Republicans have long opposed the expiration of the high-income Bush tax cuts, those that hit incomes over $250,000, because they claim it will be a tax hike on America’s small businesses. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said as much today in highlighting his opposition to the expiration. “Raising taxes on small businesses will kill jobs in America,” Boehner said. “It is as simple as that.”

Economic evidence, however, contradicts that view. Under President Clinton, the top marginal tax rate was 39.6 percent, where it would return if the high-income Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year. But small businesses grew twice as fast during Clinton’s time in office than they did when President Bush occupied the White House, as this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows:

Boehner has repeatedly highlighted a flawed study stating that the expiration of those tax cuts would kill 700,000 jobs and hit a substantial number of small businesses, even as non-partisan reports from the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Service show that the expiration would have little effect on economic growth, and the Joint Committee on Taxation found that only 3 percent of small businesses would be hit by the increase.

And, as CBPP notes, there are numerous problems with Boehner’s argument. A “small business” would have to earn substantially more than $250,000 a year to actually feel an impact of the higher tax rates, meaning it likely isn’t that small anyway. Many of them, meanwhile, are “pass through entities,” businesses that operate as investment vehicles or for other reasons and are “not engaged in business activity as it is traditionally understood.” According to a Treasury Dept. study cited by CBPP, just 7.6 percent of the income taxed at the top two income tax rates comes from actual small business income.

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.”

With the 2012 election behind them, congressional leaders and President Obama will turn their attention toward a series of expiring tax provisions and automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect at the beginning of 2013: the so-called “fiscal cliff.” Both parties and the president want to avert many of, if not all of, the pieces of the fiscal cliff puzzle, which includes defense cuts, cuts to domestic spending, and the end of the Bush tax cuts. Here’s what you need to know about the situation facing Congress come January:

– The Middle-Class Tax Hike: House Speaker John Boehner (R) won’t consider tax increases on the wealthy, he said this week, and President Obama has said he won’t sign an extension of the high-income Bush tax cuts. The parties agree on 98 percent of the cuts — those aimed at the middle class — but Republicans have refused to negotiate an extension of those cuts (which also benefit the rich) without an extension of the high-income tax cuts as well. Multiple recent studies have shown that high-income tax cuts don’t stimulate economic growth or job creation, a central claim in the GOP’s defense of them.

– The Payroll Tax Cut Expires: While the focus has largely revolved around the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the most dangerous tax provision is the expiration of the payroll tax cut, a middle class tax cut that Republicans largely opposed when it came up for renewal earlier this year. After the issue was largely ignored by elected officials through 2012, Congressional Democrats have finally called for extending the payroll tax cut. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that the cut’s expiration would deliver one of the fiscal cliff’s biggest hits to economic growth next year.

– Austerity-Like Spending Cuts: In all, the fiscal cliff represents a bigger dose of austerity than even austerity-happy European countries have instituted. The spending cuts that would go into effect starting in January pose a greater risk to the economy than expiring tax cuts, according to Congressional Budget Office reports. However, the effect would be slow to kick in, making the fiscal cliff really more of a “fiscal slope.” As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, “if there is no agreement by January 1, policymakers will still have some (although limited) time to take steps to avoid the serious adverse economic consequences that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) outlines

– The Debt Limit Is Back: Meanwhile, the U.S. is also on pace to hit its borrowing limit near the end of the year, setting up another fight over raising the debt ceiling. The “fiscal cliff” is itself a creation of the last debt limit fight, when Republicans insisted on massive spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. That fight led to the downgrade of the nation’s credit rating, cost the U.S. as many as one million jobs, and increased the nation’s borrowing costs.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report in September that showed that cutting tax rates for the wealthiest Americans did not spur economic or job growth, refuting a key Republican justification for the party’s continued obsession with maintaining the tax cuts for the wealthy they passed in 2003. But when Senate Republicans aired seemingly minor complaints about it, the agency quietly withdrew the report, even as its economic team advised it to stand firm.

The report, as ThinkProgress reported in September, found that tax cuts for the rich spurred income inequality, not economic growth. “There is not conclusive evidence, however, to substantiate a clear relationship between the 65-year steady reduction in the top tax rates and economic growth,” the report stated. “However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”

The withdrawal came after Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) aired minor quibbles about language the report used that he viewed as “politically freighted,” the New York Times reports:

Senate Republican aides said they protested both the tone of the report and its findings. Aides to Mr. McConnell presented a bill of particulars to the research service that included objections to the use of the term “Bush tax cuts” and the report’s reference to “tax cuts for the rich,” which Republicans contended was politically freighted.

Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee also aired methodological questions about the study, a spokesperson told the New York Times. But a Times source inside the CRS said that the report was pulled even as its top economic team, including the study’s author, stood by its finding. Outside economists, like Vice President Biden’s former adviser Jared Bernstein, said the study was methodologically sound and that the GOP attack on it “sounds to me like a complete political hit job.”

Despite Republican efforts to block the findings of the CRS study, others have shown similar results. Even Republicans have admitted in the past that the Bush tax cuts didn’t spur the job and economic growth the party promised, and if nonpartisan studies aren’t enough, history makes the same case. Since Republicans began instituting supply-side policies under President Reagan, growth has lagged and income inequality has surged as the wealthiest Americans make more money while paying less in taxes.

The Republican Party’s insistence on protecting tax cuts for the wealthy as their end-of-year expiration approaches is a practice in “faith-based economics” that ignores statistics about job growth over the last decade, Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth (D) said Tuesday.

The high-income tax rates expire at the end of the year, part of the so-called “fiscal cliff.” In an interview with ThinkProgress, Yarmuth blasted the GOP claim that letting the high-income cuts expire amounted to a tax hike on “job creators”:

YARMUTH: That’s nonsense, to be quite honest. All you have to do is look at the Bush years when those tax rates were in play and you had one of the worst eras of job creation in modern history. So, that was the whole purpose of cutting those rates back down. But it didn’t create jobs, and there’s really not any evidence that it ever does.

The vast majority of people who are actually hiring and firing, making those decisions, they make those decisions based on whether there’s enough business to justify hiring another person.

It’s a silly argument that’s based on some kind of faith-based economic system that really doesn’t exist in the real world.

Republican supply-side policies (once referred to as “voodoo economics” by then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush) have indeed failed to generate the job and economic growth the GOP promised. The Bush tax cuts were followed by the worst growth in job creation in more than six decades, as they blew a massive hole in the federal budget. Both jobs and the economy as a whole grew faster under the higher Clinton-era tax rates.

Recent studies have shown that the expiration of the high-end Bush tax cuts would have little or no effect on economic growth, and even some Republicans have admitted that the cuts failed to spur growth at the rates the GOP had promised. Still, the party insists on the preservation of the lower tax rates for the wealthy and has even blocked an extension of the middle-income rates because Democrats refused to extend the high-income cuts too.

The tax plan proposed by Mitt Romney, which he says will avoid adding to the debt and won’t cut taxes for the rich, will work exactly the way the 2003 high-income Bush tax cuts worked, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) said during an appearance on CNN on Thursday. Romney has faced criticism over how his tax plan will provide a 20 percent, across-the-board tax cut without adding to the debt or raising taxes on the middle class. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan analyst, recently found that Romney’s plan as outlined is mathematically impossible.

But Hensarling has confidence that it will work, because the Republican Party has tried this before. In fact, Hensarling said, Romney’s tax plan will work just because it followed the “recipe” outlined by earlier GOP-led tax cuts, including the 2003 Bush tax cuts:

HENSARLING: This is the tax plan: fairer, flatter, simpler, more competitive tax code. We broaden the base by getting rid of a lot of these special interest deductions, exclusions — by one estimate, one-third of the tax code is what is known as tax expenditures.

HOST: Why couldn’t Paul Ryan explain that 11 days ago?

HENSARLING: My guess is he could have had he had time. But we did this in ’03, it was done in the Reagan administration, it was done under President Kennedy under JFK, and guess what: when you follow this recipe, you get more jobs, more economic growth, and more tax revenue.

Since their passage, the Bush tax cuts have been a major driver of the nation’s increased debt and deficits. Without the Bush tax cuts, in fact, the nation’s debt would be at sustainable levels.

Even worse, the Bush tax cuts, which the Romney plan maintains before cutting taxes even deeper, were heavily skewed toward the rich and failed to lead to the economic and job growth Republicans promised. The decade following was one of the worst on record for economic, job, and income growth.

Hensarling is correct: the Romney tax plan certainly follows the Bush recipe. That recipe, though, is one that leads to fewer jobs, slower economic growth, and even bigger debts and deficits.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan would be a boon for the wealthiest Americans, a fact Romney himself admitted in GOP primary debates.

Now, though, Romney has decided that cutting taxes for the rich isn’t what his plan will do, and he insists that he won’t support any tax plan — even his own, apparently — that provides the rich with a massive tax cut. “I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans,” Romney said in last night’s presidential debate.

The last Republican president used a similar argument to sell his tax proposal when he was running for election. At a debate on October 3, 2000, George W. Bush made the exact same claim, telling debate moderator Jim Lehrer that once his tax plan became law, “the wealthiest of Americans” would “pay more taxes”:

BUSH: Let me tell you what the facts are. The facts are, after my plan, the wealthiest of Americans pay more taxes on the percentage of the whole than they do today. Secondly, if you’re a family of four making $50,000 in Massachusetts, you get a 50% tax cut.

Watch it:

Bush’s tax cuts eventually became law, and as a result, the wealthy got a massive tax cut. In addition to rate cuts on income taxes, the Bush tax cuts included cuts to the capital gains rate and other investment taxes and an estate tax cut, all of which largely benefit the rich. The plan came at a cost of $2.5 trillion over its first decade.

And while Bush was technically correct that the rich did “pay more taxes on the percentage of the whole,” that is “a useless measure of tax progressivity,” as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden has explained. The share of taxes paid by the wealthy grew by 25 percent under Bush, but their share of income grew by 30 percent, evidence that they actually got a massive tax cut. Bush’s promise, just like Romney’s, is a vague misdirection meant to distract from the overall tax cut he planned to provide.

Romney’s plan, at a cost of nearly $5 trillion, is even bigger. And though Romney at least says he will cover some of the cost, the closure of loopholes wouldn’t offset the cuts for the rich, and to avoid adding to the deficit, he would have to raise taxes on the middle class. Romney relies on another similar argument Bush used, insisting that economic growth will offset the remaining costs. But the Bush tax cuts were followed by years of tepid job and economic growth that blew a massive hole in the federal budget and left Bush flailing when it came to his promise to pay off the national debt in a decade.

A Republican National Committee spokesperson earlier this year said that Romney’s economic policies would be “Bush, just updated.” It turns out his arguments are too. (HT Chris Hayes)

If the United States hits the so-called “fiscal cliff” — the scheduled year-end spending cuts and tax increases — nearly 90 percent of Americans would see their taxes rise, according to a report released Monday. Thanks to an array of expiring tax provisions, middle-income families would see a $2,000 increase, according to the Tax Policy Center report.

The majority of increases on the middle class would come from the expiration of the middle-income Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax cut extension, and the failure to patch the Alternative Minimum Tax. But if those provisions, most of which have bipartisan support in Congress, were extended, the majority of the remaining increases would hit only the wealthiest Americans, as this chart from the TPC report shows:

Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the middle-income Bush tax cuts (the area in orange) should be extended, but Republicans blocked such an extension earlier this year because Democrats did not include an extension of the high-income cuts. The AMT is traditionally patched to prevent higher taxes on the middle class. Only the payroll tax cut is unlikely to be extended again, according to recent reports, and though it would hit working families, it was a stimulus measure meant to expire eventually anyway.

If other tax credits that were expanded by the 2009 stimulus act — the Child Tax Credit, American Opportunity Tax Credit, and Earned Income Tax Credit — were temporarily extended, the burden on low- and middle-income earners would be even smaller (Republicans also opposed the extension of those credits while pushing for a full extension of the Bush cuts.)

As the chart shows, though, the other tax provisions would mostly hit the wealthy. The high-income Bush tax cuts, cuts to the capital gains rate and other investment taxes, the estate tax cut, and taxes meant to pay for Obama’s health care reform law would all hit the richest taxpayers while having little, if any, impact on middle-class and low-income earners. The overall impact of the tax increases would be significantly larger for the rich even if all of the increases take place, with the top one percent seeing a 7.2 percent increase versus a 5.1 percent increase for all other taxpayers.

The top-line tax number new outlets are taking from the TPC report is certainly ugly: raising taxes on the middle-class would have a negative economic impact at a time when the country is still recovering from the Great Recession. But that calamity should be easily avoidable, given that both sides agree that those cuts should be preserved. The vast majority of the tax increases that would result from going over the “cliff” would have little economic impact since they primarily affect the wealthy, and, as a Congressional Budget Office report made clear earlier this year, the biggest economic threat posed by the fiscal cliff comes not from the tax side, but from its massive spending cuts.

The United States is approaching the so-called “fiscal cliff” at the end of 2012, when a set of policies enacted by the debt deal reached in August 2011 will go into effect. In addition to massive spending cuts, several tax provisions will expire, including the full Bush tax cuts.

Though both the GOP and Democrats agree that the low-end Bush tax cuts, those that give everyone a tax cut but primarily affect the middle class, need to be extended, Republicans have blocked that in order to leverage an extension of the upper-income tax cuts. The logic, Republicans argue, is that not doing so will raise taxes on “job creators” at a time when the economy can least afford it.

An analysis of the fiscal cliff policies by the Economic Policy Institute, however, found that the cost of the Bush tax cuts — and particularly those for high-income earners — far outweigh the benefits:

EPI’s analysis found that letting the entire Bush tax cuts package expire would cause “just over one-third” of the damage of letting the stimulus measures (primarily made up of the payroll tax cut and other middle class tax cuts) expire and less than half the damage of the spending cuts. The high-end Bush tax cuts, as the chart shows, account for 7.3 percent of the cost of the fiscal cliff policies but just 2.3 percent of the economic benefit, meaning their expiration would save a substantial sum of money with a negligible effect on economic growth.

The findings are similar to an earlier report from the Congressional Budget Office that found the expiration of the high-income Bush tax cuts, once multipliers are added, would cause far less economic damage than spending cuts to the discretionary budget favored by Republicans.