Deficit fraud Dino Rossi, who is running on the Republican ticket for Senate in Washington, spends a lot of time fearmongering about the deficit while advocating for policies that would make that deficit worse. Rossi would also like to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans — at a cost of $830 billion over ten years — and as he made clear during a debate last night, he has no intention of cutting the budget in order to cover that cost.

During a portion of the debate during which the two candidates were given an opportunity to question each other, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) asked Rossi what he would eliminate from the budget in order to offset the cost of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Rossi refused to answer, instead attacking Murray’s record.

Murray asked a second time, to which Rossi replied, “I answer your questions, it’s just not your answers.” But in both instances, Rossi failed to identify one single item he would cut from the budget. Watch it:

According to the Tacoma-Seattle News Tribune, Rossi “said after the debate that there should be measures to offset the extension of the tax cuts, but said that as with any budget cuts, it’s impossible to detail them, since it involves cutting thousands of budget line items.”

Of course, Rossi is far from alone in being unwilling to identify one item in the budget that could be cut to begin reducing the deficit. Yesterday, Carly Fiorina, California’s Republican senate nominee, was asked seven times what she would cut from the budget to offset extending the Bush tax cuts and failed to name anything.

Finding the money to offset the Bush tax cuts (and Democrats want to extend a lot of them without paying for it as well) would require cutting huge swathes of the budget, including popular and vital social safety net programs. So, in order to avoid offending any portion of the population, it seems that Rossi is subscribing to the Linda McMahon version of campaigning: elect me first, and then I’ll tell you what budget cuts I’m for.

Dino Rossi, the Republican Senate nominee in Washington, has already made his penchant for economic voodoo apparent by falsely claiming that the estate tax will affect huge numbers of small businesses and inflating his state’s wealthy population by 24 times in an attempt to fearmonger about the effects of the expiring Bush tax cuts. And Rossi doesn’t seem to have it any more together when it comes to deficit reduction, as evidenced by some of his rhetoric on the campaign trail yesterday:

Rossi said the nation is on a “fiscal cliff,” and accused [Sen. Patty] Murray of being one of the people who brought the economy to the brink with deficit spending and industry bailouts. He said he would extend tax cuts made by Congress in 2001 and 2003, repeal the health reform law and work to reduce burdensome regulations on business if elected.

Of course, if one is truly concerned about a “fiscal cliff,” one would probably want to avoid implementing budget-busting tax cuts or repealing measures that actually reduce the deficit. But Rossi here is advocating for both.

Extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich — rather than letting them expire as the Obama administration has proposed — will add $830 billion to the deficit over the next ten years, all to the benefit of the richest two percent of Americans. Repealing the Affordable Care Act, meanwhile, would actually add $143 billion to the deficit, according to the latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

The deficit reduction plan Rossi listed on his website isn’t any more inspiring. His first idea — canceling the remaining TARP and Recovery Act funds — goes after two short-term programs that have no effect on the structural deficit. His two other ideas are a constitutional balanced budget amendment (which is a pipe dream that even conservatives realize would be an economic disaster) and cutting government pay.

The real drivers of the deficit — health care spending, huge tax cuts, and defense spending — don’t warrant a mention. But that’s because Rossi is far more interested in using the deficit to score political points than he is in making any serious decisions about getting that deficit under control.

Last night, Dino Rossi officially became the Republican Senate candidate in Washington. Earlier this week, he tried to portray his desire to repeal the estate tax as a measure that will help small businesses, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the benefits from repeal would go to the ultra-wealthy. And that’s not the only way in which Rossi is going to bat for the rich.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) has embraced the Obama administration’s proposal to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans to expire, while renewing those for the lower- and middle-class. Rossi, though, wants to extend all of the cuts, saying that allowing those for the rich to expire is a “class warfare program”:

Rossi argued that 2 1/2 million people in Washington benefit from the 2001 Bush tax cuts, the extension of which will be a major issue in Congress this fall. Rossi described as “this class warfare program” the Obama administration’s plan to extend the cuts enjoyed by middle-income taxpayers, while repealing tax cuts for high-income households.

Rossi is very confused about the numbers here or is entirely unclear about what the administration’s proposal is. There are about 6.7 million people in Washington state, so for Rossi’s number to be accurate, he’s either claiming that Obama and Murray want to raise taxes on people that they don’t, or he is claiming that more than one-third of the state’s population is making more than $200,000 per year.

Back in reality, the median income in Washington is about $52,000, according to the state’s Office of Financial Management. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 105,209 households in the state that would be affected by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts (or about 1.6 percent of the total population). So Rossi inflated his state’s wealthy population by 24 times.

Washington State (where Rossi formerly served in the state senate) also has one of the country’s most regressive tax systems, as it relies very heavily on sales and excise taxes and has no state income tax. The poorest 20 percent of Washington taxpayers pay more than 17 percent of their income in state taxes, while the richest one percent pay less than three percent.

Rossi himself made somewhere between $380,000 and $1.5 million last year, and has investments worth between $4 million and $15 million. So his taxes most certainly would go up if the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire. But the same can’t be said for the vast majority of Washington’s residents.

Last week, California’s Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina used farmers as props in her quest to cut the estate tax, falsely claiming that if the currently expired tax is reinstated, farms such as the ones she visited would be clobbered. And it appears that her northern counterpart Dino Rossi, one of Washington state’s Republican senate candidates, is taking a page out of Fiorina’s book.

Rossi yesterday toured Seattle’s GM Nameplate, which is a company that “makes face-plates and touch screens for appliances.” Rossi claimed that the company would be hammered by the estate tax, saying, “just to pay that 55 percent tax you’d have to sell to some group from out of state or out of the country, instead of passing it on to the next generation.”

Rossi referenced a 55 percent rate, which only takes effect if no legislation is passed this year. President Obama and many congressional Democrats have proposed permanently reinstating the estate tax at the 2009 level of 45 percent with a $3.5 million exemption, a move which made the GOP balk. Rossi, meanwhile, wants to completely eliminate the tax, out of supposed concern for small businesses and family farms:

“Small, family-owned businesses are the backbone of our economy, providing 64 percent of jobs in the last fifteen years, and, if Patty Murray doesn’t extend this critical tax relief, many could be swallowed up by faceless corporations so that families can pay Uncle Sam,” said Rossi. “Family farms and businesses are part of what make Washington State unique, and eliminating the death tax will keep this tradition alive for generations to come.”

Actually, reinstating the estate tax at the 2009 level will have almost no effect on the small businesses Rossi claims to care so deeply about. According to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, about 110 small businesses or family farms in the entire country would be affected by the estate tax at that level, and according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities “all but a handful” would have sufficient funds on hand to pay the tax.

The exceedingly few that don’t “would have other options — such as spreading their payments over a 14-year period — that would allow them to pay the tax without selling off any of the business or farm assets.” People having to sell their farms or businesses to satisfy the tax man is a convenient conservative story that isn’t based in reality.

So Rossi is essentially hiding behind small businesses and farmers to push a cut that would almost exclusively benefit multi-millionaires. Nearly two-thirds of estate tax revenue comes from estates worth more than $20 million. Repealing the estate tax would cost $784 billion over ten years, with less than one quarter of one percent of the benefits going to actual small businesses.

And, incidentally, if it’s really small businesses that Rossi is concerned about, he chose an odd venue at which to make his anti-estate tax stand. GM Nameplate is an 800 employee manufacturing firm with divisions in Singapore and Dongguan City, China, and it brags about its “seamless transfer of US-manufactured prototypes to a company-owned offshore production facility.” Even by the federal government’s overly inclusive definition of small business, this doesn’t fit.