Over the weekend, Bank of America announced that it is suspending foreclosures in 23 states after a BofA official admitted he signed 7,000 to 8,000 foreclosure filings a month, but did not read them “because of the volume.” BofA joined JP Morgan Chase and GMAC Mortgage in halting foreclosures amidst revelations that foreclosure documents have been processed by so-called “robo-signers,” without any sort of due process or verification.

Last week, Wells Fargo, the second largest mortgage servicer in the country, offered assurances that its foreclosure process is sound, telling HousingWire, “Wells Fargo policies, procedures and practices satisfy us that the affidavits we sign are accurate. We audit, monitor and review our affidavits under controlled standards on a daily basis.” But, if a deposition obtained by the Associated Press is any example, that rosy assessment may not be based in reality:

An executive with Wells Fargo said he checked only the dates on up to 150 foreclosure documents he signed daily. The admission was made during a deposition in May when the executive said he relied on co-workers to make sure the information was correct on paperwork, according to news reports Sunday. The deposition of the Fort-Mill, S.C.-based Wells Fargo vice president, Herman John Kennerty, was reported over the weekend by AOL Daily Finance and obtained by The Associated Press.

In Florida, “a recent sample of foreclosure cases in the 12th Judicial Circuit of Florida showed that 20 percent of those set for summary judgment involved deficient documents.” That means one in five foreclosures in a state devastated by the housing crisis may be improper.

At least six states are investigating potentially improper foreclosure practices, and legal experts told the New York Times that courts “may impose sanctions on lenders or their representatives or may force banks to pay borrowers’ legal costs in these cases.” “[The banks' actions] reflects the hubris that as long as the money was going through the pipeline, these companies didn’t really have to make sure the documents were in order,” said Kathleen C. Engel, dean for intellectual life at Suffolk University Law School and an expert in mortgage law.

At the same time, a new study from Professor Douglas Massey of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University shows that “predatory lending aimed at racially segregated minority neighborhoods led to mass foreclosures that fueled the U.S. housing crisis.” Massey found that “living in a predominantly African-American area, and to a lesser extent Hispanic area, were ‘powerful predictors of foreclosures‘ in the nation,” as subprime lending in those areas skyrocketed.

So will Wells, like BofA and JP Morgan, suspend foreclosures until this mess is sorted out? Or will it continue to throw people out of their homes, when its own officials admit to not having done due diligence on foreclosure documents?

(HT: David Dayen)

Back in June, I spoke to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), one of the members of President Obama’s debt commission, who said that the commission was likely to “deadlock,” because its Republican members were ruling out any and all tax increases as part of a comprehensive budget solution. “[Conservatives] give some lip service to ‘everything should be on the table,’ then, when it actually comes to what kind of revenue can we raise, are closing that door and taking it off the table,” she said.

Now, one of the commission’s Republican members, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), is telling a similar tale:

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) says there is no chance fellow Republicans on the president’s deficit commission will endorse tax increases, which also means Dems would never offer up the spending cuts needed for a bipartisan deal. But Gregg says the commission may get behind tax reform that lowers rates, closes loopholes and is revenue-neutral.

To his credit, Gregg has been unwilling to rule tax increases as out of bounds for the commission. “Everything has to be on the table – there’s no question about that,” Gregg has said. However, it seems that he doesn’t have much company within his own party.

As CAP economists Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden laid out, just trying to get the budget into primary balance by 2015 without any tax increases requires draconian cuts in important programs, including “big cuts to highway funding, cuts to medical research, the Federal Aviation Association, defense, Pell grants and much more.” The last time that the federal budget was balanced, revenues amounted to 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product, but even under President Obama’s proposed budget, they never get above 19 percent (and actually fall in 2015 from their 2014 high).

Taxes are also at a fifty-year low, so contrary to Republican assertions, revenue is definitely part of the problem and needs to be part of the solution. But the refusal of Republicans to endorse tax increases has also extended to portraying the closing of corporate tax loopholes and cutting corporate tax subsidies as “increasing taxes.” Due to the convoluted corporate tax code, the U.S. raises below average corporate tax revenue, despite having a higher statutory rate than most industrialized nations.

Under President Obama’s budget, corporate taxes will amount to just 2.1 percent of GDP in 2015, compared to 9 percent for personal income taxes. If the tax code can’t even be combed to get rid of some of the egregious corporate giveaways it contains, the budget fix is going to be foisted onto the backs of working people via cuts to the programs upon which they depend.

In July, economists Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder released a study showing that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus package) raised Gross Domestic Product by about 2 percentage points and kept the unemployment rate one and half points lower than it would have been otherwise. In concert with the Troubled Asset Relief Program, government interventions to prevent a complete economic meltdown were “huge,” keeping the unemployment rate about 6.5 points lower.

Wisconsin’s Senate Republican nominee Ron Johnson, though, is having none of it, saying the stimulus “has not created jobs, has not created sustainable growth and has put us $2 trillion further in debt.” Instead, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported, Johnson preferred the government boost the economy by extending the Bush tax cuts:

“I don’t believe government is the solution. I want to move in the direction of limited government. I don’t want to start throwing $1 trillion at the problem. That means inflation and taxes will increase.” If the government had instead cut taxes, in particular the Bush tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year, and controlled spending, Johnson said, “the economy would have taken off.”

For starters, Johnson is acting as if the Recovery Act did not include tax cuts, when one-third of the package was just that. In fact, Johnson’s desire to stop stimulus funding in its tracks — in addition to stopping construction projects around the country cold — would raise taxes on the middle class by reversing Obama’s Making Work Pay tax credit.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, extending the Bush tax cuts is the least stimulative tax or spending step available for boosting the economy, producing just 10 to 40 cents in economic activity for every dollar spent. Extending the Bush tax cuts permanently will actually depress incomes in the long-term, because of the debt-load they entail.

Of course, Johnson’s distaste for the stimulus didn’t extend to his own business dealings, as he sought funds for an opera house while sitting on its board as treasurer. And, in the end, we’ve already tried his preferred approach for boosting economic growth; what we got was the weakest job and income growth of the post-war period.