lieutenant governor from 2002 to 2007 and Perez as labor secretary from 2007 to 2009. Perez, as Steele noted, has a long history of fighting on behalf of workers. He has pushed for labor protections for domestic workers and for immigrant workers who weren’t getting paid and also fought worker exploitation and human trafficking

Conservative opposition to Perez has stemmed largely from his time at the Justice Department, where he brought an unprecedented number of cases challenging voter restrictions. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) also voiced skepticism of Perez’s supposed work around a case involving the New Black Panther Party, but Perez did not join the department until after the case in question had been dismissed.

No one would accuse Arthur Brooks of being a shrinking violet when it comes to defending a right-wing economic vision. The President of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has accused President Obama and the Democrats of being opposed to “capitalism” and “free enterprise,” and supports “actual sacrifice” in the form of “cut[ting] spending and reform[ing] entitlements right now.”

So it might surprise some to hear that, when ThinkProgress caught up with him at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this weekend, Brooks delivered a strident critique of the idea that we should cut spending on the poor, particularly in the form of Medicaid.

During his address to the general conference, Brooks said that “austerity always hurts the poor the most,” a point which, as he noted, is borne out by the European experience. When ThinkProgress asked Brooks to expand his comments, the topic of Medicaid came up. Here’s what he had to say:

BEAUCHAMP: Medicaid, do you think it needs to be “fundamentally reformed” — that is to say, cut?

BROOKS: I think it needs to be reformed, but not necessarily cut. There’s a lot of things we can do. My own view is that even if we didn’t reform anything for the poorest members of society we could afford it…I wanna make sure the poor are not left out in the cold. So even if we didn’t reform anything at the bottom end, and did everything at the top end, we could do a lot better than we are today. The wrong position is to say we start with cutting programs for the poor.

Watch it:

Two-thirds of the Ryan-House GOP budget cuts are sliced out of programs for the poor, with Medicaid bearing the brunt of it. Several Republican governors and state legislatures have refused to accept Obamacare Medicaid expansion funding, even though the expansion would help millions of poor Americans access health care at minimal cost. There is little reason to believe that Medicaid, or any other program for the poor, is contributing to a long-term debt crisis that must be solved by cuts today.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said he would not support revenue increases in budget negotiations with Democrats during an appearance on Bloomberg TV Tuesday morning, explaining that the nation must reform the tax code by lowering rates and “plugging loopholes” and achieve a balanced budget with spending cuts alone.

“We propose 4.6 trillion dollars in spending cuts that are essential to preventing debt crisis,” Ryan claimed, referring to reductions in spending from the repeal of Affordable Care Act benefits and savings from Medicaid, Medicare and other social programs. Nearly two-thirds of the House GOP’s cuts come from poverty programs that aid the neediest Americans like Pell Grants, food stamps and job training.

Ryan insisted that Republicans would demand these reductions and stand united against additional revenue since, as he put it, Democrats “got their tax increases…but we have yet to get any spending cuts”:

PETER COOK (REPORTER): Isn’t that going to require Paul Ryan to consider revenue and for [Senator] Patty Murray to consider entitlement program changes that she has decided on?

RYAN: Well, I would say to the Patty Murray school of thought to the President Obama school of thought, they’ve got their tax increases. They got $1.6 trillion in tax increases that are just now starting to hit the economy. But we have yet to get the spending cuts. [...]

PETER COOK: Aren’t you going to have to offer something more on the revenue front even if you don’t want to?

RYAN: No offense Peter, I’m not interested in negotiating through the media, but to be candid, no. No. We reform the tax code, that’s what we’re proposing that means that by plugging loopholes you can raise the same amount of money for the federal government with a far more competitive, far more pro-jobs tax code than we currently got.

Past budget deals have reduced spending by $1.5 trillion, a fact Ryan himself bragged about when he urged Republicans to back the Budget Control Act in 2011 and later endorsed sequestration. “We’re actually cutting spending while we do this,” Ryan told his colleagues in 2011. “We’re getting two-thirds of the cuts we wanted in our budget.”

Indeed, spending cuts have so far outnumbered revenue by nearly 3 to 1, which is why economists believe that “the next installment of deficit reduction should reach $2 trillion and about half of it should come from higher taxes.” Ryan, meanwhile, has told voters for more than three years that he would pay for his massive tax breaks by closing tax loopholes without ever specifying which deductions or credits he plans to eliminate.

The United Kingdom’s breathless pursuit of austerity under Prime Minister David Cameron was aimed sparking economic growth and reducing deficits. Three years after the conservative government began its deficit reduction efforts, though, it has failed to do both. Britain is now on the brink of its third recession in four years and its economy is still smaller than it was when the Great Recession began.

Persistently high unemployment and that lack of economic growth — caused by fiscal contraction — have left the UK far short of its deficit reduction goals, as this chart from the Wall Street Journal shows:

In 2010, Cameron and finance minister George Osborne projected that their austerity package would by now have reduced deficits from 4.8 percent of the economy to just 1.9 percent. At the beginning of 2013, the deficit stood at 4.3 percent. Still, Osborne and Cameron remain committed to austerity, with Osborne telling the BBC last week, “You can’t get out of debt crisis by borrowing more and more.” But Britain doesn’t have a debt crisis — its borrowing costs are at historic lows. It has an unemployment and growth crisis that a growing number of economists are begging the conservative government to address.

That should be a lesson to lawmakers in the United States, which emerged from the Great Recession in better shape than its friends across the Atlantic because it chose to stimulate the economy instead of cutting spending. Congress is committed now to a similar path of deficit reduction, even though countries that have tried it have entered an austerity death spiral — as they attempt to reduce deficits, they instead reduce growth and inhibit their ability to reduce deficits. The U.S., like Britain, is nowhere near a debt crisis. Still, lawmakers are insistent on cutting spending, even though unemployment is still high, spending has plateaued, and fiscal contraction has already hampered America’s tepid economic recovery.