Congressional Republicans have been doing their best to undermine the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. They’ve tried to gut the budgets of the regulators charged with implementing the law, push back the date for when certain provisions take effect, and obstructed nominees for key regulatory positions. And legislation examined by House Republicans on Friday, if enacted into law, would be one more volley in this assault.

As HousingWire explained, a bill sponsored Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) would permit banks to assume that modified mortgage loans held on their books have no risk whatsoever. This would allow them to lower the capital — or amount of cash — they need to keep on hand for when loans turn sour:

The House Financial Services Committee heard testimony from lenders and regulators Friday on a proposed bill that would allow banks to count recently modified mortgages as accrual loans on their balance sheets — meaning the loan can be counted on to be repaid.

The emerging concern is twofold, however, where modified mortgages could be counted as an asset and not a liability. This may create a false assumption of capital requirements, especially for lenders with large amounts of modified mortgages on the books.

“Subjective overregulation makes banks less inclined to loan money for job creation, results in more foreclosures, more layoffs and longer unemployment lines,” Posey said.

But at the moment, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. already allows banks to count modified loans as performing, meaning that they can assume there will be payments coming in from them. While mortgage modifications are going to be very important to the economic recovery, this bill would allow banks to treat a modified loan as having no risk, even when the banks are well aware that a borrower is in trouble. The banks would then be able to lower the amount of capital they keep on hand, chipping away at the foundation of the financial system.

George French, an FDIC deputy director, said the bill “‘would result in an understatement of problem loans‘ on banks’ balance sheets, [and] overstate the amount of capital they hold against losses.’” MIT Professor Simon Johnson added, “In some ways, the bill duplicates what the FDIC already does. But classifying loans as ‘accrual’ when they are either not receiving the full interest due or when the institution knows there will be a problem is not a good idea.”

During the 2008 financial crisis, it became abundantly clear that America’s largest banks did not have sufficient capital on hand to weather the storm created by the housing crisis. So many loans went into default when the housing bubble burst that the banks were on the verge of collapse. As a result, both Dodd-Frank and new international accords stipulate higher capital requirements for banks. This bill proposed by the GOP would undermine that effort.

The key sticking point in the contentious debt ceiling negotiations has been the unwillingness of Republicans to make a single concession while they make huge demands of Democrats.

In a press conference today, President Obama explained that the two sides have reached an impasse because Republicans have taken a “my way or the highway” posture. Obama said he’s “bent over backward” to work with Republicans, offering cuts that have forced him to “take on significant heat from my party.” “I don’t see a path to a deal if they don’t budge,” he concluded.

Republican leaders responded by saying they have already sacrificed something: they’ve agreed to raise the debt ceiling. At a news conference with reporters today, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said the key Republican concession is “the fact that we are voting — the fact that we are even discussing voting for a debt ceiling increase.” Cantor then insisted Democrats are “going to have to come meet us” if they want a deal before Aug. 2 — as if Democrats are the ones who won’t meet Republicans halfway.

Before heading to the White House for another round of debt talks, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) agreed that this is what he considers a “balanced” agreement: “Most Americans would say that a balanced approach is a simple one: the administration gets its debt limit increase, and the American people get their spending cuts.” In fact, a recent Pew poll found that 60 percent of Americans — and 50 percent of Republicans — say it is more important to keep Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are than to reduce the deficit.

Boehner and Cantor’s justification is extraordinary since GOP leaders have conceded that raising the debt ceiling is an economic imperative. At the same press conference today, Boehner said, “I agree with the President we can not allow our nation to default on our debt.” Just days ago, he said that failing to raise the limit by Aug. 2 “puts our economy in jeopardy, risking even more jobs.” Just yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed “no one is talking about not raising the debt ceiling.”

So how can it be both an imperative and a gift that Republicans deign to give?

During the Bush presidency, Republicans voted to increase the debt limit 19 times without ever demanding cuts in exchange for their votes. But this time, Republicans have dug in their heels and made it clear that not ruining the global economy is the very most they’re willing to do to reduce America’s deficit — and even that comes at a heavy price.

In the midst of debt negotiations, Republicans have gone to bat for their biggest fans: multinational corporations. Flatly refusing to eliminate wasteful tax breaks for inordinately profitable companies, Republicans are adamant on protecting the privilege of the wealthy few. In defending this unpopular position, House Republicans paint corporations as beleaguered job creators who are suffering under prohibitive tax rates.

In an interview with Newsmax on Saturday, House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA) declared that the U.S. corporate tax rate is so draconian that businesses prefer to “go almost anywhere else.” He then proceeded to advocate for a territorial tax system, under which offshore profits of a U.S. corporation would be exempt from U.S. taxes. Price argued that exempting offshore profits would create a “huge jobs magnet” here:

PRICE: We have the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world which makes it so that, if you’re a job creator out there, there’s no incentive from a tax standpoint to put your business here in America. It’s better from a tax standpoint to go almost anywhere else…There’s something called repatriation or territorial tax which means that businesses that make a profit outside the united states but they’re domiciled here, they have a huge incentive not to bring that money back — repatriate that money — because of the tax rate here. And if we were to allow those taxes to come back at the rate at which they’re taxed in those other countries, then we would have a huge jobs magnet to this country.

Watch it:

However, according to a Citizens for Tax Justice report, not only would such a territorial tax system give companies greater incentive to profit-shift (disguise U.S. profits as foreign profits), but it would give corporations “a greater incentive to shift actual operations — and jobs — to other countries.” The function of a “job magnet,” presumably, is not to send jobs overseas.

Of course, the entire premise of this argument isn’t entirely factual in the first place. Unless, by “highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world,” Price means the U.S. has “the second lowest corporate taxes in the developed world.” While the U.S tax rate is high on paper, the ever-expanding number of corporate tax loopholes makes for a very low corporate tax rate across the board in the U.S. Thus, as a share of GDP, only Iceland’s corporate taxes rate lower.

This past Friday, Brookings Institution scholars Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney released new research on the Up Front Blog detailing how Americans are working longer hours than ever, but not netting higher wages for hours worked.

The researchers shockingly found that “although median wages for two-parent families have increased 23 percent since 1975, the evidence suggests that this is not the result of higher wages. Rather, these families are just working more. In 2009, for instance, the typical two-parent family worked 26 percent longer than the typical family in 1975.” They illustrate this with the following graph:

The authors also note that while wages have increased over time, those increases do not come from higher wages for time worked. Rather, they are a result of overtime. As an addendum to this Brookings research, it’s important to note that while median wages for most Americans have not grown with productivity, the wealthiest Americans continue to eat up more and more of the nation’s wealth.

Income inequality is currently higher than it has been at any other time since the 1920s. At an event ThinkProgress attended today about how to re-focus the nation’s political agenda on job growth, Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) took note of this growing income inequality:

LEVIN: These are the figures about income growth from 1976 to 2007. 58 percent of the income growth in those 30 years went to the top 10 percent. 58 percent. A third went to the top five percent. 20 percent of income growth those 30 years went to the top 1 percent. And nearly 10 percent went to the top one-tenth of one percent. And so we need to talk to our fellow sister citizens, this is the land of opportunity. When income growth is so tilted in favor of a small minority, it really challenges the growth of the middle class in the United States of America.

Watch it:

It should be noted that one of the greatest factors involved in American wage stagnation and the explosion of inequality has been the decline of strong labor unions.

During the ongoing negotiations over raising the nation’s debt ceiling, Republicans have stridently opposed any tax increases, with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) abandoning negotiations (much like House Majority Speaker Eric Cantor (R-VA) did before him) over taxes. Boehner has repeatedly decreed that any increase in revenues “can’t pass the House.”

Evidently the GOP believes that the public is with them on this issue, preferring the economic mess that would occur if the debt ceiling isn’t raised to any additional government revenue. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is so sure of this that she lectured President Obama today during an interview on Fox News, explaining that “the American people” absolutely do not want to see any taxes go up:

BLACKBURN: Mr. President, you have gotten on the last nerve of the American people and they don’t want a tax increase, and you just don’t seem to understand that. What they want to do is see the size, scope and cost of the federal government cut. They want the spending cut. They want some caps in place. They want a balanced budget amendment to come out of Washington and go to the states. And Mr. President it is time for you to give it up.

Watch it:

Contrary to Blackburn’s pronouncement, the American people do favor increasing taxes to deal with the deficit. At Capital Gains and Games, Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser for both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, found 19 different polls showing that the American public is okay with raising taxes to reduce the deficit, particularly when the alternative is slashing important programs like Medicare or Social Security. “Contrary to Republican dogma, polls show that the American people strongly support higher taxes to reduce the deficit and improve income inequality,” Bartlett wrote.

Back in March, a whopping 81 percent of people surveyed said that they favor a surtax on millionaires to reduce the deficit. However, the GOP has refused to even consider such a move.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a 2012 GOP presidential hopeful, has continually touted her time as a “federal tax attorney” to bolster her economic credentials. “I’m a former federal tax litigation attorney. My husband and I started a successful company. We’re business people. We’re job creators,” Bachmann has said.

But as National Journal noted, Bachmann leaves out a key part of the story — her job was to sue taxpayers on behalf of the United States government:

You’ll never guess what Michele Bachmann, the rabble-rousing, tax-reviling, government-bashing idol of America’s tea party movement, used to do for a living. Sue tax scofflaws for the Internal Revenue Service.

As she flexes her credentials as a Republican presidential candidate in a field of former governors and corporate executives, Bachmann is more likely to describe herself as a “former federal tax litigation attorney’’—as she did in her first nationally televised debate—than as a three-term member of Congress. But she rarely, if ever, mentions the one and only employer of her legal services: the U.S. Department of Treasury.

During an interview with the conservative publication Newsmax, Bachmann derided the IRS as “the most heartless organization that anyone knows of.” At other times, she has called the IRS a “new social welfare agency,” that will have “the right to confiscate our tax refunds.” But an Associated Press report during Bachmann’s 2006 Congressional campaign “cited Bachmann’s (now-defunct) web site, http://www.keepitpositive06.com, where she said she was proud of her work for the Treasury Department.”

Bachmann has also used the IRS as a whipping boy during her crusade against the Affordable Care Act, falsely claiming that the ACA would empower IRS agents to enforce the law. Factcheck.org called this claim “flat-out wrong.”

Bachmann is taking a rabidly anti-tax position during the campaign, saying that she favors the highly regressive Fair tax (even as she advocates for a tax plan that would raise taxes on low- and and middle-income households). And once upon a time, she helped the government agency that she now ceaselessly attacks collect the very taxes she now rails against.

Thinkprogress intern Sarah Bufkin contributed research to this post.