Last week, two Senate Democrats joined Senate Republicans to filubuster President Obama’s jobs plan, even though analysts have found that it could add 1.9 million jobs next year. Now, Democratic lawmakers have decided to introduce Obama’s plan piece-by-piece, beginning with Obama’s $35 billion aid package “to help state and local governments provide funding for teachers, police officers and firefighters” that would create or save about 400,000 jobs.

The first measure will be well received by the public, as a new CNN poll found that, for the past two months, about 75 percent of the American people support this measure:

The poll also shows that 72 percent support increasing federal spending for roads, bridges, and schools; 60 percent support increasing federal aid to the unemployed; and 76 percent support increasing the tax rate of those who make more than one million dollars a year — all positions that Republicans are dead set against. “I’ll bring this bill for a vote as soon as possible,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said today.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer "Serve The Banks" Bachus (R-AL)

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) has already announced his belief that Washington’s role is to “serve the banks.” To that end, Bachus has decided that Congress’ fiscal super committee, in order to reach its goal of $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, should cut foreclosure prevention programs and repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform law:

Bachus also recommended the committee cut funding for a variety of foreclosure prevention programs. He proposed ending the Home Affordable Modification Program early, which is set to expire at the end of 2012. Under HAMP, more than 816,000 borrowers received a permanent modification, which will still fall short of the 3 million to 4 million originally estimated.

The proposals also included cuts to the struggling Federal Housing Administration Short Refi program, the remaining unspent money for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, various public housing operations under the Department of Housing and Urban Development and appropriations for the housing counselor organization NeighborWorks.

Bachus ended the letter with another call to repeal several provisions under the Dodd-Frank Act, pointing to faulty government housing policies rather than out-of-control Wall Street leveraging as the cause of the real estate bubble and the resulting financial crisis.

As BusinessWeek noted, “the proposals [regarding Dodd-Frank] range from changing the structure and funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and expanding exemptions from new derivatives regulations to a full repeal of the law.” Twenty-one other Republicans signed Bachus’ letter.

But left out of their equation is the fact that Dodd-Frank reduces the deficit by $3.2 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So repealing the law, in addition to sending the regulatory system back to 2007, would actually make the deficit worse.

Of course, cutting foreclosure prevention funding would, indeed, reduce the deficit. But it would do so at the expense of a housing crisis that has continued to burn unabated. Though federal foreclosure prevention programs have been woefully implemented, the answer isn’t to give up and cut the funding. It’s to finance the sort of programs that have already been successful. Instead, the GOP is aiming to, once more, do the banks’ bidding when it comes to the federal budget.

Even as the economy struggles, corporate profits continue to rise. Wells Fargo, the largest consumer lender in America, announced today that its third-quarter earnings rose 21 percent, to $4.1 billion. Citigroup, the nation’s third-largest bank, also released its earnings statement today, announcing that its third-quarter earnings rose 73 percent over last year, with $3.8 billion in profits. Even though JP Morgan Chase saw its earnings fall from a year ago, it still raked in more than $3 billion in profits.

Corporate profits as a share of the nation’s gross domestic product, in fact, are at their highest point since 1950. Recent snapshots, however, tell a much different story on Main Street, where small businesses are limping through an economic recovery that treated corporations much more kindly. According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses’ September report, two out of every five small businesses reported that profits are falling:

Reports of positive earnings trends were 1 point worse in September at a net negative 27 percent of all owners, not a pretty picture, but still one of the best readings in years. Not seasonally adjusted, 17 percent reported profits higher (down 3 points), and 40 percent reported profits falling (unchanged). Corporate profits are at a record high level as a share of GDP, but the story is very different on Main Street.

Small business sales are also dragging, as the percentage of all firms reporting higher sales fell over the last three months, and more businesses reported sales trending down than up. Worse yet, small business owners expect sales to continue falling over the next three months.

Corporations aren’t content just ignoring these problems, instead choosing to help exacerbate them. The largest corporations have continued hoarding cash instead of investing in job creation that would help small businesses and the economy recover. At other times, they’ve spent millions lobbying for ineffective tax holidays or lax regulatory rules that led to the 2008 financial crisis. They continue to pay some of the world’s lowest tax rates. And executive pay at the largest companies continues to rise even as wages remain stagnant for most American employees. That has led to growing income inequality that rivals many African nations, saddling the American economy with problems that are becoming increasingly hard to fix.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s push for increasing taxes on the very wealthiest Americans — who, due to the preferential tax treatment of investment income, often pay lower taxes than those in the middle-class — led to the creation of the Obama administration’s “Buffett rule.” The rule is aimed at ensuring that millionaires can’t use special treatment in the tax code to drive their tax rates down below that of their employees.

Republicans have met the Buffett rule with universal derision, calling it “class warfare.” “If it’s not class warfare, it’s highway robbery,” said 2012 GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. “Pick my pockets, because that’s what he’s doing!” As it turns out, Cain’s much-touted 999 tax plan would basically do the opposite of the Buffett rule, driving Buffett’s already low tax rate down to new depths:

If the “9-9-9″ tax plan promoted by Herman Cain, a leading Republican presidential candidate, had been the law of the land last year, Warren Buffett would very likely have paid no income taxes, according to an analysis prepared for Yahoo News and The Lookout by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. At most, Buffett would have paid taxes on just 1 percent of his income.

As Yahoo’s Zachary Roth wrote, “if Buffett thinks he’s getting off easy under the current tax system, he should try life under Cain’s plan. Then he’d really be complaining.” Under 999, Buffett’s taxable income would come to $4.9 million of the $62 million he earned last year. After accounting for charitable deductions — which is one of the few tax preferences Cain says he would preserve — “Buffett would have paid no income taxes at all last year under the plan.”

However, low- and middle-income Americans would pay much more under the 999 plan than they do currently. They will be hammered by Cain’s nine percent sales tax (which Buffett would also pay, though at nowhere near the effective rate of poor Americans, who spend almost all of their income in a given year), while also paying a nine percent income tax.

Cain finally admitted this weekend that “there are some” people who will pay more in taxes under his 999 plan. However, he has yet to fess up to the fact that his plan entails a humongous tax cut for the very wealthiest Americans.

In early September, Mitt Romney released his economic plan in Nevada — which has one of the worst foreclosure rates in the nation — without mentioning the housing crisis. And he’s far from alone in the GOP field in ignoring the effect that continued foreclosure is having on the economy. Tomorrow, the latest GOP primary debate will take place in Nevada, giving the whole field a golden opportunity to talk about a subject that, as the Las Vegas Sun noted, none of the candidates have bothered to broach:

When the Republican presidential field debated economic policy in New Hampshire last week, the word “foreclosure” was uttered once. One time.

And that lone mention by former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman accompanied no prescription for the crisis that has reached epidemic proportions in Nevada and that economists agree is among the biggest drags on the economy. Rather, Huntsman mentioned it in a description of the pain felt by Americans.

That’s unlikely to change when the GOP presidential candidates debate Tuesday in Las Vegas, a city ravaged by the bursting of the housing bubble. Republicans running for president have referred to foreclosures as an ugly symptom of the economic recession but offered no remedy.

The one Republican candidate who even bothered to mention foreclosures at last week’s debate — former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman — won’t even be on stage tomorrow, as he is boycotting the debate due to Nevada’s decision to move up the date of its primary.

The GOP field, most prominently Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) and Newt Gingrich, continues to cling to the thoroughly debunked notion that it was government housing policy that led to the financial crisis. Romney likes to slam Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while profiting from his investments in the two government-backed mortgage giants. And Gov. Rick Perry (TX) gave millions of taxpayer dollars to subprime lenders, lauding their job-creation abilities.

Will being on the ground at the epicenter of the housing crisis entice the GOP to actually address foreclosures in a meaningful way? Or will they continue to ignore the very real weight housing is laying on the economyt?

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain — when he’s not mangling the details of his own 999 tax plan — has been singing the supposed benefits of “the Chilean model” of Social Security privatization. Using the right-wing buzzword “personalization,” (instead of “privatization”) Cain claims that this model will provide a better deal for workers.

As many analyses over the years have shown, privatized retirement accounts would not provide a more secure retirement for seniors. In fact, an October 2008 retiree would have lost tens of thousands of dollars in that month’s stock market slide alone. And as it turns out, not only would Chile-style private accounts be bad for workers, they’d be bad for the country’s bottom line as well, as Bloomberg News detailed:

Herman Cain, the former pizza executive surging in polls for the Republican presidential nomination, wants to replace Social Security with what he called the “Chilean model” of private pension funds. Full adoption of that model may push the U.S. deeper into deficit than Greece. [...] The U.S. budget shortfall would rise above Greece’s 10.5 percent of GDP if all of the current payroll tax was diverted into private saving funds, according to Bloomberg data.

Chile’s plan has “left millions without savings for their retirement and originally provided no safety net for the poor.” According to estimates by Chile’s undersecretary for pensions, “in 2007, only 60 percent of Chilean workers had some kind of pension coverage, down from 86 percent in the 1970s.”

Of course, Cain would have to radically rethink Social Security since his 999 tax plan eliminates the payroll tax, Social Security’s source of financing. But that doesn’t change the fact that the sort of privatization he envisions would entail massive new costs to the government just to pay for shifting to a new system, while leaving everyone but the very wealthiest seniors more vulnerable and with less of a safety net.