Since President Obama’s election, Republicans in Congress have criticized the administration’s stimulative economic policies for increasing the deficit and “spending trillions of dollars we do not have.” But the GOP’s concern about the debt goes out the window when they’re advocating for extending the Bush tax cuts. Over the weekend, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said Congress should not allow the Bush tax cuts to expire and suggested that tax cuts should never have to be paid for, a sentiment echoed by almost every prominent Republican. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) agreed, saying, “I tend to think that tax cuts should not have to be offset.” Carly Fiorina, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in California, said this week that “you don’t need to pay for tax cuts. They pay for themselves.” GOP Senate candidate Marco Rubio (FL) released an economic platform of almost all unpaid-for tax cuts. Then, on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) went a step further, claiming that “there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.”

BUSH TAX CUTS DID ‘DIMINISH REVENUE’: As Michael Linden, Associate Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, put it, McConnell’s claim “is not some disagreement among economists over the effects of a future tax cut. Nor is this a philosophical debate between the left and the right.” “Instead,” Linden said, “what we have here is McConnell making a clearly false claim about recent history.” Before the tax cuts, income tax revenues were 10.2 percent of GDP. Three years later, income tax revenues were 6.9 percent of GDP. Even in total dollars, tax receipts were lower in 2002 and 2003 than they were in 2001. What’s more, the Bush tax cuts led to “the weakest jobs and income growth in the post-war period,” with monthly job growth the worst of any business cycle since 1945 and only contributed to the nation’s income inequality. Today, income inequality is the worst it has been since 1928, and 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 COSTS OF EXTENDING BUSH TAX CUTS: While Obama has proposed extending the Bush tax cuts “for all but the richest two percent of taxpayers,” Republicans have all insisted on “making permanent all the tax cuts enacted under President Bush,” including cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans. But as Fox News’ Chris Wallace pointed out to Kyl, extending tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 per year would add $678 billion over 10 years to the growing deficit. Debt-service costs alone would amount to “$1.7 trillion over the 2009-2019 period” and more than $330 billion in the 2019 fiscal year. As Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) told The Progress Report yesterday, “When reasonably intelligent people say something that is patently absurd and ridiculous, then you have to look to the hidden agenda, right? Judd Gregg, Sen. Kyl, these are not dumb people. They know what they’re saying is completely self-serving, but they’re looking at it strictly from the standpoint of personal gain and the gain of individuals directly connected to them and people who they regard as their base.”

WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM A DEFICIT PEACOCK?: Indeed, earlier this year, the GOP repeatedly rejected legislation that would have, among other things, increased aid to states and boosted unemployment benefits. Despite Democratic attempts to offset the bill, Republicans still voted against the measure, demonstrating that they were unwilling to tolerate a one-year short-term hike in the deficit of $33 billion to save jobs and help people who can’t find them, but supported adding $678 billion to the deficit to help the richest Americans. “We just can’t keep kicking the can down the street and say, ‘Oh, we’ll take care of it later on. It’ll be offset later,” Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told The Hill. “That’s all we’ve been doing these last couple of years, and I’m fed up with it.” “What our Republicans believe is that the bill spends too much money and not enough of the money it does spend is offset,” Kyl added yesterday, just three days after insisting that Bush’s tax cuts should not be paid for. Linden refers to these conservative thinkers as “deficit peacocks” because they “like to preen and call attention to themselves, but are not sincerely interested in taking the difficult but necessary steps toward a balanced budget.”