Right now, 14 million unemployed Americans are struggling to make ends meet. 44.4 percent of these Americans have been struggling without a job for six months or more. While Republican lawmakers continually put off their “jobs” agenda, many of these Americans receive much needed financial support from the federal unemployment benefits program. These benefits, unfortunately, will expire at the end of 2011.

GOP presidential frontrunner Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has been touting a “jobs” candidacy and emphatically insists that she could spur some economic recovery within the first three months of her presidency, if “not the whole turnaround.” Her powerhouse plan? Fire Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, repeal “Obamacare,” and cut taxes for the wealthy. Indeed, today on NBC’s Meet The Press, Bachmann reiterated that, to ensure “job creation,” Congress needs to cut the coporate tax rate from 34 percent to “something that is far more competitive.” But when asked whether extending the much-needed jobless benefits is part of her jobs agenda, Bachmann flatly rejected the idea. “Frankly we don’t have the money,” she said:

BACHMANN: I think we need to focus on more than anything is, what will lead to job creation. And what will lead to job creation is taking the United States down from about the top corporate tax rate in the world at 34 percent down to something that is far more competitive.

GREGORY: What about extending jobless benefits for people who are out of work. Do you think that’s a necessary step?

BACHMANN: I think it would be very difficult for us to do because we frankly don’t have the money. That’s the bottom line in the United States. We are now, according to Mark Stein, he wrote a book called “After America,” and in his book he says we are the brokest [SIC] nation history. He said we have gone from the biggest creditor nation to the biggest debtor nation in a very short period of time.

GREGORY: So no on extending jobless benefits.

BACHMANN: Right now I don’t think we can afford it.

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Bachmann’s focus on the corporate tax rate to create jobs and spur the economy is, at best, ironic. Right now, corporations are sitting pretty on trillions in cash reserves. Corporate profits are at record highs. Still, Bachmann advocates for cutting the corporate tax rate down to nine percent, a policy that would cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion over ten years. According to the Tax Policy Center, a ten point reduction would cost $915 billion. Such a significant blow to the deficit may be justifiable if it resulted in job creation. However, as the non-partisan CBO noted, it doesn’t.

By contrast, an extension of jobless benefits for six months would cost $34 billion and will actually generate two dollars of economic growth for every dollar spent — not to mention the peace of mind it would provide to millions of jobless Americans. A fact, it seems, that Bachmann frankly does not seem to care about.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) yesterday jumped in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, saying that “it is time to get America working again.” “I will work every day to make Washington, DC, as inconsequential in your lives as I can, and free our families, small businesses and states from a burdensome and costly federal government so they can create, innovate and succeed,” he said. And Perry quickly picked up the endorsement of former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX):

Former senator and current banker Phil Gramm of Texas — well-connected to big donors but controversial for his role in preventing tighter regulation of Wall Street — told The Huffington Post yesterday that he is endorsing his former student and political protege, Texas Gov. Rick Perry...”I’m for Rick and I will do what I can to help,” Gramm said in an interview in Detroit. “He has been an effective governor. He is a determined guy from a small town who knows how to get things done.”

In 2008, Gramm, who was advising Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign (and was floated as McCain’s choice for Treasury Secretary) gained notoriety for saying that the country was “a nation of whiners” that was only in a “mental recession.”

But Gramm’s legacy goes much deeper than that. In 2001, he tucked the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into an unrelated, 11,000 page appropriations bill. That act ensured that the huge market in over-the-counter derivatives stayed unregulated, laying the groundwork for the 2008 financial crisis (and the implosions of AIG and Lehman Brothers). He also believes there should be no minimum wage and has derided the working poor by saying, “we’re the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat.”

Perry was a student of Gramm’s at Texas A&M, and when Perry became governor “Gramm and his bank pushed a controversial proposal to allow the company to take out insurance polices on teachers and other workers, even though the workers themselves would not benefit.” If Gramm’s support is any indication, Perry’s zeal for financial deregulation will know no bounds.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — who last won the Ames, Iowa Republican presidential primary straw poll — has been trying to spin S&P’s downgrade of U.S. credit as something other than a “blast at Republicans.” Though S&P cited GOP intransigence on taxes, the use of the debt ceiling as a political football, and the very existence of “default deniers” (of which Bachmann is one) as reasons for the downgrade, Bachmann has claimed that S&P “essentially proved me right.”

Today, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Bachmann what government spending she would have cut if her plan to simply not raise the debt ceiling were adopted. (Failing to raise the debt ceiling would have forced the government to cut 40 percent of its spending overnight.) Bachmann refused to answer, instead laying out the things she wouldn’t have cut, including military spending and Social Security:

TAPPER: Rick Santorum, who came in fourth in the straw poll, called your position on just refusing to raise the debt ceiling, he said it was just irresponsible and outrageous, since immediately the government would have to cut 40 percent of the government. What cuts would you make?

BACHMANN: Well, it’s not outrageous at all. What’s outrageous is turning us into the biggest debtor in the history of the world. No nation has ever been in debt to the level that we are, and it wasn;t that long ago that we were the world’s largest creditor. We have to get our house in order. This year alone, we brought in $2.2 trillion in revenue from all the taxes we pay, and then we spent not only every penny of that, but we spent $1.5 trillion more.

TAPPER: Right, so what would you cut? What would you cut?

BACHMANN: Well, immediately what need to do is recognize that we will tell the markets that we will pay the interest on the debt, don’t worry about default. Number two, we will pay our military, and anyone who’s currently on Social Security, you get paid. But beyond that, I would bring all members of Congress together — and this isn’t some project for ten years, fifteen years down the road — and we’re going to reform entitlements.

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A 40 percent cut in government spending that exempts the military and Social Security would mean cutting all other programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and education spending, by nearly 90 percent. Even then, depending on the amount of revenue that would be coming in on a given day, Social Security may not be safe. A report from the Bipartisan Policy Center showed that, if the debt ceiling had been breached on August 2, the government would not have enough revenue on August 3 to cover all of the Social Security checks that were due.

Bachmann has been desperately trying to spin her way out of the debt ceiling debacle’s aftermath, since S&P has unambiguously said that the slew of ideas the GOP put forward during that debate would have made U.S. creditworthiness worse. As S&P senior director Joydeep Mukherji noted about the country’s default deniers, “that a country even has such voices, albeit a minority, is something notable. This kind of rhetoric is not common amongst AAA sovereigns.”

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, IA.

After one of the three credit ratings agencies, S&P, downgraded the United States’ creditworthiness from AAA to AA+ in large part because of extreme GOP intransigence on raising revenue, Republicans were quick to try to deflect blame onto the Democrats. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney singled out the White House, saying “Standard & Poor’s rating downgrade is a deeply troubling indicator of our country’s decline under President Obama.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) piled on the following day, calling S&P’s move a “wake-up call for Congress and the President to take meaningful action to reduce deficit spending and the resulting debt.”

ThinkProgress spoke with Grassley at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday to get his further thoughts on S&P’s criticism of Republican stubbornness. However, before we were able to ask the Iowa senator about S&P’s recommendations regarding our nation’s fiscal dilemma, Grassley made a startling revelation: he has not even read the report.

KEYES: Did you get a chance to read the S&P report?

GRASSLEY: It’s a wakeup call…

KEYES: Did you read the report they released on it?

GRASSLEY: No, I did not, because it came out as I was leaving. I was out here, you know, so I don’t have a copy of the report.

The report is five pages long. It was released a full week ago. And despite Grassley’s assertion that he was “out here [in Iowa] so I don’t have a copy of the report,” it’s available free on the Internet for anyone to read, Iowans included.

Still, Grassley didn’t let the fact that he hadn’t read the report stop him from making broad generalizations about what our plan of action needs to be going forward.

With the revelation that Grassley, the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, didn’t even read S&P’s short report explaining why it decided to downgrade the United States’ creditworthiness before commenting on it, one has to ask: how many other members of Congress haven’t read the report?

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) is set to jump into the presidential race today, bringing with him his beliefs that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are unconstitutional “Ponzi schemes.” While Perry likes to brag about Texas’ economic strength, his story is largely a mirage.

One of Perry’s favorite topics is Texas’ job creation, even though, between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace in Massachusetts than in Texas, and “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” In an interview with The Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Perry actually showed callous disregard for American workers, saying that he doesn’t believe that any jobs were saved by the government’s rescue of the American auto industry:

Q: But the counterargument is that if GM collapsed, there would have been tons of jobs lost—and now it’s profitable again. Without TARP, the banking system would’ve imploded—and now the money’s been paid back.

A: I don’t necessarily buy into the premise that somehow or another those measures saved these jobs. There are companies that get restructured on a regular basis and the workers don’t lose their jobs. They get new management, they put a pay-out plan in place and we go on about our business rather than getting these huge amounts of debt piled on future generations.

According to the Center for Automotive Research, “if the government had not invested in the automotive industry, up to 80,000 automotive jobs would have been lost…Once Chrysler and GM emerged from their ‘orderly’ bankruptcies, the growth of automotive sector employment has been strong, with 52,900 workers added since July 2009. Had GM and Chrysler not successfully emerged, those jobs would have been permanently lost.” The auto companies also support hundreds of thousands of jobs at manufacturers and suppliers. There’s no telling how many of those jobs would have been lost if GM and Chrysler had gone under.

Of course, Perry doesn’t seem to believe that government jobs (including his own) exist at all, so maybe he thinks that auto workers are a figment of the imagination as well.

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa.

Conservative legislators and talk show hosts have falsely repeated one of their favorite claims — that poor people don’t pay enough in taxes — multiple times throughout the debt and budget debates, as they attempt to deflect Democratic attempts to ask corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share. The claim has been distorted in multiple ways, whether it’s that nearly half of Americans don’t pay taxes or that the top 1 percent shoulders 40 percent of the nation’s tax burden.

Either way, the claims are false. And today at the Iowa State Fair, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich refused to play along, blowing up the conservative talking point by correctly stating that nearly all Americans pay taxes in some form:

KEYES: There’s been a lot of discussion on the number of people who aren’t paying income taxes. Do you think people are paying enough in taxes?

GINGRICH: Well, first of all, virtually everybody pays taxes, ’cause if you go to work, you pay into Social Security and Medicare taxes. We have property taxes. Most states if you buy something, you pay a sales tax. So I don’t find too many Americans who think that they are under, or they are not being taxed enough. [...]

It’s technically true of the income tax. It’s not true of taxes in general.

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Gingrich is correct. As ThinkProgress has repeatedly noted, Americans who are not subject to the income tax — primarily senior citizens, students, the unemployed, and the poor — do pay taxes in other forms, whether through payroll taxes, sales taxes, or state income taxes. Less than a quarter of American households do not contribute to federal tax receipts.

As for the richest one percent of Americans, they’ve continued to see their tax rates fall, even as income inequality continues to grow to unfathomable levels.