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In the election of 1928, the Republican Party of Herbert Hoover promised voters "a chicken in every pot and a car in every backyard." (We all know how that turned out.) Now, Mitt Romney is pledging that "If I'm President" every college graduate will be guaranteed a job, Iran will have no nuclear weapons and the United States will dominate the 21st century. And when Romney isn't making fantastic promises about what he'll do when he gets to the White House, he's slandering the current occupant, Barack Obama.

"I Won't Let Iran Get Nukes"

Governor Romney's guarantees start with Iran and its nuclear program. In a November 10, 2011 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Romney pledged, "I won't let Iran get nukes." Or as he put it 10 days earlier during a GOP national security debate:

"If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon."

As to how he'll ensure that outcome, Romney explained that "If you want peace, prepare for war." And despite occasionally acknowledging the complexity of a strike against Iran and even the questionable possibility of success, Romney told the Wall Street Journal this weekend how he would get it done:

So what would he do about it? "I do not have a top secret security clearance at this stage to be able to define precisely what kinds of actions we could take." But he adds that "the range includes something of a blockade nature, to something of a surgical strike nature, to something of a decapitate the regime nature, to eliminate the military threat of Iran altogether."

No U.S. Decline in Romney's "American Century"

Romney's promise to "eliminate the military threat of Iran altogether" is just part of his larger assurance that the 21st century will be another "American Century." Pretending that the rise of India, China and Brazil doesn't inevitably entail the relative loss of U.S. power and influence, Romney announced in his October address at The Citadel:

"This century must be an American Century. In an American Century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. In an American Century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world...As President of the United States, I will devote myself to an American Century. And I will never, ever apologize for America."

Not content to rest there, Romney accused President Obama of "waving the white flag of surrender":

"An eloquently justified surrender of world leadership is still surrender.

I will not surrender America's role in the world. This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President.

You have that President today."

Two months later, Mitt Romney repackaged his promise and his slander at the December 15 Republican debate in Sioux City, Iowa:

"Our president thinks America is in decline. It is if he's president. It's not if I'm president. This is going to be an American century."

As for Romney's charge that President Obama "went around the world and apologized for America," the Washington Post Fact Checker deemed it a Four-Pinocchio lie.

A Job for Every College Graduate

At an event in New Hampshire last week, Governor Romney's pandering went from the sublime to the ridiculous. There, Mitt pledged President Romney would deliver full-employment for all American college graduates:

"What I can promise you is this -- when you get out of college, if I'm president you'll have a job. If President Obama is reelected, you will not be able to get a job. That's the reason I will hopefully get young people who are in college is to say, You know what, I understand what it takes to get jobs in America."

As the record shows, not so much. After all, as the Los Angeles Times recently documented, Romney's "Bain Capital often maximized profits in part by firing workers." That's why FactCheck.org, the Washington Post Fact Checker and Fortune all refused to vouch for Romney's claim that "In those hundreds of businesses we invested in, tens of thousands of jobs net-net were created."

Obama "Has Not Created Any New Jobs"

If Mitt Romney can't prove his boasts about his own job creation record, neither can he justify his blatant lie about President Obama's:

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Credit: TPM

If nothing else, former House Speaker and new GOP front-runner Newt Gingrich is all about keeping his options open. After all, Newt has gone through three religions and three wives. As it turns out, when it comes to Medicare, Social Security and the tax code, President Gingrich wants Americans to have options as well. In each case, Gingrich is offering voters a choice between the current system and a new one. With a nod to that other GOP champion of American women, Herman Cain, call it the 2-2-2 Plan. Of course, whatever you name it, the result is the same: Newt Gingrich would deliver yet another massive windfall for the wealthy while draining trillions from the U.S. Treasury.

Gingrich's scheme for a budget-busting payout for the gilded class starts with his tax reform proposal. Like Rick Perry, taxpayers could choose to pay an optional flat tax rate (15 percent in Newt's case, 20 percent in Perry's proposal). The corporate tax rate would be slashed from 35 percent to 12.5 percent. Like, Perry, Gingrich would eliminate the capital gains tax altogether. (As the Washington Post recently explained the impact of the already historically low 15 percent capital gains tax rate, "Over the past 20 years, more than 80 percent of the capital gains income realized in the United States has gone to 5 percent of the people; about half of all the capital gains have gone to the wealthiest 0.1 percent.")

But as Suzy Khimm documented in the Washington Post, Gingrich's plan would produce an ever larger payday for the upper class than Rick Perry, while ensuring Treasury hemorrhages even more red ink:

Gingrich preserves deductions for corporations and rich individuals that Perry eliminates: He preserve deductions for charitable giving and mortgage interest to all Americans, whereas Perry only keeps them for families earning less than $500,000. Perry vows to eliminate all corporate tax deductions, while Gingrich would preserve them. As such, corporations and the richest Americans could stand to benefit even more under Gingrich's plan than Perry's.

Under Perry's plan, those with more than a million in income would save $500,000 in taxes by 2015, due to a 60 percent drop in their tax rate, and those benefits would be even bigger under Gingrich. According to the Tax Policy Center, Perry's plan would lower total projected government revenue by 27 percent--a $1 trillion loss in 2015 alone. Gingrich's plan, accordingly, would result in even bigger revenue loss.

As ThinkProgress documented, under Gingrich's tax plan "half of the entire benefit goes to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers" with "the richest 0.1 percent of the country will receive a tax cut worth nearly $2 million each and every year." Compared to what they pay now, those earning over $1 million a year would pocket $600,000 in savings.

Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center concurred with that assessment, concluding, "You would have about three-quarters of the revenue you would have under Perry, so you have a much bigger revenue hole."

This week, Bloomberg News explained just how big:

The economic plan proposed by Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich would add $1.3 trillion to the U.S. budget deficit in 2015 alone, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

On Social Security, too, a President Gingrich could unleash torrents of red ink for Uncle Sam.

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Among the predictable differences between the Democratic and Republican members of the so-called debt super committee is this: Democrats propose to increase revenue by raising taxes, while Republicans want to increase revenue by cutting taxes. You read that right. After Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and George W. Bush doubled it again thanks in large part to supply-side tax cuts that gutted the U.S. Treasury, Congressional Republicans are once again peddling the GOP's biggest fraud that "you cut taxes and the tax revenues increase."

On Wednesday, super committee Democrats offered an initial proposal delivering an estimated $3 trillion in debt reduction by 2021. But since roughly half that figure would come from new tax revenue largely produced by modest rate hikes on the wealthiest Americans, Republicans instantly dismissed the Democratic plan. House Speaker John Boehner said it wasn't "serious." As one GOP aide put it, "It is ridiculous, nothing more than political posturing."

Instead, Republican debt panel members put forward their own plan the next day. And as the Washington Post explained, the GOP proposal went from the ridiculous to the sublime:

Republicans, instead, have offered more than $2 trillion in savings over 10 years, highlighted by nearly $700 billion in spending reductions to Medicare and Medicaid. According to lawmakers and aides familiar with the GOP proposal, it includes an offer of more than $600 billion in savings from new tax revenue. But the two sides are in deep dispute because Republicans want to count these increased receipts based on the expectation of surging economic growth -- a standard that neutral budget observers have declined to use in the past.

If that "magic asterisk" sounds familiar, it should. The tried and untrue talking point that tax cuts spur economic growth so rapid that revenues exceed what they otherwise would have been was the formula for the mountains of debt produced by Reagan and Bush.

As Reagan's OMB chief David Stockman learned the hard way, Arthur Laffer's supply-side snake oil may have been Republican orthodoxy ever since Jude Wanniski sketched Laffer's curve on a cocktail napkin, but it also happened to be catastrophically wrong.

As most analysts predicted at the time, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-setting debt. Even his OMB alchemist Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios" and "future savings to be identified."

Forced to raise taxes eleven times to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It's no wonder that, three decades after he concluded "the supply-siders have gone too far," Stockman lamented last year:

"[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."

And that magical thinking - that "tax cuts pay for themselves" and "tax cuts raise revenue" and "tax cuts don't need to be offset" - dominates what passes for thinking by the Republicans' born-again deficit hawks.

For example, take GOP debt super committee panelist and second ranking Senate Republican Jon Kyl.

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Credit: Center for American Progress

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner peppered his address to the Economic Club of Washington with a dozen mentions of America's so-called "job creators." But in claiming that high taxes and unnecessary regulations have "pummeled" his supposed job producers, Boehner willingly misrepresented the source of and solutions to the nation's economic problems. After all, recent surveys show that regulations and taxes are not killing small business. With corporations flush with cash and the total federal tax burden at a 60 year low, the U.S. instead faces a demand crisis fueled by staggering household debt.

But John Boehner perpetrated the biggest fraud of his address when he declared, "Job creators in America are essentially on strike." If so, they've been on the picket line for a decade. As it turns out, George W. Bush's tax breaks for the wealthy sadly coincided with the worst period of job creation of any president since Herbert Hoover.

Like his lieutenant Eric Cantor, John Boehner has been regurgitating the "job creators" talking point for months. (Arguably, the sound bite dates back to 1993, when Republicans deployed the same "job killing" language against the Clinton upper-income tax increases that preceded the 1990's economic boom.) In May, Boehner served up the "job creators" line seven times in a speech to the Economic Club of New York. Contending that "the mere threat of tax hikes causes uncertainty for job creators -- uncertainty that results in less risk-taking and fewer jobs," Speaker Boehner explained that same month just who his magical job creators are:

"The top one percent of wage earners in the United States...pay forty percent of the income taxes...The people he's [President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy."

If so, those expectations were sadly unmet under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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I had to listen to this clip of Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona, who joined Eric Cantor earlier last week and bailed on the debt-ceiling negotiation, several times to convince myself that I was actually hearing what I thought I heard and just how completely bizarre Kyl's understanding of economics truly is. Does he think that this is in any way persuasive towards the Ryan budget plan? In what universe?

KYL: Right, but just take the Ryan budget. It’s supposed to be the most radical thing. Okay, over ten years, the Ryan budget adds $5 trillion dollars to our national debt. We would have ten straight years of roughly $500 billion in increased debt. So the radical cuts that some people are talking about and that the chairman warns against, are simply not a part of the Republican plan. Once you begin to turn down the long term spending, which is what the Ryan budget does, then you get back to a point where we’re only spending 20% of our economy, of the GDP. Today, we’re spending 25%. The Obama budget never gets below 23, but that’s what the Ryan budget does. Obama would add $12 billion over that same period of time to our debt

Well, first of all, the Ryan budget plan is radical because it ends the social contract that has allowed America to prosper for eighty years by ending Medicare as we know it. But does Kyl actually think it softens the blow because it adds FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS to the national debt? Where is that vaunted GOP fiscal responsibility? And that's in comparison to Obama's budget, which allows seniors to keep Medicare AND only adds to the debt by a relatively measly $12 billion. (Even though the fact is that's not true).

Sorry, but what Kyl blabbered on about (and Wallace let him) *is* precisely a seriously radical idea of how to fix this economy, in that it won't fix anything.

Or maybe since Bernanke's warning that spending cuts in the near term were dangerous for the weak recovery was too obtuse for him to understand, Kyl needs a more remedial explanation of the economy.

THE GOP/RYAN BUDGET PLAN IS WILL HURT THIS COUNTRY, ECONOMICALLY, FISCALLY, EMOTIONALLY, PHYSICALLY AND SPIRITUALLY BECAUSE IT IS A FUNDAMENTALLY UN-AMERICAN PLAN.

Any questions, Kyl?

Remember this article from The Hill, about a split in the Obama administration on Social Security reform?

Social Security reform is splitting President Obama’s economic and political advisers. Obama is being pulled in opposite directions by those whose priorities are fiscal and those whose No. 1 concern is electoral Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling and Sperling’s deputy, Jason Furman — leading figures in the president’s economic team — are pressing Obama to cut Social Security benefits if necessary, say sources familiar with their positions.

But Obama’s political team, led by David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, are urging the president to understand that backing benefit cuts could prove disastrous to his 2012 reelection hopes, sources say.

The political team is winning the argument so far, but internal debate rages at the White House as Republicans in Congress insist sweeping efforts to restore government finances must include Social Security reform. “Gene Sperling and Jason Furman and some of the Treasury people started with the posture that we’re the best people to reform Social Security — that was when the Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress,” said a Democratic policy expert who has met Obama’s economic policy team over the past two years.

“The same people have continued to make that argument even as they’re now responding to conservatives who are stronger in the Congress,” the source, who strongly opposes benefits cuts, told The Hill. “There are two camps,” the source added. “One camp wants to be able to throw a bone to Republicans and some [centrist] Democrats.

“The political people would prefer not to be accused of being the party that cuts Social Security in those ways. Some political people would like to see the president out there defending the program and making the case that it has nothing to do with the deficit.”...read on

Every poll shows quite clearly that even Republican voters do not want a cut in these benefits.

If Sperling's argument is about reforming Social Security and Medicare without taking away from them, then OK, but that's not what I'm reading here. Do these creatures only listen to Villager gasbags who want working-class Americans to be the only people to "share" the sacrifice and suffer in America after Wall Streeters and their partners caused the Great Recession?

Guess who won?

President Obama will deliver a major speech this week about plans to reduce federal budget deficits and long-term debt, senior adviser David Plouffe said this morning. "He's going to lay out his approach very clearly," Plouffe said on CNN's State of the Union, one of a string of Sunday talk show appearances he made.

Obama will address cuts to defense and domestic spending, as well as what to do with the growing entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, Plouffe said. He will talk about "dollar amounts" over "a period of years." "We have got to make sure that we are taking a balanced approach to this," Plouffe said.

The president's deficit speech is set for Wednesday.

It comes as the nation is set to hit its $14.3 trillion debt ceiling in mid-May.

It's interesting that Plouffe didn't want this to happen, but he was put on the Sunday talk-show circuit to be the one to tell us about Obama's upcoming speech.

If the President approaches it with no cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and actually frames the debate by demonstrating that Paul Ryan's ludicrous budget plans are in fact ludicrous, then it may not be as bad I think it will be. But I don't have much faith in that, now that more information has been released on the budget deal. Also, once he sets out his plans for what appears to be austerity, then I'd calculate that it'll be at least 50% worse than what he's going to propose nationally, since they terribly negotiated the 2011 budget.

Steve Benen says as much:

But then there's the flip side. Once Democrats commit to systematic debt reduction as policymakers' principal goal -- as opposed to, say, economic growth -- it sets the terms of the debate. The unyielding dynamic locks everyone into answering the same question: how do we tackle the deficit and the debt?

That's the question Republicans (and much of the media) want as the central focus, but there are more pertinent and important questions that should be prioritized, such as, "How about a jobs plan to reduce unemployment?" Or maybe, "How will taking money out of the economy and reducing public investment lead to more growth?"

What's more, it also sets baselines for a "compromise." If Obama presents a credible vision for long-term debt reduction this week, we'll have one pillar, which will serve as a counterweight to Paul Ryan's radical House budget plan presented a few days ago. But a moderate counterweight may not be wise -- if recent history is any guide, negotiations will produce a deal that's somewhere between them.

In this case, that'd be a disaster. Even halfway to Ryan's roadmap would destroy much of the modern American social compact, and prove devastating to the middle class.

mcjoan of DKos explains:

With Republicans coming off of their big win Friday night, with an additional $6.2 billion more in cuts than they went into the negotiations asking for, it's hard to see getting out of the budget and debt ceiling negotiations with Medicare and even Social Security largely intact. Now that Obama is offering up Medicare, well, get that spare bedroom ready for the parent or grandparents.

But in case the administration really wants to think about some policy alternatives to save Medicare and Medicaid some money, they might start with breaking the the policy they helped kill during the Affordable Care Act negotiations. It'd be a start.

Paul Krugman writes:

You might have expected the president’s team not just to reject this proposal, but to see it as a big fat political target. But while the G.O.P. proposal has drawn fire from a number of Democrats — including a harsh condemnation from Senator Max Baucus, a centrist who has often worked with Republicans — the White House response was a statement from the press secretary expressing mild disapproval.

What’s going on here? Despite the ferocious opposition he has faced since the day he took office, Mr. Obama is clearly still clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend America’s partisan differences. And his political strategists seem to believe that he can win re-election by positioning himself as being conciliatory and reasonable, by always being willing to compromise. But if you ask me, I’d say that the nation wants — and more important, the nation needs — a president who believes in something, and is willing to take a stand. And that’s not what we’re seeing.

Wednesday is his chance to lead.

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During the debate over the stimulus program in early 2009, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed, "If the money were lent rather than just granted, states would, I think, spend it wisely and the states that didn't need it at all wouldn't take any." Now would be a good time to take him up on his offer.

After all, state and local governments have already slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs, and facing a staggering $175 billion budget gap over the next two and a half years, are certain to shed hundreds of thousands more. Last week, the Commerce Department revised down its fourth quarter GDP estimate, confirming once again that draconian state budget cuts are putting the U.S. economic recovery at risk.

So here is a modest proposal to rescue the states and protect the fragile American economy. Establish a $200 billion, two-year federal fund providing loans to those states desiring them to prevent further layoffs and to help pay for the rising, recession-induced costs of Medicaid, unemployment and other essential services. Call it the State Assistance Fund (SAF).

How Would the State Assistance Fund Work?

As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Moody's economist and former John McCain adviser Mark Zandi each documented last year, aid to state and local government provides among the biggest "bangs for the buck" of any federal stimulus spending. While the CBO estimated "transfer payments to state and local governments" provides a multiplier as high as 1.8 (that is, delivers $1.80 in economic returns for each dollar spent), Zandi's model showed a 1.41 multiplier. As he put it last July:

Federal aid to strapped state and local governments also is providing significant economic benefits, lessening their need to slash programs and jobs or to hike taxes and fees.

Unlike the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the State Assistance Fund would not offer grants, but instead low (or no) interest loans to state governments. With the approval of their legislatures and governors, states could apply for their share of the $200 billion pool of emergency assistance funds. While the formula for divvying up funds would have to address the relative size and need of the states, they themselves would control how the money is spent.

Keeping police, teachers and firefighters on payroll, bolstering depleted unemployment insurance funds, funding the increased costs of Medicaid for swollen ranks of the jobless, distributing aid to counties and municipalities or even addressing shortfalls in public employee pension funds, state capitals would make those decisions. The only requirement is to repay the U.S. Treasury within 10 years.

Participation in the program is entirely voluntary. If states for fiscal - or ideological reasons - did not need or want the help from Washington, they need not ask for it. So while cash-strapped California, New York and Illinois might take that deal, similarly situated states like Rick Perry's Texas, Chris Christie's New Jersey or Scott Walker's Wisconsin might take a pass.

Why Now?

Forty-nine of 50 states are required by law to balance their budgets. Mercifully, to fight wars and economic calamities like the Bush recession, the federal government is not.

As the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal among others recently detailed, state and local governments are fiscal facing a fiscal triple-whammy. Even with spending now well below 2008 levels, the downturn-induced drop in revenues and increased demand for social services coupled with the looming end of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is producing yawning gaps in state budgets. And the states, all but one of which must balance its budget each year, are responding with sharp spending cuts, massive layoffs, deferred payments to state employee pension funds and, in some cases, tax hikes.

The numbers are staggering. By November, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that state and local governments had shed 407,000 jobs since their August 2008 peak. With state budget shortfalls estimated to approach $100 billion for each of the next two years, analysts including Moody's Economics and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have forecast more state and local job losses reaching between 400,000 and 900,000.

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This weekend, Republicans marked the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan with speeches celebrating his small government philosophy, anti-tax fervor and hard-line foreign policy. But if Reagan was a GOP candidate today, he would doubtless fall victim to violations of his own 11th Commandment, "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican." Because despite all of the right-wing hagiography, Ronald Reagan ballooned the national debt, repeatedly raised taxes, signed abortion rights legislation and negotiated with terrorists in Iran. For those and so many other perceived offenses, the GOP rank and file - and especially its purity-demanding Tea Partiers - would today brand a reanimated Ronald Reagan a Republican in Name Only.

Meet RINO Reagan:

1. Reagan tripled the national debt
2. Reagan raised taxes 11 times
3. Reagan expanded the size of government
4. Reagan supported the "socialist" Earned Income Tax Credit
5. Reagan negotiated with terrorists in Tehran
6. Reagan sought to eliminate nuclear weapons
7. Reagan gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants
8. Reagan approved protectionist trade barriers
9. Reagan signed abortion rights law in California
10. Reagan eventually debunked AIDS myths Republicans continued to perpetuate

1. Reagan Tripled the National Debt. As most analysts predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-settings deficits. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios."

Forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It's no wonder Stockman lamented last year:

"[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."

Sarah Palin's revisionist history Friday notwithstanding, it was Reagan who put the United States on "the road to ruin."

2. Reagan Raised Taxes 11 Times
As ThinkProgress noted, the inedible image of Ronald Reagan the tax cutter is "false mythology." (It is also worth noting that it was President Obama and not Reagan who delivered the largest two year tax cut in American history.) While Governor Reagan doubled California's state spending and signed the biggest tax hike up to that point, as President he raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan "a dear friend," told NPR, "Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration -- I was there."

3. Reagan Expanded the Size of Government
On Friday, Sarah Palin told the Reaganauts assembled by the Young Americans for Freedom, "We need to stop spending and cut government back down to size." If that's the case, her role model should be Democrat Bill Clinton and not Republican Ronald Reagan.

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Credit: New York Times

In their scorched-earth effort to deliver another $700 billion tax cut windfall for the wealthy, Republicans have fittingly appropriated their favorite global warming talking point: "uncertainty." Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and John Boehner are just of the GOP leaders claiming "Congress ought to act today to stop all the tax hikes" because "it would reduce the uncertainty that's affecting employers all across our country." Of course, they are predictably silent about the 1980's, when Ronald Reagan upended the tax code four times in five years, including "the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime." And despite conservative warnings then as now about "job-killing tax hikes," American businesses responded by adding 23 million jobs after President Clinton raised upper-income tax rates in 1993.

Since the age of Reagan, the Republican electoral strategy has been "you can fool some of the people some of the time and that's our target market. At least, that is, when it comes to taxes. Because while the Gipper did deliver steep tax cuts in 1981 (slashing the top rate from 70% to 28%), what Reagan giveth he also taketh away. As Paul Krugman noted, in the face of the staggering deficits Reagan's supply-side tax cuts produced, "no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people":

The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.

Tax historian Joseph Thorndike concurred, noting that the two bills passed in 1982 and 1984 together "constituted the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime."

But the Reagan tax hikes hardly ended there.

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So it's come down to this. On Saturday, David Stockman, the legendary Reagan budget chief who presided over the Gipper's supply-side tax cuts, announced that the "debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts." The next day, the former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, who famously helped sell the 2001 Bush tax cuts to Congress, declared them simply "disastrous."

Sadly, Stockman and Greenspan are just about the only voices in the Republican Party speaking the truth about the fiscal devastation wrought by the expiring Bush tax cuts. After all, the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan, only to double again during the tenure of George W. Bush. And as it turns out, the Bush tax cut windfall for the wealthy accounted for almost half the budget deficits during his presidency and, if made permanent, would contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession - combined. Of course, you'd never know it listening to the leaders of GOP.

And that's just the beginning. Here, then, are 10 Republican Lies about the Bush tax cuts:

• Lie #1: Democrats Plan Across the Board Tax Hikes on January 1st
• Lie #2: Democrats Want a $3.8 Trillion Tax Increase
• Lie #3: Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves
• Lie #4: The Bush Tax Cuts Didn't Add to the Deficit
• Lie #5: Expiring High Income Tax Cuts Will Hurt Small Business
• Lie #6: The Estate Tax Devastates Small Businesses and Family Farms
• Lie #7: The Bush Tax Cuts Helped All Americans
• Lie #8. Extending Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy is the Best Way to Stimulate the Economy
• Lie #9. Bush Tax Cuts Produced 52 Straight Months of Job Growth
• Lie #10: The Rich Pay Too Much in Taxes Already

For the details, data and charts for each, continue reading after the break.

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