“The President and his party’s leaders have fallen short in their duty to tackle our generation’s most pressing fiscal and economic challenges,” claimed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). “By contrast, the new House Majority has fought to put the brakes on the President’s spending spree.”

However, as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden noted, CBO was projecting a surplus for 2012 as recently as 2007, and plummeting federal revenue — not the GOP’s imaginary “spending spree” — is responsible for the lion’s share of the swing from surplus to deficit:

Most of that swing from surplus to deficit was the result of the Great Recession’s onset. Between September of 2008 and January of 2009 alone, economic conditions prompted the CBO to revise estimates of 2012 revenue collections downward by over $240 billion. [...]

The remainder of the deterioration did happen after 2009, but higher spending wasn’t even close to the main culprit. The real problem was lower-than-expected revenues.

In January 2009, the CBO forecast 2012 revenues at $3.1 trillion. Today, the CBO expects that this year’s revenue will be just $2.5 trillion, a nearly $600 billion difference. That revenue decline accounts for fully 48 percent of the swing from projected surplus to current deficit.

And while some of that decline has to do with continued economic weakness, the majority of it, about $335 billion, is the direct result of the tax cut deal signed into law in December 2010. That deal, which extended all of the Bush tax cuts, even those that exclusively benefit the very wealthy, is the legislative factor by far most responsible for this year’s deficit.

It was Republicans who insisted that the Bush tax cuts be extended for everyone in 2010, even during a time of record deficits. Not only is revenue the main factor behind today’s deficit, but it’s also the driver behind projected deficits:

As we’ve noted, a do-nothing Congress could virtually eliminate the deficit by simply not extending a slew of expiring tax breaks at the end of the year.

Not only that, but as the Tax Policy Center found, Santorum’s plan would blow a $1.3 trillion hole in the budget, gutting federal revenue by about 40 percent:

The Santorum plan would reduce federal tax revenues substantially. TPC estimates that on a static basis, the Santorum plan would lower federal tax liability by about $1.3 trillion in calendar year 2015 compared with current law, roughly a 40 percent cut in total projected revenue. Relative to a current policy baseline, the reduction in liability would be about $900 billion in calendar year 2015.

“I was surprised at how large the revenue losses were,” said TPC’s Roberton Williams. “It’s a lot of rate cuts and doesn’t get rid of anything to help pay for that.”

The average tax cut for a millionaire under Santorum’s plan would be nearly $448,000. For the richest 0.1 percent of the country, the tax cut would be worth $1.3 million annually. Santorum often complains that the deficit “is exploding,” but his plan would do nothing to turn around the nation’s budget woes, instead spending trillions to cut taxes for those at the very top of the income scale.

“We’re about to release 30,000 prisoners in the state of California because we can’t house them in a humane way,” said Executive Producer James Duff. “Last year in pursuit of the death penalty, the state of California spent $172 million.”

This, of course, is true—Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget is projected to bring the state’s deficit down to $9.2 billion, which is not small potatoes, and leaves the state with a long way to go. And that fiscal crunch and prison overcrowding are a tremendous problem that has a real impact on how people carry out their duties, whether it’s prison guards using different tactics on maintain control on unit, or the situations in which prosecutors are willing to cut deals and how they think about probation versus jail time. It’s intelligent to have a show acknowledge that, and to draw its drama from the ongoing structural problems of the state. It’s not exactly Tony Kushner’s East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis, which is about the reasons California is broke and the tax-dodging mentality that crops up like an infectious disease. But it’s still a decision that reflects a sense of both time and place, that actually makes use of the fact that the show is happening in California instead of just being there because it’s easy.

An expanding workload and cuts in funds have left the Internal Revenue Service unable to adequately perform either of its primary duties — collecting taxes and providing the public with reasonable service, according to a report released Wednesday by the I.R.S.’s internal monitor.

The agency’s staff reductions and backlog have limited its ability to collect the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that the government is owed but not paid, Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate, said in her annual report to Congress.

In the report, Olson noted that, due to budget cuts, the IRS “is unable to maximize revenue collection, contributing to the federal budget deficit.” “It will never be possible to eliminate the tax gap entirely, of course, but even modest improvements would help to reduce the federal budget deficit. Moreover, even apart from the fiscal implications, the size of the tax gap raises important equity concerns,” the report added.

The latest data shows that there is a $385 billion gap between the taxes owed to the U.S. and those collected, meaning close to 15 percent of federal taxes went unpaid. There would have to be a $3,400 “noncompliance surtax” paid by every tax compliant household, in order “to enable the federal government to raise the same revenue it would have collected if all taxpayers had reported their income and paid their taxes in full.” The IRS, meanwhile, estimates that every dollar spent on enforcement brings in $4-$5 dollars of additional revenue.

For the past year, Republicans have doggedly insisted that the nation’s deficit is a crisis that eclipses high unemployment. But they’ve only been willing to reduce the deficit through drastic spending cuts — and have denounced Buffett for saying tax increases on the rich need to be part of the solution.

Last fall, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that if Buffett was feeling “guilty” about paying too little in taxes, he should “send in a check to the Treasury. Now, Buffet says he’s willing to do just that to pay down the national debt — if Republicans will do their part too:

The billionaire investor, in the new issue of Time magazine, says he will donate $1 to paying down the national debt for every dollar donated by a Republican in Congress. The only exception is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell – for whom Buffett said he would go $3-to-$1.

The idea stems from a New York Times opinion piece Buffett wrote last August in which he said the rich ought to pay more taxes. It sparked an instant controversy, with some Washington conservatives calling on the 81-year-old “Oracle of Omaha” to voluntarily pay extra.

“It restores my faith in human nature to think that there are people who have been around Washington all this time and are not yet so cynical as to think that can’t be solved by voluntary contributions,” the Berkshire Hathaway CEO told Time…

McConnell certainly has the resources to meet Buffett’s challenge — he’s worth at least $10 million. Buffett went on to say that the U.S. needs a system that “takes very good care” of citizens who work hard but don’t happen to make millions in the financial sector.

Romney’s economic plan includes a $6.6 trillion tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the rich and corporations. As a result of this gargantuan giveaway, the plan “would yield approximately $6.5 trillion in deficits from 2013 through 2021.” And as the Tax Policy Center found, Santorum’s plan doesn’t fare much better:

The Tax Policy Center has not yet formally modeled the former Pennsylvania senator’s tax platform. However, because it cuts rates significantly but does not eliminate tax preferences—and even expands a few—it would very likely add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit. Looked at from that prism, it is not so different from the ideas raised by most of his GOP rivals.

Like other Republican tax planks, Santorum’s would benefit corporations and high-income individuals. No surprise there. But unlike his rivals, he’d also cut taxes for many families with children.

Santorum is no bleeding heart, however. Even as he’d cut their taxes, he’d shred direct government spending for programs aimed at assisting these same households.

When it comes to economic policy, the GOP field is largely in lockstep, supporting new, huge tax cuts for the rich and corporations and opposing efforts to ensure that millionaires can’t pay lower taxes than middle-class families. That kind of end result fits right in with the economic beliefs that Santorum holds, as he’s said that he is “for income inequality” and believes that the country’s economic woes are the result of “huge moral failings.”

The senators claim that these reductions are simply “real, sustainable spending cuts.” However, as McClatchy reported, about 70 percent of the deficit reduction in DeMint’s plan is placed right onto the backs of low-income Americans:

A plan by Republican U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina to slash the federal budget deficit would hit the poorest Americans especially hard, directing 70 percent of its $4.2 trillion in spending cuts at safety-net programs intended to help tens of millions of low-income people.

The plan proposes $20 billion in cuts that would affect the affluent. It suggests almost $3 trillion in cuts that would affect low-income Americans, leading one liberal economist to call the plan “cruel.”

“It’s cruel,” said Andrew Fieldhouse of the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s inexcusable to cut supports that help those adversely affected by the economic downturn.” Alan Viard, who was on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, added that “this plan places a disproportionate burden on low-income groups.”

Even with tax revenue at a 60 year low, DeMint proposes no new revenue other than from one-time sale of government assets, which is obviously not a sustainable revenue source. Interestingly, he also does nothing on Medicare, even while walloping Medicaid and means testing Social Security.

This is hardly the first time that DeMint has been the right-wing id on economic policy, as he also put forth the Senate Republican stimulus plan, which consisted of nothing but huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. He simply shows what the right-wing would do if it had absolute control of the budget: gut the social safety net while largely sparing the richest Americans any pain.

All of us are going to give a little something if we’re going to get out of the hole we’re in. Everybody’s going to see something different…I think it’s better for us to take the pain that we’re going to have to take and make sure it’s meted out in the proper order than take much more severe pain. When I talk to my colleagues on the other side, and some of my closest colleagues are the most liberal, I find them more intellectually honest oftentimes, the very people they want to help, unless we change these [government programs] now are the very people who are going to get hurt if we don’t fix it.

Watch it:

Coburn is absolutely a staunch conservative with whom we disagree on most budgetary issues, but to his credit, he has consistently said that new revenue needs to be a part of any realistic deficit reduction package, acknowledging what the vast majority of his Republican colleagues won’t. He has said it’s “pretty stupid and naive” for Republicans and anti-tax zealots like Grover Norquist to think that a budget deal won’t include new revenue, accurately pointing out the depths to which government revenue has plunged in recent years.

During the speech, Obama reserved specific criticism for the Bush tax cuts, saying that “in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history. And what did they get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country.” This drew the ire of Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who said Obama’s speech contained “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” (three “Pinocchios“) because of the statement:

The Bush tax cuts have been roundly criticized for being inefficient and poorly designed, but it is a stretch for Obama to blame slow job growth on the tax cuts. That are many factors that affect job growth, and it is silly to directly link the 10-year-old tax cut to today’s job growth — just as it is silly to claim that Bill Clinton’s tax increases resulted in a gain of 23 million jobs. Obama’s claim of the “slowest job growth,” in fact, includes the loss of jobs under his administration… Finally, Obama blames the Bush tax cuts for “massive deficits.” It is certainly true that the Bush tax cuts helped blow a hole in the budget. But they did not do it all by themselves.

Let’s unpack these one by one. First, Kessler claims that its unfair to say that the Bush tax cuts were for the wealthy. But last year, fully half of the entire benefit from all of the Bush tax cuts flowed to the richest 5 percent of Americans.

Next, Obama’s argument is clearly that the Bush tax cuts didn’t lead to job growth, as conservatives claimed they would. It’s a perfectly reasonable — and entirely accurate — shorthand to say that the Bush tax cuts were followed by “the slowest job growth in half a century.” Obama never said that the tax cuts, and only the tax cuts, were the sole factor that caused that slow growth. And of course Obama should count jobs lost in his own term towards this total. In case Kessler hasn’t noticed, the Bush tax code is still in place.

It’s also perfectly reasonable to attribute deficits to the tax cuts, even if they’re not responsible for every dime of the fiscal decline. Here’s a chart laying out which aspects of fiscal policy contributed to the deficit over the next decade. The huge brown stretch in the middle is the Bush tax cuts:

In fact, if everything that happened over the last decade had happened, including the wars and the recession, except for the Bush tax cuts, “total debt as a share of GDP would be under 50 percent this year — instead of pushing 70 percent — and it would be expected to stay under 60 percent for the rest of the decade.”

It seems that Kessler decided to slam Obama’s speech at dishonest because, in an address meant for the general public, he didn’t explain each and every aspect of slow job growth or go in-depth on every factor that caused the deficit, instead pointing to broad trends showing that the Bush economic plan did not do any of the things that it was meant to do. This is hardly a stretch and is certainly not worthy of a rating corresponding with “significant” errors. But this is hardly the first time Kessler’s ginned up his own meaning of true when it comes to budget matters.

President Obama has threatened to veto any legislation undoing the trigger cuts. And it seemed that House Speaker John Boehner had his back, Talking Points Memo reported last month:

But on November 3, at his weekly press availability, Boehner said he feels “bound” by the debt limit deal, even the automatic defense cuts. “Me, personally? Yes, I would feel bound. It was part of the agreement, and so either we succeed or we’re in the sequester. The sequester is ugly. Why? Because we didn’t want anybody to go there. That’s why we have to succeed.”

But now, Boehner is calling on Obama to stop the automatic military cuts, the Hill reports:

“I really believe that the president of the United States has a responsibility here as well,” Boehner told reporters [yesterday]. “He’s the commander in chief; he knows what those cuts will mean to the military, and so I frankly believe the Congress still must work with the president to find a solution to our long-term debt.”

Although it’s unclear why the Republicans turning back. The sequestration military cuts would bring defense spending back to 2007 levels.

After 536 days without a government, Belgian opposition parties struck a deal today to form a new coalition led by Socialist Elio Di Rupo. On this side of the pond, 563 days without any congressional action on fiscal or budgetary measures would go most of the way toward achieving the deficit reduction Congress is longing for. As Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden has pointed out, if Congress were do to nothing between now and January 2013 (just 397 days from now), the federal budget deficit would fall to just 1.6 percent of gross domestic product and continue dropping after that:

Similarly, debt as a share of GDP would fall to just 61 percent by 2021:

Such reductions would take place primarily due to the expiration of the budget-busting Bush tax cuts, which cost roughly $2.5 trillion over 10 years. The spending cuts triggered by the inability of the supercommittee to reach a deal would also take place, and multiple policies that Congress generally kicks down the road, like the alternative minimum tax, would also take effect.

Of course, there are policies Congress could enact to actually help unemployed Americans and the struggling economy, like passing laws that would create jobs and stimulate growth while addressing much-needed improvements in infrastructure and other areas. But if the goal is only to reduce debt and deficits, perhaps it’s better if members take their cue from the Belgians and just go home for a year or two.

This dance should by now be familiar. This past summer, during the debt ceiling negotiations which produced the super committee, the Republicans nearly drove the country into financial default by refusing to allow tax rate increases even as they insisted that Democrats make up the difference in deficit reduction through trillions in destructive spending cuts. Indeed, Standard & Poors specifically cited the GOP’s intransigence on revenue raising when it downgraded the United States’ credit rating.

And before that, in a budget deal hammered out last December, Republicans established their ongoing theme by refusing to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for even the top brackets — at a cost of $133 billion, and benefiting a mere 4.8 million people.

ThinkProgress has compiled the video evidence of the GOP’s singular ongoing obsession. Watch it:

Yet, today, when Chicken Little had the opportunity to write a balanced budget amendment into the Constitution, he ran away screaming that the amendment wouldn’t do enough to transform the Constitution into a Tea Party fantasy:

The backstory here is that, just a few months ago, Ryan and his fellow congressional Republicans were pushing a permanent austerity amendment that would effectively lock Tea Party fiscal policy in place permanently. Among other things, amendment would make it functionally impossible to ever raise taxes, while simultaneously requiring the federal government to balance its budget entirely through spending cuts.

Were Paul Ryan’s fantasy scenario — a balanced budget achieved entirely through cuts — to actually play out, it would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.”

The amendment Ryan rejected today, by contrast, contains no provision preventing the budget from being balanced through higher taxes — possibly even on rich people! This would allow Congress to save a percentage of these jobs by shifting the cost of deficit reduction to people who can afford it, but it would not protect the interests of the very wealthiest Americans. So Ryan voted it down.

Let’s be completely clear about what this means. Given the choice between an option that would kill 15 million jobs & drive the nation into another great depression, and a different option that could kill fewer jobs but would also not guarantee that David Koch and Paris Hilton pay low taxes, the House GOP’s top budget policymaker decided that he would rather protect poor Paris and hold out for the option that would force millions of American families into utter destitution.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) next to Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL)

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), a co-chair of the congressional supercommittee tasked with crafting a $1.5 trillion deficit reduction package, suggested that he would reject “any penny” of further tax increases in the deal currently being negotiated. Republicans on the committee so far have only offered $300 billion in revenue-increases in the form of eliminating tax deductions. Even with revenues at a 60 year low, Hensarling, who was speaking with CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, bristled at increasing static revenues (meaning he only wants revenue increases that come due to economic expansion):

HENSARLING: But listen, any penny of increased static revenue is a step in the wrong direction. We can only balance that with pro-growth reforms, and frankly the Democrats have never agreed to that. So I don’t know how many times I can tell you, that agreement’s not going to happen.

KUDLOW: I appreciate the honesty.

Watch it:

Despite new reports showing how the government subsidizes the rich, Hensarling makes clear that he would oppose efforts to close loopholes in the tax code or raise tax rates on billionaires as part of a deficit reduction package. Bloomberg News reported today that Democrats on the committee are already scaling back their revenue demands.

The GOP is voting to make Paul Ryan's budget unconstitutional.

Here’s a simple question for the 235 House Republicans who voted for House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget, and who also plan on supporting an amendment to the U.S. constitution that would mandate balanced budgets when it comes up for a vote this week: Why did you support a budget plan that you also think should be considered unconstitutional?

This is a serious question. Last April, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a budget that made a lot of dramatic changes. It slashed Medicaid, ended Medicare as we know it, gutted public investments in education, transportation and science research, cut huge holes in the safety net, and dramatically cut taxes for rich people, while raising them for everyone else. But there’s one thing it didn’t do. It did not balance the budget — not for nearly 30 years anyway.

And yet, those same House Republicans are now poised to vote for a constitutional amendment that would require the budget to be fully balanced as soon as 2018. If they get their way and the constitution is changed, the Ryan budget plan — the same one that they supported just months ago — would produce more than 20 years of budget deficits, each and every one in violation of the highest law in the land.

Of course, this push to change the constitution is just the latest twist on an old idea. Back in the 1990s, congressional Republicans also thought that the only way to get to a balanced budget was by constitutional fiat. That belief proved false, as Congress balanced the budget just fine by 1998 without having to change the constitution. But as with so many other right-wing economic ideas that should have perished long ago from exposure to facts, this one just won’t die.

A balanced budget amendment might sound good in a press release, but it’s not a serious budget proposal. You can’t fix the country’s fiscal problems by simply deeming them to be “unconstitutional.” You have to actually change the tax code so that it raises more revenue. You have to identify specific programs and services and benefits that will be cut to reduce spending. And you have to implement policies that will directly address underlying economic weaknesses like extremely high unemployment, a struggling middle class, and increasing income inequality. Passing a balanced budget amendment accomplishes precisely none of those goals (and, in fact, makes accomplishing them even harder).

But this week’s debate over a balanced budget amendment isn’t really about fiscal policy. It’s about scoring political points. Otherwise, how can anyone who voted for the Ryan budget plan possibly vote for a bill that would make their preferred budget path unconstitutional?

Congressional Republicans have offered to increase tax revenue by nearly $300 billion over the next decade through an overhaul of the tax code, a significant concession aimed at breaking a long-standing impasse in negotiations over the federal debt.

The offer envisions a tax code rewrite that would lower rates for everyone while raising overall tax collections by $250 billion, mainly by limiting the value of itemized deductions such as write-offs for home mortgage interest, state and local taxes and other expenses.

As a symbol of how far this debate has shifted, over the summer Speaker of the House John Boehner proposed a plan that included $800 billion in new revenue. The GOP now wants to raise less than 0.2 percent of GDP in revenue, which is less than the Democrats have offered in Medicaid cuts.

Plus, there is a huge catch: in order to agree to raising revenue, Republicans want to not only make all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, but according to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, they also want to lower the top income tax rate from its current 35 percent to 28 percent:

The highest tax rate would be reduced from 35 percent to 28 percent under the emerging GOP tax code overhaul proposal, the senior Democratic aide tells me. And the reduction would actually be even bigger than this. After all, if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire, as they’re set to do, the high end rate would go up to at least 39 percent. In other words, the aide says, under the proposal Republicans are pushing, the drop down to 28 percent would be at least 10 percentage points from what it would be if the cuts are allowed to expire.

According to Center for American Progress Director for Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden, the reduction in the top tax rate alone costs $670 billion, which exclusively benefits the wealthy. Meanwhile, limiting itemized deduction in the way that the GOP suggested to the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore would, according to Linden, raise $560 billion from the wealthy. So the rich are still getting a tax cut.

The rest of the revenue that the GOP has to raise to net $300 billion, therefore, must come from middle- and low-income households. Let’s emphasize that again: the GOP’s big “concession” when it comes to deficit reduction is paltry amount of revenue that will come from many middle-class households, paired with a huge tax cut for the rich.

Simply put, the GOP’s plan is not a concession, but a joke meant to make them look reasonable as they continue to push for lowering tax rates on the most well-off Americans. As one Democrat said, “they either think we’re morons or desperate.”

In the plan, the “sequestration” — a fancy word for cuts — of $600 billion in military spending could be avoided. Speaking with Foreign Policy yesterday, a former top official in Donald Rumsfeld‘s Defense Department, Dov Zakheim, promoted the idea, outlining a GOP strategy in which failure of the super committee is preferable:

If there’s sequestration, Congress has a year to move out from under it. If the Super Committee actually strikes a deal [that includes some defense cuts], it will be exceedingly difficult to undo the deal.

The strategy is something Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other Republicans have been suggesting since the middle of last month. Yesterday, McCain, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, reiterated the message:

The sequestration is not engraved on golden tablets. It is a notional aspiration. And those of us — and I think we’d have sufficient support to prevent those kind of cuts from being enacted because of the impact it would have on national security.

Watch the video:

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) said there “would be bipartisan interest” in dodging the triggered cuts. While Senate Armed Services Chair Carl Levin (D-MI) called sequestration the “Sword of Damocles over everyone’s head,” he refused to comment on the possibility of negating the debt deal. One Democratic aide, however, described the potential GOP move as “giving up prematurely [on the super committee] and anticipating failure.”

If Congress did indeed produce new legislation nullifying parts of the Budget Control Act of August 2011 (the debt deal that created the super committee), Obama should veto it. By issuing a veto threat now, Obama could put pressure on the super committee to fulfill its mission and make the more than trillion dollars in deficit reduction.