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Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) says that Republicans are willing to compromise on a deal to reduce the deficit, but a "balanced approach" would include no increases in tax rates.

"A real solution includes both revenue increases and spending reductions," Price told CNN's Candy Crowley on Sunday, adding that higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans "don't solve the problem."

"We need to look at increasing revenue through pro-growth policies," the Georgia Republican explained.

"But not through tax hikes?" Crowley wondered.

"No," Price insisted. "Tax revenue, which means broadening the base, closing the loopholes, limiting the deductions, limiting the credits and making sure we identify the appropriate spending reductions so that we have, indeed, a balanced approach."

"But we're still at the place where everything gets hung up: No increases in tax rates," Crowley noted. "That is still the position of House Republicans, correct?"

"It doesn't solve the problem," Price replied. "We want a real solution, which means increasing tax revenue through pro-growth policies."

(h/t: Talking Points Memo)

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Chuck Todd really should have just stuck to being a pollster, because ever since Tim Russert brought him on at MSNBC, he really has gone from someone who used to be pretty good at analysis of voter trends and elections for Roll Call and with his regular appearances on C-SPAN, to pretty much just another Villager hack once MSNBC hired him. I remember actually enjoying him sharing some of his insights on election coverage on Washington Journal, before he decided to join the D.C. cocktail circuit with the rest of the Villagers.

Todd seems to have made the move quite easily and unfortunately from someone who used to be more concerned about reporting facts and statistics and trends to the typical inside the beltway type of "reporting" we see from his colleagues Chris Matthews, David Gregory and Andrea Mitchell, among others.

His interview with Rep. Tom Price from this Wednesday is just the latest example of that. Todd was terribly upset with Stephen Colbert for making a "mockery" of his brand of "journalism" but sadly as Nicole noted, Todd's done a good enough job of that all by himself.

He did it again here by letting Price claim that you're going to kill the Confidence Fairies if you raise the capital gains tax and that will somehow lead to more offshoring of jobs.

That you shouldn't tax capital gains because that money has supposedly already been taxed.

That the Community Reinvestment Act and giving loans to poor people somehow caused the housing crisis.

That Republicans care anything about closing loopholes for businesses or doing anything about offshoring our jobs.

That unions are harming our economy or the working class.

That we need to lower the corporate tax rate.

And that we'd be "punishing businesses" if we dared to tax them if they want to repatriate the money they've been hiding offshore to avoid taxes in the United States.

If Chuck Todd considers himself a "journalist" you'd think he'd have bothered to push back a bit more harshly at any one of these lies, but that's not what we got during this interview. Heaven forbid he might lose some access for the next interview with Price or one of his colleagues to potentially keep the ratings up on his show if he dared to call him out for anything he lied about here.

I'm sure the salary is much better for Todd since he made the move to MSNBC from Roll Call. Sadly what he's contributing to the national political dialog for the most part has gone down the sewer while his salary has gone up for adding to the pollution.

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A member of the Congressional Prayer Caucus insisted on Thursday that House Republicans were forced to pass a resolution reaffirming that "In God We Trust" is the national motto as a reminder to President Barack Obama.

"This was a priority because the president himself had stated that the motto of the country was E Pluribus Unum," Prayer Caucus member Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) told Fox News host Bill Hemmer. "So, we thought we'd remind him."

"Are you suggesting that there is a crisis of identity?" Hemmer asked.

"Well, the resolution was necessary because we felt it was appropriate to remind the president what, in fact, the motto of our great country is," Price explained.

"You aren't saying he's against religion or there's no suggestion in there?" Hemmer wondered.

"There was no suggestion at all," Price declared. "It was an opportunity to say, 'No, Mr. President, the motto of this country is not E Pluribus Unum.' ... We'll remind you."

"That's not putting people back to work," Obama said Tuesday. "I trust in God, but God wants to see us help ourselves by putting people back to work. There's work to be done. There are workers ready to do it. The American people are behind this."

"In God We Trust" was also reaffirmed in 2002 when the Republican-controlled Congress passed a bill that said no changes should be made to a 1956 law that originally made the phrase the national motto.

Critics of Tuesday's resolution noted that in 2010, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) promised a laser-like focus on jobs and the economy, even crafting what has been termed the "Cantor Rule."

"Each day, we will hold ourselves accountable by asking the following questions: Are our efforts addressing job creation and the economy; are they cutting spending; and are they shrinking the size of the federal government while protecting and expanding individual liberty?" Cantor explained. "If not, why are we doing it?"

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After discussing the House Republicans and their ridiculous game with insisting that they vote on this balanced budget bill that's never going to become law, Andrea Mitchell ask Rep. Tom Price about the Republicans decision to keep the SEC from doing their job by making cuts to their funding and if they're essentially handcuffing the SEC.

Price denies it of course and rather than follow up and call him out for it, Mitchell just gives him a pass and ends the interview.

Think Progress has more on the subject here -- House Republicans Propose Deep Cuts To Financial Regulators, Effectively Blocking Financial Reform:

When Congress approved a continuing resolution in March to keep the government funded, it did not include additional money for the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to implement the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The two agencies, which were given important new responsibilities under Dodd-Frank, have already had to restrict some activities, delay implementation of various aspects of the law, and put off hiring personnel to fill key new positions policing Wall Street and the nation’s biggest banks.

The budget that the Obama administration proposed yesterday included boosts for both the SEC and the CFTC, as well as a proposal to allow the CFTC to begin collecting fees to raise additional revenue. In fact, under the budget, the CFTC would receive an 82 percent funding boost (to $308 million), as it has the vast new task of overseeing the derivatives market.

However, House Republicans have made it quite clear that they have no intention of giving the regulators any additional money. In fact, their proposed continuing resolution for the remainder of the fiscal 2011 year (which ends in October) explicitly cuts funding from both the SEC and CFTC: [...]

This is essentially an attempt to repeal Dodd-Frank through the backdoor, by simply making it impossible for the regulators to implement and enforce the law. As Michael Ettlinger and Adam Hersh noted, this is only inviting another devastatingly expensive financial crisis, in the name of modest savings in the short-run:

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There are a lot of other talking points that could be debunked in this segment from Mike Huckabee's show on Fox, like pretending that throwing seniors at the mercy of the "free market" and the for-profit private insurance market would somehow give them the ability to keep those costs down. Ezra Klein wrote a very good article last month which explains why Rep. Tom Price is not telling the truth when he calls Paul Ryan's plan to voucherize Medicare "premium support." It's not.

And par for the course, Price is not asked to explain why Republicans want to keep the current Medicare system in place for those over 55 years of age if privatizing it is such a wonderful idea and would keep costs down.

Here's Klein's article -- Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan is not Bill Clinton’s fault:

Finally, it was a very different plan. The idea of giving Medicare beneficiaries a choice of private plans in addition to traditional Medicare fee-for-service — in wonk parlance, “premium support” — does have Democratic backers. Some months ago, in fact, I interviewed Henry Aaron, a center-left health-care expert who is one of the idea’s creators. And he said the problem with Ryan’s plan is that it’s not premium support.

Premium support, Aaron explained, was designed to create competition without allowing cost-shifting. The key feature was that payments kept pace with the cost of health care. That way, either there’d be savings from competition, or there wouldn’t be savings. And you can see that in the bipartisan committee’s proposal. They authors write that “on average, beneficiaries would be expected to pay 12 percent of the total cost of standard option plans.” And as far as I can tell, that defined the federal contribution, no matter the growth in health-care costs. You could save money by choosing a cheaper plan, but the government couldn’t save money by simply covering less and less of your costs each year. Premium support, in other words.

That’s not how Ryan’s plan works. For one thing, it eliminates traditional fee-for-service Medicare. For another, Its savings come from capping the growth of federal spending at inflation — which is much, much, much slower than the rate of health-care cost growth. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that, in 2022, Ryan’s plan would have a typical beneficiary shouldering 61 percent of the cost of a standard plan, and by 2030, because the government would limit its contributions, they’d be paying 68 percent. That’s very different than a plan that holds the average contribution to 12 percent of the plan’s cost. But it’s absolutely central to how the Ryan budget saves money. It’s the core of his proposal.

And as my fellow C&L contributor Jon Perr pointed out to me today, Tom Price is not exactly the best spokesman for saving Medicare, since he thinks it was a mistake from the beginning as Jon noted in this post -- GOP Medicare Killers Now Pretend to Be Saviors:

In 2009, Missouri's Roy Blunt argued that "government should have never gotten into the health care business." That same month, Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a one-time orthopedic surgeon and then chairman of the Republican Study Group, proclaimed:

"Going down the path of more government will only compound the problem. While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare."

When asked at a 2009 rally, Rep. Price refused to defend Medicare after stating "we will not rest until we make certain that government-run health care is ended."

Partial rough transcript of Price below the fold.

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Well the Republicans sure are on message this week with more denial that Keynesian economics had anything to do with our recovery from the Great Depression. Rep. Tom Price talked to Neil Cavuto fill-in Brian Sullivan about whether the Republicans are going to be perceived as heartless for refusing to extend unemployment benefits with the terrible job market we have in the United States right now and Price defends their actions by claiming that the Democrats economic policies have made the employment situation worse and that we need to get back to some "sane fiscal policy", by which I'm sure he means more tax breaks for the rich.

Paul Krugman did a good job of beating back this nonsense this week talking about why the stimulus didn't work since it wasn't large enough and of course that was going to give Republicans like Price to do exactly what he's doing here and say it didn't work.

Thom Hartmann talks about this on his radio show every week and here's an excerpt from one of his shows explaining why Republicans like Price are completely wrong about the type fiscal policies that create jobs.

You know, what’s happening is that Americans are figuring out, both on the left and the right, that to a large extent we don’t have America in America anymore. We don’t have the American Dream in America anymore. That, you know, when that great transition happened in the early 1980s where in the inaugural ball of 1976 Jimmy Carter walked the parade route down Pennsylvania Avenue and invited average people to his Presidential ball versus four years later Ronald Reagan did the whole thing with pomp and circumstance and people had to pay an enormous amount of money and everybody was wearing $10-20,000 dollar ball gowns and it was like the royalty was back.

And it was the end of the celebration of the middle class. We had 50 years in the United States where we celebrated the middle class and we built the middle class. And the main thing that we used to build the middle class was a top marginal tax rate on people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who make more than 2 million dollars a year so that they were paying, you know the top tax rate was 74%. They were actually paying 51 ½ %. The average tax paid on somebody making more than 2 million dollars a year in 1980 was 51.6%, more than half.

So as a consequence of this, very wealthy people had an incentive to keep money in their businesses, to grow businesses, to build the infrastructure of America, to have a middle class, to not take enormous amounts of money out of this country and put it in Swiss bank accounts or build factories in China, but build American business. Now Reagan changed all that. And dropped that top tax rate down into the low 30s where it is now. And Clinton kicked it up three or four points for a couple of years and damn near balanced our budget and then Bush dropped it back down again. [...]

We are now at that point that the American middle class is in the midst of its own destruction and is turning into the American working poor. And the wealthy class have seized control of the levers of government, including the Obama administration. So how do we take this back? I think that, first of all I want to give you just a little bit more information on how the very powerful have achieved their victory in this class war, and it comes around, and then what we can do about it. Read on...

Of course our corporate media is never going to ask Tom Price or anyone else for proof that their idea of "sane fiscal policy" actually creates jobs. I'd also like to know if Tom Price was worried about the deficit spending for these two occupations of ours in the Middle East. I haven't heard a single Republican go on the air and talk about how spending for wars can't happen unless we balance the budget. Cuts to the poor and the unemployed however and they're playing deficit hawks. Just shameless.

Sullivan also failed to ask Price, if Republicans think the stimulus was a failure, why are they as Think Progress noted, taking credit for its success.

Transcript via Nexis Lexis below the fold.

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Yesterday Speaker Pelosi made a valuable point that seems to have been overlooked with the dust-up over Rep. Joe Barton's (R-TX) words of devotion for BP, namely that his response and the earlier letter sent by Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) were symptoms of a widespread problem within the Republican party itself, not merely a few individuals. There are over one hundred members of the Republican Study Group, not one of whom voiced disagreement with the following:

BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics. These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this Administration’s drive for greater power and control. It is the same mentality that believes an economic crisis or an environmental disaster is the best opportunity to pursue a failed liberal agenda. The American people know much better.

Transcript from the video:

Q: Do you think Mr. Barton should step aside as Ranking Member on the Energy and Commerce Committee? And do you think his sudden firestorm that's blown up around his comments represents kind of a turning point for the Republicans, and this attitude you describe of favoring big business?

Speaker Pelosi. A turning point for them supporting Big Business? They've always been on that track.

Q: Is this comment too far?

Speaker Pelosi. Well, let me just say that — that was one comment. I think it's important to note that it was not inconsistent with comments made the chairman of the Republican Study Committee — a part of the Republican leadership, Representative Tom Price. He said: "BP's reported willingness to go along with the White House new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style 'shakedown' politics."

So I think that Mr. Barton's comments fit comfortably among the leadership of the Republicans in the House of Representatives. It's up to them to decide who's in the leadership of their committees. But he is not alone in his association with sympathy for the oil companies.

As I said before, people in the Gulf are suffering from BP's negligence and recklessness. Republicans in Congress are apologizing to BP.

Looks like Mike Stark has been having a little fun with our Congress critters:

Mike Stark has been up on the Hill all week whipping Democrats to hold fast on the public plan, and in his spare time, he decided to ask Republicans if Barack Obama was born in the United States. Not only do they not want to answer -- they run.

He asks Republicans Tom Price, Thaddeus McCotter, Jeff Fortenberry, Charles Boustany, Aaron Schock, Greg Harper, Mike Coffman and others what they think. Tim Murphy hides, looking at pens for 20 minutes to try and avoid him.