“What’s so hypocritical about Republicans’ position on the payroll tax increase that they are proposing is that it is an enormous impact by hitting the middle class and working poor,” Braley said during a conference call with press. “It’s so important to remember that this hike has an immediate impact on their paycheck.”

Braley was joined by Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky, who said the Republicans’ support of the payroll tax increase is “hypocritical” because Republican leaders oppose tax hikes for wealthy individuals and called the increase “a bad policy.”

“[Democrats] fight for the middle class, and Republicans forget about them,” she said.

Last winter, President Barack Obama struck a deal with Congress to lower the tax American workers pay toward benefit programs like Social Security from 6.2 to 4.2 percent for 12 months. Obama, however, has indicated that one year will not be sufficient, and has put it to Congress to extend his policy for an extra year. Republicans have taken the stance that the extended reduction will fail to reduce the deficit.

With regard to fixing the federal deficit, trust in congressional Republicans edged out trust in President Obama by a slight margin, but on the issues, those polled were supportive of Obama proposals while rejecting Republican cuts.

Overwhelming majorities — 69 and 78 percent, respectively — oppose cutting Medicaid and Medicare. The budget favored by most Republicans, introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), would overhaul both programs, ceding control of Medicaid programs to state governments and replacing Medicare with a voucher system. Even if a Medicare voucher program didn’t result in cuts to coverage — a notion championed by Ryan but thoroughly refuted by experts (PDF) citing rising health care costs — 65 percent of respondents opposed vouchers generally and said Medicare should remain as it is today.

A full 58 percent disapproved of Obama’s handling of the deficit. This is a smaller number than the 64 percent who disapproved of congressional Republicans’ handling of the deficit, but still a significant majority. Yet 72 percent were in favor of raising taxes on those earning $250,000 or more per year. As previous polls have demonstrated, most Americans felt that a combination of tax cuts and spending cuts is the best approach to tackling the deficit — in this case, 59 percent.

On the whole, there was slightly more trust in Obama to handle taxes and protect the middle class than there was in Republicans. Similarly, 56 percent said Obama’s views on the issues were either “about right” or too conservative — compared to just 39 percent who said they were too liberal, while 55 percent said Republicans in Congress were either “about right” or too liberal.

Also throwing a wrench into obtaining a coherent picture of the national political compass in the poll is the fact that more people — 46 to 42 percent — trusted Republicans in Congress to handle the national debt over President Obama. The upshot of the poll seems to be a picture of an American populace that is either deeply confused or simply misinformed about the current situation in Washington.

Elsewhere, the poll results showed dissatisfaction with Congress across party lines on a level similar to that which has been expressed for nearly twenty years. Of the Americans polled, 63 percent disapproved of Republican job performance in Congress, while 60 percent disapproved of Democratic job performance. These figures are within a few percentage points of the results of every poll since 1994 (barring a period of slightly favorable views of Congress in the late ‘90s), when the Post and ABC News first asked the question.

Olivier Blanchard, chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, told French newspaper Le Monde in an interview that the U.S. has failed to provide a way out of its debt problems. The full interview is set for publication on Thursday, but Le Monde has printed some of Blanchard’s comments already. Translated from the original French, Blanchard told Le Monde:

The United States lacks a credible plan, for the medium term, to reduce its budget deficit. The debate between the two parties that concluded on April 8 with a savings plan of $39 billion was inadequate. President Barack Obama’s April 13 speech was a step in the right direction, but more concrete decisions remain to be taken.

Blanchard is well acquainted with American economic policy, having served as an economics professor at Harvard and MIT for over 30 years (PDF). His endorsement of Obama’s speech, in which the president blasted Republican cuts and championed tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans, may be a source of consternation for Republicans, who celebrated the S&P evaluation as a sign that their cuts are necessary.

Blanchard’s comments echo an official statement from the IMF last week asserting that the U.S. needs to make “major” adjustments to its fiscal policy, lest it suffer further deficits, hugely exacerbated by accompanying increases on U.S. Treasury bond interest. The IMF lumped in the U.S. with Japan, whose own tremendous national debt has been compounded by restoration costs following March’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.

Japan has since come out in support of its partner in debt. “The US is tackling fiscal issues in various ways, so I still think US treasuries are basically an attractive product for us,” Japanese Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda said this week.

So why is one changed word causing some prognosticators to panic?

The S&P’s negative outlook means the index is considering cutting America’s credit rating from AAA to AA. AA is hardly a terrible rating. The scale goes down to D, and the U.S. would be joining countries like Japan and China if its rating were knocked down to AA — hardly in the company of nations in dire straits. But even that marginal decline could have major consequences for America’s economic future.

S&P’s “sovereign credit ratings” for entire countries are essentially credit scores on a much larger scale: “credit ratings express the agency’s opinion about the ability and willingness of an issuer, such as a corporation or state or city government, to meet its financial obligations in full and on time,” in the words of the official S&P definition.

And just as wealthy individuals can nevertheless have terrible credit scores thanks to bad credit histories, so too can an entire country with a history of carrying excessive debt end up with a sub-par credit rating.

The greatest impact of a diminished American credit rating, as reported by Forbes Magazine’s Leonard Burman, would be its effect on the U.S. Treasury. Without a top-tier credit rating for the U.S., skittish investors at home and abroad could induce the Treasury to raise interest rates on government bonds. This would massively compound the national debt.

While America’s surging debt is hardly breaking news, the S&P issued its altered outlook as a result of the internecine battle between Democrats and Republicans over the budget. It’s not clear if a deal that would raise the debt ceiling, which, at $14.3 trillion, currently looms just above the $14.2 trillion national debt, would satisfy the S&P credit rating bureau.

Republican lawmakers have hailed the S&P evaluation as, in the words of House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), a “wake-up call” to the government, a sign that only significant spending cuts will pull the country out of a tailspin. House Speaker John Boehner, meanwhile, retweeted a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming that the re-evaluation could only have been a response to Obama’s budget speech last week, in which the president condemned Republican cuts as ideological.

Democrats have responded to the evaluation by contending that the parties will surely come to an accord over federal debt and spending, and by calling the credibility of the S&P index into question. A bipartisan congressional report on the root causes of the recession that was released last week cited inaccurate S&P credit ratings as a major factor in the mortgage crisis that precipitated the country’s economic fall.

Two of the more outspoken members of each party took to Twitter to respond to the news. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said, “S&P confirms what we know: the government must slash spending. A debt ceiling hike will only worsen the problem”; Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) had a more colorful take, saying, “S&P paint a pessimistic picture. Oh yeah, those rating agencies are never wrong. #DidTheySendTheMemoFromJail?”

“We have to ensure that Iraq and Afghanistan remain anomalies in American history,” Franken said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “And that’s what my resolution seeks to do. It will ensure that future wars don’t make our deficit and debt problem worse. It will ensure that Congress and American citizens must face the financial sacrifice of going to war. And it will force us to decide whether a war is worth that sacrifice.”

“In the last ten years our wars have been paid for by borrowing,” Franken said. “The Iraq War was accompanied by a massive tax cut. That failed fiscal experiment created the impression that war requires no financial sacrifice. We know that is just not true. The question is who will bear the financial sacrifice, the generation that has decided to go to war or its children and grandchildren?”

He said the bill was started months ago, before the U.S. action in Libya. “This did not start with Libya although Libya gives it a sense of urgency,” he said.

In a press release from Franken’s office, he notes that think tanks across the political spectrum, from the Cato Institute to the Center for American Progress support his war budgeting plan.

Watch it:

The CBO expects that the unemployment rate will fall to 9.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, 8.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 and 7.4 percent at the end of 2013 — still high above the natural rate of unemployment of 5 percent. The CBO also says that the tax cut/unemployment extension deal will provide a “short-term” boost to the economy, similar to what Moody’s Economist Mark Zandi predicted will raise growth in the first half of 2011.

The CBO also took a look at the budget, which has a record deficit of $1.5 trillion — or about ten percent of output. The CBO predicts that the deficit will decline rapidly in the next five years — mostly because of increased revenues due to economic output. However, the calculations do not include an extension of the 2010 tax cuts deal, the Medicare “doc fix” or some of the tax credits in the stimulus package, all of which will sunset, but will be difficult not to extend because of their political popularity or impact on growth.

1. Reduce the federal deficit

2. Promote a clean energy economy

3. Make sure our children are the best educated in the world.

No mention of cap-and-trade, no mention of immigration reform. Pushing health care reform when he had a large majority in both chambers made sense strategically. Pushing education reform and investments in clean energy makes sense now that he doesn’t.

Democrats are all but certain to lose a number of seats and perhaps their majorities. Most of the casualties will be fiscally conservative Democrats from Republican-leaning areas, leaving a smaller, more solidly liberal caucus less inclined to support cost-saving changes in future Social Security benefits, for example.

Republicans’ ranks will almost certainly be strengthened by a wave of conservatives, including Tea Party loyalists, who are opposed to raising any taxes and to compromising with Democrats generally — a stand Congressional Republican leaders have adopted. And incumbents otherwise inclined to make deals are now wary, Republicans say privately, mindful of colleagues who lost primary challenges from Tea Party candidates.

Getting into specifics about the cuts you’d like to make is never a popular strategy for candidates on the campaign trail, which explains why most of the answers GOP candidates have given me — scrap the remaining stimulus package dollars, repeal the new health care law, bring non-defense discretionary spending back to 2007-8 budget levels — are pretty vague and insufficient for dealing with the magnitude of the problem. A couple of candidates, however, were willing to talk seriously about entitlement reform — and one got particularly creative.

Trey Gowdy, a Republican who beat Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) in the primary and is looking to win a seat in South Carolina’s 4th district, informed me via his campaign manager that he’d like to consolidate the Commerce, Agriculture and Interior Departments into one agency in order to eliminate duplicative services. His plan wins points for novelty, but it’s unclear what kind of impact it would have besides setting off a lot of bureaucratic turf wars. (Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst at the Cato Institute, likens it to “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”)

Also of note from Gowdy is “a BRAC-like commission to review federal assets that could legitimately be liquidated.” It’s a truly novel proposal — as far as I’ve heard — that’s based on a commission that was set up by Congress to review the Department of Defense’s recommendations to close several military bases. As to what other federal assets might conceivably go on the chopping block, Gowdy didn’t elaborate.

The Gallup poll got a lot of play in the blogosphere, as one could argue it showed that deficit hawks — Blue Dog Democrats and fiscal conservatives, mostly — had succeeded in scaring the bejesus out of Americans and convincing them of the immediate need to start slashing the federal budget. When adding up “extremely serious” and “very serious,” 79 percent of Americans are worried about terrorism and debt, but unemployment still takes the cake, concerning 83 percent. And cooler academic minds argued that one poll does not not indicate a new political reality. Monkey Cage blogger and political scientist Andrew Gelman, for instance, pointed to a good blog post from Ben Somberg on the issue. Somberg argues that this is only one survey — and in many others, Americans report being far more concerned with the immediate issue of crisis levels of unemployment than with the long-term issue of the United States’ unsustainable debt.

A Pew Research/National Journal poll from early June asked, “Which of the following national economic issues worries you most?” Number one was “job situation” with 41 percent. “Federal budget deficit” got 23 percent.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from early May asked, “Please tell me which one of these items you think should be the top priority for the federal government.” Sure enough, “job creation and economic growth” won with 35 percent. “The deficit and government spending” got 20 percent.

A Fox News poll also in early May got even more dramatic results. “Economy and jobs” topped the priority list with 47 percent, while “deficit, spending” garnered only 15 percent.

A CBS/NYT poll in early April found 27 percent prioritizing “jobs,” 27 percent the “economy” and 5 percent prioritizing “budget deficit/national debt.”

The only recent poll that gives the slightest hint of support…is the USA Today/Gallup poll from late May (not even their newest). Participants were asked, “How serious a threat to the future well-being of the United States do you consider each of the following?” For “federal government debt,” 40 percent said extremely serious, 39 percent very serious, and 15 percent somewhat serious. For “unemployment,” 33 percent said extremely serious, 50 percent said very serious and 15 percent said somewhat serious. If you use only the “extremely serious” numbers, you get 7 percent more for the debt. …

And in fact a newer Gallup poll, from a week ago, asking, “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?,” finds the economy and jobs on top. “Economy in general” gets 28 percent, “unemployment/jobs” gets 21 percent and “federal budget deficit” gets 7 percent.

I think that the academics are right here. Poll after poll and survey after survey show that Americans want Congress to help stave off job losses and get people back to work, and would not mind a bit more deficit spending now, particularly if Congress commits to serious debt reduction once the recovery has taken a better hold. But in the screwy logic of Washington, one poll can be stronger than a dozen. Politicians have started trotting out that Gallup survey showing that Americans fear debt and terrorism above all. In a letter to The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein,* Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) used the Gallup poll as justification for holding up the much-whittled-down and much-needed jobs bill currently floundering in the Senate. And Nelson’s intransigence and concern about the deficit are enough to effectively kill that bill — no matter how many other senators and how many millions of Americans support it.

*Full disclosure: In the romantic phrasing of the census, Ezra is my “unmarried domestic partner.”