The Illinois GOP congressional delegation wants us to believe they stand for fiscal discipline. All seven Republicans voted down President Obama's economic recovery bill yesterday because it included too much "social spending" and, just this past week, Rep. Peter Roskam wrote an op-ed denouncing the Obama administration for running up short-term deficits. But when the rubber meets the road, the GOP's alternative proposals all have one thing in common: The disproportionatley benefit the wealthy.

Take yesterday's budget vote. As noted above, the House Republicans unanimously rejected the Democratic budget proposal, which they argued would pile up government debt. Instead, Reps. Roskam, Judy Biggert, John Shimkus, Don Manzullo, and Aaron Schock all backed a substitute amendment put forth by Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's (ranking member on the House Budget Committee), which was eventually defeated 137-293. (Illinois GOP Reps. Mark Kirk and Tim Johnson voted nay.)

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Ryan explained that his plan "halts the borrow-and-spend philosophy that brought about today's economic problems."  He even cited a graph comparing "democratic budgets" and the Republican alternative based on spending as a percentage of GDP between 1980 and 2080. According to Ryan's data, the Democratic plan would initiate runaway deficits while the Republican plan would actually lower spending over the long-haul.

But there was one problem with those figures. The chart compiled by the budget committee's Republican staff bases its trends on "out-year" numbers from the Congressional Budget Office's "Long-Term Alternative Fiscal Scenario." As the Huffington Post's Sam Stein, the Atlantic's Conor Clarke, and others noted, the CBO has not actually run such projections for the Obama budget. Instead, Ryan was referencing a study CBO conducted on his behalf in May 2008, when the budget was George W. Bush's.

Clarke explains the result:

As near as I can tell, Paul Ryan and his staff just took the CBO projections that ended in 2019 and drew a random line, extending upward at about a 45 degree angle, until 2080. There's no real attempt to make it look scientific.

What does the GOP-favored budget actually do? It permanently extends the Bush tax cuts and adds even more tax breaks for wealthy Americans and corporations, including chopping the marginal tax rate on the top three tax brackets to 25 percent and cutting the capital gains taxes to zero through 2010. According to Citizens for Tax Justice (PDF), over 25 percent of taxpayers -- mostly low-income families -- would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under Obama's proposal. It would cost over $300 billion more than the Obama income tax cuts in 2011 alone.

To compensate for their subsidies to America's CEO's, the GOP also proposed a five-year discretionary spending freeze, exempting national defense and veterans' health care. It's neo-Hooverism at it's most elemental. On Wednesday, Matt Ygleasias explained how this idea might effect one's neighborhood school during an economic recession:

Basically, you can imagine a school that today is serving a certain number of children and has a certain budget. Well, over the course of five years the population will grow and the number of kids in that school will also increase. But the school won’t get any additional money. Instead, because there’s inflation, the school will actually be getting less money even as it needs to teach more children. And so on across the board for federal programs. If you think that there’s literally nothing in the entire federal budget that’s useful, this may strike you as an appealing idea. Otherwise, April fools!

Keep in mind this is a scenario that -- under the GOP budget -- would play out in any police station, Head Start office, unemployment line, or transit agency in America.

It was extraneous defense spending and regressive tax cuts that bloated the deficit to begin with. Apparently, the House Republicans want us to relive history.