In an interview with ThinkProgress and other online reporters this morning, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) flatly asserted that Republicans were not interested in deficit reduction. Pelosi asserted that the purpose of the GOP obsession with deficits is to destroy government, which she referred to as “the public space.” Pelosi said the programs under attack include “education, clean air, clean water, food safety, public safety” and more. Pelosi concluded, “You name it, they’re there to diminish it, destroy it.” Listen:

Sign our open letter to Pelosi asking that anyone she appoints to the super committee insist on new revenues that exceed any new cuts, and a jobs creation program.

Despite rhetoric about the imminent need to cut federal spending, the Republican-controlled House Armed Services Committee late last night approved a $700 billion military funding allocation for next year — the Pentagon’s largest budget ever — including a “lifeline” to the presumed-dead extra engine for F-35 fighter jet:

During a markup of the 2012 Pentagon authorization measure, House Armed Services Committee members approved one amendment that would allow Rolls and GE access to equipment so they could continue testing a second F-35 power plant. [...]

[T]he panel shot down an amendment introduced by [Rep. Jim] Cooper [R-TX] that would have siphoned $380.6 million from the F-35 fighter program. It also would have reduced the planned buy of the Marines’ version of the Lockheed Martin-made F-35 in 2012, from six to four.

The second engine for the F-35 is one of the most obvious and least painful places to cut federal spending, as the military has insisted for several years that it doesn’t want it. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has even urged President Obama to veto any defense authorization that includes funding for the project, saying, “Every dollar additional to the budget that we have to put into the F-35 is a dollar taken from something else that the troops may need.”

Finally, at the Pentagon’s urging, the full House voted to kill funding for the extra engine in February, but last night’s vote is the first step to resurrecting the project. While the new measure allocates no funds for the project, with the defense contractors working on the project offering to self-fund testing in the meantime, the clear assumption underlying their investment is that the project will be fully revived one day.

Last night’s vote was a big “helping hand to Rolls-Royce and GE,” the lead contractors on the project — and they’ve earned it. The companies dispatched a small army of lobbyists from 13 different firms to the Capitol and have donated heavily to key lawmakers. GE gave $223,000 to members of the Armed Services Committee in the 2010 election cycle alone, including $8,500 to Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA). Rolls-Royce’s PAC gave almost $10,000 to McKeon in the 2010 cycle. Other supposed fiscal hawks like House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) have also defended the redundant project.

Meanwhile, Republicans on the committee also approved spending an extra $100 million on missile defense, money which could have instead gone to National Guard and Reserve equipment needs.

As Washington considers ways to rein in the deficit, Republicans have obstinately demanded that any tax revenue increases be taken off the table, claiming that raising taxes during a down economy would doom the recovery. As evidence, they often point to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, claiming his massive 1981 tax cuts caused that decade’s economic boom. But this anti-tax position makes it almost impossible to do anything serious about the deficit, since — despite GOP talking points — the country has a revenue problem, not a spending problem. On ABC’s This Week today, Reagan’s own budget director, David Stockman, exposed the GOP tax cut “theology” for the ahistorical sham it is. Asked by Reuter’s Chrystia Freeland if the economy could “sustain” a tax increase, Stockman said “absolutely,” noting that the economy only recovered under Reagan once he raised taxes in 1982 after “cut[ting] taxes too much” the year before:

FREELAND: You worked for Ronald Reagan. Do you think the American economy — so you’re, like, a red-blooded capitalist — could it sustain higher taxes than it has now?

STOCKMAN: Absolutely. In 1982, we were looking at the jaws of the worst recession since the 1930s. We overdid it in 1981, cut taxes too much. We came back with a big deficit reduction plan in 1982. Unemployment’s at 10 percent, the economy is in dire shape, and we raise taxes by 1.2 percent of GDP, which would be $150 billion a year right now — not 10 years down the road — but right now.

Watch it:

Stockman also attacked Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget plan, noting it “does not cut one dime from the debt” in the next three years. Indeed, in addition to being draconian and regressive, Ryan’s budget fails to acomplish the only thing it sets out to do — solve the deficit — despite claims from Washington journalists that his plan is “serious.”

Appearing on MSNBC’s Jansing and Co. this morning, Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN) ran into some problems defending a GOP talking point when he claimed that the federal government has “too much” tax revenue coming in:

ROKITA: Washington does not have a revenue shortage problem, it has a spending problem. [...]

JANSING: I know that’s a talking point, I’ve heard it from every Republcian. The whole revenue/spending thing. But when I read indepdent economist’s analyses, they say you need to do both.

ROKITA: I don’t think so. … Again, we don’t have — we have too much revenue as it is. We spend to much.

Watch it:

The Republican message about a revenue vs. a spending problem is silly, as they are each flip sides of the same coin, but Rokita’s statement is just wrong. If the government spent only what it takes in in tax revenue, it would have to slash nearly half its funding to every program, from defense to Medicare, yet Rokita apparently thinks even that is too much. As a share of GDP, government revenue in 2009 (the most recent year available) was at its “lowest since 1950.” As this chart from the Congressional Budget Office demonstrates, the recession decimated the federal tax base:

But even before the recession, there simply wasn’t enough money coming into the federal government to cover costs, forcing the government to borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends, as Republicans like to remind Americans so frequently.

It’s worth noting that the last time Republicans claimed there was too much revenue coming into the federal government, they ended up solving that problem by helping to create the deficits of today. “[M]ore than any other” reason, President Bush justified his 2001 tax cuts by claiming the budget surplus President Clinton created was actually bad. “A surplus in tax revenue, after all, means that taxpayers have been overcharged,” Bush explained. Of course, the Bush tax cuts are one of the largest contributors to today’s budget deficit by depriving the government of needed revenue.

There wasn’t “too much revenue” in 2001, and there’s far less today. As a member of the budget committee, Rokita should be aware of that.

Late last night, just minutes from an impending government shutdown, congressional negotiators and President Obama reached a deal to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year, cutting $38.5 billion under current funding levels, per Republican demands. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and other Republicans hailed the deal as an important step to reining in the deficit. In a speech addressing the deal, Obama compared the compromise to the one he helped broker late last year on extending the Bush tax cuts for two years.

But a look at those two deals suggests Republicans are not as interested in cutting the deficit as they claim. In both cases, Democrats made big concessions on key Republican agenda items — tax and spending cuts — in the face of intransigent opposition from the GOP. But while the appropriations deal from last night cuts $38.5 billion in spending over the next six months (through the end of the fiscal year in September), the tax cut deal deprives the government of roughly $150 billion in revenue over a similar period of time.

Extending the Bush tax cuts “would result in a $200 billion to $300 billion cost to the US Treasury compared to what had been expected” in one year — or $100 to $150 billion in six months. So while they very nearly shut down the government to extract painful spending cuts, Republicans had already wiped out those spending cuts many times over with the revenue lost from extending the Bush tax cuts.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and a handful of other tea party lawmakers have been pushing a plan to create a balanced budget amendment (BBA) to the U.S. Constitution. With little support for the idea in Congress, Paul traveled to the Kentucky Capitol this week to urge his state’s lawmakers to call for a Constitutional Convention in order to force the issue. On Tuesday, at Paul’s behest, the state Senate passed the measure on a near party-line vote.

But not everyone on the right is thrilled with the plan. Kentucky tea party gubernatorial hopeful Phil Moffett — who introduced Paul at CPAC earlier this month and whom Paul has endorsed — slammed Paul’s idea in a lengthy statement on his website:

Asking states to call a federal constitutional convention is fraught with peril. First this has not been attempted since the Constitution was passed. There are not any established protocols or limitations that can be placed on the convention, therefore the entire Constitution will be open for modification. I do not have confidence in today’s politicians to do the same level of work our Founding Fathers accomplished in the 1780′s.

Moffett goes on to explain, in detail, why a balanced budget amendment to Kentucky’s Constitution has completely failed in its aims.

Indeed, a balanced budget amendment is a terrible idea. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative columnist who worked for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, in addition to Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), has noted that a BBA is “just an election year ploy” to “fool people into thinking [Republicans] are fiscally responsible.” Bartlett cites over a dozens scholarly articles explaining the dangers of a BBA, and lists eight reasons why it is a “bad idea.” For example:

It’s doubtful that BBA supporters really understand the composition of federal spending. In fiscal year 2009, we would have had to abolish every discretionary spending program, including national defense, to balance the budget and that still wouldn’t have been enough without higher revenues. We would have had to cut more than $300 billion out of Medicare and Social Security as well.

“A BBA would force the federal government to make economic recessions worse,” he adds. And Bartlett is hardly alone among conservatives. Scott Galupo, a former staffer for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) called the proposed amendment “quite simply, insane,” in an op-ed he wrote last year titled “A Balanced Budget Amendment Is Still a Stupid Idea.”

On the campaign trail, House Republicans repeatedly vowed to cut $100 billion in federal spending their first year in office. Once actually in power, though, they tried to put forward just $30 billion in cuts, only to face a backlash from tea party activists. Republicans went back to the drawing board and the Appropriations Commitee came back with $60 billion in proposed cuts.

The GOP has tried to pass this off as $100 billion in cuts by using as a baseline President Obama’s 2011 budget. But this is highly misleading as that budget was never enacted — instead, spending is at the lower levels set the year before.

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who sits on the Appropriations Committee, admitted yesterday that the $100 billion figure is “funny math.” In an interview with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, he went on to acknowledge that the GOP’s cuts are just a “rounding error when it comes to the overall budget and deficit”:

FLAKE: We’re proposing $100 billion in cuts — kind of. It’s a little funny math, as it always is here. But it’s a pretty significant cut to non-defense discretionary [spending]. But that’s a rounding error when it comes to the overall budget and deficit. It represents one-fifteenth of the current deficit that we’re running.

Listen here:

Indeed, Flake is correct in noting that his committee’s budget neither cuts $100 billion nor does much to significantly reduce the deficit. It will, however, cost up to a million federal employees their jobs, slash programs that help women, kill investment in education and transportation, and hurt financial regulators’ ability to do their job.

Back in September, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) guessed that his state was facing a $10-11 billion budget shortfall for its fiscal 2012-2013 budget, and refused to entertain reports that his budget gap might be larger until he received the state Comptroller’s official report. He even poo-pooed pronouncements from his 2010 election opponent, Houston Mayor Bill White, that Texas’ deficit may be twice what he was estimating. “If [White] wants to be the budget forecaster for the state of Texas, that’s a different job,” Perry said. “It’s called the comptroller.”

Well, the Comptroller released its report today, and Perry had it wrong:

Texas is expected to collect $72.2 billion in taxes, fees and other general revenue during the 2012-13 budget, down from the $87 billion used in the current two-year budget, Comptroller Susan Combs announced Monday. That puts the shortfall at $27 billion given that maintaining services would run $99 billion for biennium.

Not only did Perry severely underestimate the depth of his state’s budget woes, but he has also spent the last few years lecturing Washington D.C. on its supposed fiscal improprieties, giving speech after speech in which he held up Texas as the economic model for the nation to follow. Just last week, he said that Congress needs to propose a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, or else “the hard work that Texas and states like ours have done to make prudent fiscal decisions will be washed away by Washington’s growing avalanche of excess”:

“I am convinced that a constitutional limit on Washington’s spending sprees and irresponsible borrowing is the only boundary they will understand and heed. Otherwise, the hard work that Texas and states like ours have done to make prudent fiscal decisions will be washed away by Washington’s growing avalanche of excess.” [1/7/11]

“Americans are growing ever more aware of this spending explosion, and increasingly interested in grabbing the throttle, so they can slow down Washington’s runaway train. I’m convinced that the hardworking citizens of our state and country simply want government to handle the basics, then get out of the way, as we have done here in Texas.” [1/15/10]

“I don’t suspect I’m the only person in this room who is concerned about a national debt that has blown past $11 trillion and a federal deficit that is well over $1 trillion… Fortunately, we have taken the opposite approach here in Texas.” [6/30/09]

“In Texas and South Carolina, we’ve focused on improving “soil conditions” for businesses by cutting taxes, reforming our legal system and our workers’ compensation system. We’d humbly suggest that Congress take a page from those playbooks by focusing on targeted tax relief paid for by cutting spending, not by borrowing.” [12/2/08]

Though it’s facing a budget mess of roughly the same magnitude as California, Texas has received far less attention, and at this point, there’s practically nothing left in the state’s budget to cut besides education and health care spending (while Texas already has some of the lowest per-pupil spending rates and the highest number of those without health insurance).

As Paul Krugman wrote, “Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting — the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending — has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere.” And it seems the theory can’t make it there.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.