Bill Kristol, who had predicted that Mitt Romney would name Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running-mate, expressed some concern Saturday morning that Republicans may have a hard time defending the GOP budget, which disproportionately cuts taxes for the rich.

“It’s the tax cuts for the wealthy, where Republicans have not done a particularly good job of defending it and I think you’ll see Democratic attacks focus on that side of the equation,” he said. The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore agreed, but noted, “who’s better to defend those policies that Paul is, I mean he knows this stuff better than anyone.” Watch it:

Paul Ryan’s infamous budget — which Romney embraced — replaces “the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.” Federal tax collections would fall “by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade” as a result. To avoid increasing the national debt, the budget proposes massive cuts in social programs and “special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.”

But 62 percent of the savings would come from programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes, who would also experience a tax increase. That’s because while Ryan “would extend the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year, he would not extend President Obama’s tax cuts for those with the lowest incomes, which will expire at the same time.” Households “earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.”

The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire in January, and since he was on the campaign trail, President Obama has expressed a desire to preserve the cuts for the middle class while letting tax rates for the wealthy reset to where they were during the Clinton administration. Most Democrats in Congress have embraced that proposal.

Conservative lawmakers and pundits, however, have been fearmongering that allowing the tax cuts for the wealthy to expire will kill job creation and small businesses (despite the fact that fewer than 2 percent of small business owners will be affected). “Republicans must emphasize that they stand for small and medium-size business,” wrote Karl Rove in an op-ed today. “A GOP growth agenda would keep intact the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.”

Last night on CNBC, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore took this one step further, saying that he can’t “see the sense” of allowing cuts for the rich to expire, and then advocating that taxes be raised on the poorest Americans in order to finance tax cuts for the rich and corporations:

I just don’t see the sense of this. In fact, if I could have my ‘druthers, I’d raise the ten percent tax rate to fifteen percent and lower the [top] rates…Let’s bring the [corporate] rate down.

Watch it:

This is a stunning admission from Moore, as he explicitly advocated raising the lowest tax bracket while simultaneously cutting the highest. But he’s not the only one on the right who would like to see such a plan implemented. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has crafted a budget plan that raises taxes on 90 percent of Americans while cutting them for the richest 10 percent.

Adopting such a plan would only exacerbate income inequality that is already the worst it has been since the 1920′s. According to the latest data, “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.” The top 1 percent of families now receive nearly 25 percent of the country’s income, after earning less than 10 percent in the 1970s.

At the same time, tax cuts for the rich have pushed the difference in tax burden between the wealthy and the middle class to the smallest in modern history. In fact, this year the Bush tax cuts will give millionaires more in tax breaks than 90 percent of Americans will make in total income.

Retaining the tax cuts for the rich in a time of long-term structural deficits and vast income inequality would be bad enough. To actually cuts those rates while raising rates for those on the bottom of the income scale would be unconscionable.

Today, the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to 9.4 percent in July, and “businesses cut a much-less-severe 247,000 jobs from their payrolls.” Analysts had anticipated something to the tune of 325,000 jobs lost and a 9.7 percent unemployment rate.

As the New York Times reported, an analysis of the stimulus plan offered by economists “suggests that the punch from increased government spending has helped the economy begin to bottom out faster than it would have otherwise.” However, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore appeared on Fox News this morning and said that, despite the report, he is “ready to declare the economic stimulus plan a failure.” Watch it:

Moore is right that this is by no means a “good” report overall, but declaring the stimulus a failure at this junction is to ignore the effect that it has already had. “The signs of the stimulus are there,” Allen L. Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics, told the New York Times. “Government — federal, state and local — is helping take the economy from recession to recovery. I think it’s the primary contributor.” This graph, from a report by the Council of Economic Advisers, shows the impact on job loss that the stimulus has had.

Due to the stimulus, the actual loss has been much less than the projected. So as Tim Fernholz put it, “I hope that these arguments will dispel the ignorant discussion over whether or not the stimulus is ‘working.’ It is doing exactly what economists thought it would, even if the policy wound up being executed in an economic environment that was much worse than expected.”

David Leonhardt noted that the jobs report also shows that “the average hourly pay of rank-and-file workers, which had been flat in June, rose 3 cents in July, to $18.56 an hour. That wage is up 2.5 percent over the past year, while inflation has been roughly zero.” These are encouraging signs. To be sure, the economy is still in a very weak state, and it remains the case that finding a new job is extremely challenging for those who have lost theirs. But that’s precisely why the stimulus dollars need to keep flowing into the economy, boosting demand and stimulating spending as the economy starts to slowly turn around.