We’ve been following the trials and tribulations of various Republican candidates and lawmakers as they are asked, after waxing poetic about the need to cut government spending, which program they’d remove from the federal budget. One of the many who were unable to cite a single program was Carly Fiorina, California’s Republican senate nominee.

You’d think that, having failed to name one program to cut while on live television, Fiorina might take some time to find specific budget reductions before releasing a plan on how she would reduce the deficit. But Fiorina released her plan “to rein in out-of-control government spending” yesterday, and it literally has no proposals for spending to cut, aside from ending earmarks, which account for less than one percent of the federal budget.

Fiorina promises to cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, and then has this to say about where the cuts to get to that level will come from:

– Review every government program as their authorizations expire to ensure only effective programs receive additional funding.

– Terminate ineffective programs that are unable to be reformed such that they have a positive impact.

– End earmarks and sweetheart deals and give the president the authority to line item veto any spending not in the national interest.

That’s it: “terminate ineffective programs.” And we’re all for terminating ineffective programs! In fact, here’s $100 billion in the Defense Department and hundreds of millions in the Education Department that could be cut, just to get the ball rolling. Fiorina’s inability to even suggest one program that she would eliminate shows how fundamentally disinterested she is in actually controlling spending.

Of course, eliminating ineffective and duplicative programs won’t get you anywhere close to bringing the budget into balance. In fact, you’d have to eliminate the entire discretionary side of the budget — including discretionary defense spending, all federal education funding, some veteran’s benefits, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, federal highway funding, and Congress itself — to eliminate the deficit.

The real structural deficit is a result of health care spending, defense spending, and massive tax cuts, none of which Fiorina suggests cutting by one dime.

Interestingly enough, though, Fiorina may have accidentally come out in favor of a tax increase. She says she would cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP — which is where it was the last time the budget was balanced and far below the levels of the Reagan administration — but revenues through 2015 are not projected to go higher than 19 percent of GDP. So either Fiorina is going to have to cut further than even she says we need to, or she’s going to have to raise some taxes.

I understand that candidates are hesitant to say exactly which programs they’d cut, because such choices will inevitably be unpopular with someone. But is it too much to ask that a plan explicitly about reducing spending actually lay out some ways to reduce spending?

Last week, Ben Armbruster noted that a slew of Republicans say that they want to cut federal spending, but when pressed for specifics, can’t come up with anything tangible to cut. One of these is Carly Fiorina, the Republican senate nominee in California, who was asked on CNBC last week to identify a specific spending cut that she would like to see, and only called for a spending freeze at 2008 levels.

Fiorina recently sat down for a nearly hour-long interview with the San Fransisco Chronicle editorial board, where she was asked the same question and at first provided the same answer. However, unlike CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, the Chronicle’s board pushed Fiorina further, asking for a tangible, specific cut that she would make. All that Fiorina could come up with, after a lengthy silence, is the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Q: Can’t you name some areas that you’d like to cut, some programs?

FIORINA: Sure. [pause] When you have, let’s just look at this financial regulatory reform bill as an example of an opportunity missed. What happened? We had 20 plus agencies who were responsible in some way for overseeing Wall Street and preventing Bernie Madoff. They all failed. They all failed. There is overlap, there is redundancy, there are gaps in their portfolios, and by the way, they cost a lot of money. And instead of dealing with that, instead of saying we need to have a more rigorous, accountable, and streamlined regulatory scheme, what did we do?…We’re going to create another one, called the Consumer Protection Agency, and we now have literally hundreds of regulations that are going to have to be written by thousands of bureaucrats. Wrong approach.

Watch it:

There are a couple of problems here. First, Fiorina is incorrect that no agencies were dissolved as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill. In fact, the Office of Thrift Supervision, which everyone agreed was an abysmal failure, will be absorbed into the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Second, Fiorina implies that she would defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but the CFPB is funded out of the Federal Reserve budget and is not subject to Congressional appropriations.

Even if the CFPB’s budget were overseen by Congress, it hasn’t been set up yet, so it isn’t having a budgetary impact at the moment. Fiorina didn’t name any current spending that she would cut, but future spending from a source over which the Senate has no jurisdiction.

But this is emblematic of the conservative approach to budgeting. The one specific thing that Fiorina can identify to cut, in a $3 trillion federal budget, is $500 million for the only regulatory agency whose sole purpose is to protect consumers from the excesses of the financial services industry. Besides that, all she can do is resort to the tired promise of rooting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” and budget gimmicks. (For a partial list of responsible spending cuts and revenue increases that we’d suggest, see here.)

During her debate with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) last week, GOP Senate nominee Carly Fiorina was repeatedly asked whether she supports Proposition 23, a California ballot initiative that would block implementation of AB32, the landmark California climate change law. Fiorina was non-committal at the debate, but two days later released a statement in support of Prop. 23:

Proposition 23 is a band-aid fix and an imperfect solution to addressing our nation’s climate and energy challenges…That said, AB 32 is undoubtedly a job killer, and it should be suspended.

However, according to a new study by the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California Berkley Law school, passing Prop. 23, and thus halting the implementation of AB32 in its tracks, would be a step that leads to direct job losses:

Passage of Proposition 23 would result in direct job losses by undermining the 33 percent Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), which depends on AB 32 authority (the “33% Ref ” scenario). A recent study by the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at UC Berkeley shows that suspending the 33 percent RPS would result in a direct loss of jobs, even if the 20 percent RPS remains in effect.

The researchers also refuted the notion that AB32 is causing unemployment in California. “No connection exists between California’s current unemployment rate and AB 32,” said professor Daniel Kammen, one of the report’s co-authors. “In fact, the clean tech sector in California is one of the few areas of sustained growth during the current recession.”

The Prop. 23 campaign is being funded by Texas-based oil giants Valero Energy Corp and Tesoro Corp., who are turning AB32 “into a scapegoat and blaming it for recent job losses caused by the recession.” Koch Industries, one of the biggest polluters in the country, has also thrown its weight behind the Prop. 23 effort. But ceding to the will of these polluters would be highly detrimental to California’s economy, as AB32 has provided myriad benefits:

California’s clean energy sector has continued robust growth despite the economic recession thanks to the Global Warming Solutions Act. Clean energy jobs have grown 10 times faster than the statewide average since 2005, to over 125,000 today. And green jobs grew by 5 percent even when the state experienced an overall job loss of 1 percent between 2007 and 2008.

Fiorina hasn’t always espoused the belief that clean energy legislation is a job killer. In fact, just two years ago she said that a cap-and-trade system “will both create jobs and lower the cost of energy.” But as she’s remade herself into a conservative senate candidate, she has tossed aside quite a few of her prior positions.

California’s Republican senate nominee Carly Fiorina has been outspoken in her support for extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (because, hey, they pay for themselves!). At the same time, however, she has scoffed at the recent bills before Congress that extend aid to small businesses and school districts, calling the latter “so full of accounting gimmicks it’s disgraceful.”

Last night, during her first debate with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Fiorina was asked “how do you justify immediate help for the wealthiest Americans, but not for average Californians that might be out of a job?” In response, she recited some scary-sounding statistics about unemployment and said that she wants to cut regulations and taxes:

The vast majority of that [2001 and 2003] tax relief went to middle class Americans…To create jobs we need to make sure that, in particular, our small businesses, our family owned businesses, our innovators, and our entrepreneurs are freed from strangling regulation and freed from taxation.

Watch it:

Still at a loss for why Fiorina opposed both the small business lending bill — which also renews small business tax credits — and the state aid bill? That’s because she neglected to mention them. At all. She didn’t even try. She also claimed that the majority of the Bush tax cuts went to the middle class, when nearly two-thirds of them went to the top 20 percent of income earners.

Later in the debate, Fiorina derided the small business lending bill as “TARP junior” (even though she supported the original TARP), but as USA Today reported this week, small businesses are actually waiting for the bill to pass before they start expanding, as they want to take advantage of the loans it would provide. “I’m still waiting for Congress to sign off on the bill,” said Amarjit Kaur, who runs a convenience store and gas station in Wood Village, OR.

The fact of the matter is that preserving the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans would do next to nothing for small businesses. Neither would eliminating the estate tax, which Fiorina touched upon. And when a bill with actual relief for small businesses came before the Congress, Fiorina opposed it, and then failed to justify her opposition when directly asked.

So all the lip service that Fiorina pays to small businesses is nothing more than a shell in which to house her desire to eliminate taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Igor Volsky and Amanda Terkel have more regarding Fiorina’s debate performance.

After winning the GOP nomination for the California U.S. Senate race last week, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has been quick to tout her chief executive credentials in her race against Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). While claiming to fight for “millions of Californians [that] are struggling without a job,” Fiorina has mounted a fierce defense of her record off-shoring American jobs and has glossed over her rocky tenure at Hewlett Packard.

Portfolio named Fiorina one of the 20 worst CEO’s of all time, saying she was “busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered.” And Fiorina’s even gone as far as saying that “of course” she would still cut 10,000 jobs, like she did in 2003, if she were the HP CEO today.

Moreover, the former HP CEO has made a concerted effort to criticize the stimulus package, asserting the economic recovery act “has done nothing” for unemployment in California. In Sacramento on Wednesday, Fiorina reiterated her misguided rhetoric at a press conference held at Rex Moore Electrical Contractors & Engineers, a Sacramento electrical company:

“If you’re a business owner and there are stimulus dollars that might help your customers buy more of your product or might help you, of course you’re going to accept the stimulus dollars,” Fiorina said. “But that is not an argument that the stimulus package has worked because the stimulus package clearly, factually, manifestly has failed because people are losing their jobs for every single dollar that’s out there.”

Interestingly, both Rex Moore and the window-making plant Fiorina’s campaign visited yesterday both benefited from stimulus funds — the first receiving $447,000 subcontract through the program and the latter advertising that customers could receive energy tax credits. The New York Times also reported that there is another California business benefiting from the Recovery act: Fiorina’s former company, Hewlett-Packard. The Times called this “the kind of benefit to private industry that Fiorina says has been missing from the stimulus program. ”

As The Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo has pointed out, the Senatorial candidate’s “only real solution to anything is to cut taxes. But that doesn’t do much good for those who are already out of work and have no taxable income, and it doesn’t spur demand that will give businesses more customers and thus a reason to expand.”

Additionally, while Fiorina argues “people are losing their jobs” because of the stimulus, she clearly fails to recognize the stimulus’ positive impact in California. Although the Golden State is undeniably still struggling economically, the more than 70,000 jobs created as a result of the stimulus are difficult to ignore. Furthermore, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Recovery act has already saved or created 2.8 million jobs — an estimated 3.7 million by September.

– Nina Bhattacharya