President Obama yesterday unveiled an overhaul of the Home Affordable Refinancing Program (HARP), in an attempt to find ways to boost the economy that don’t require congressional action. HARP was meant to help up to 5 million homeowners take advantage of low interest rates and refinance their mortgages, but so far has been a bit of a dud, reaching just 800,000 borrowers.

The plan was based, in part, on ideas promulgated by Columbia University economist Glenn Hubbard, who used to be a member of President George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. And according to the Wall Street Journal, Hubbard thinks the plan could be “a big deal“:

The president’s latest refinancing plan was based in part on a proposal by R. Glenn Hubbard, Columbia University’s business-school dean and a senior economic adviser to Republican front-runner Mitt Romney.

If the president’s effort “is the mass refinancing we suggest, it could be a very big deal,” Mr. Hubbard said in an interview Monday.

Hubbard told NPR, “It looks like a good plan; I’m glad they’re doing it.” But Hubbard also has a different role these days: leading the Economic Policy Team for the campaign of 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

Romney last week said that the government has no role in trying to prevent foreclosures, telling the editorial board of the Las Vegal Review-Journal that government should not try to stop the foreclosure process. However, Romney did add that “I think the idea of helping people refinance homes to stay in them is one that’s worth further consideration.” So will he follow Hubbard into supporting Obama’s plan?

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Western Republican Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Former Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle (R) declared late last week that she could “never” support a tax on millionaires if elected to the Senate next year. In an interview with ThinkProgress at the Western Republican Leadership Conference, Lingle, who is currently vying to replace Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI), expressed her opposition to a tax on millionaires. President Obama has proposed using the tax to fund the American Jobs Act, which would put 1.9 million Americans back to work.

Lingle objected to the phrase “millionaire’s tax,” preferring instead to call it a tax on small business. “I could never support something like that,” said the former two-term governor:

KEYES: It sounds like you’re against the millionaire’s tax that President Obama has proposed?

LINGLE: I guess I’d have to explain a little bit about my state to you, Scott. In my state, the majority of businesses are small businesses. The majority of them report their income as personal income. So while people may want to call it a “millionaire’s tax,” in fact, it’s a tax on small business, because almost every business in Hawaii will report their income as personal income. They have an LLC, they have a sole proprietorship, and that means if their business only earns $250,000, now they have to pay higher taxes at a time they’re struggling to keep people employed. So for me, they put that label on it, others put that label. I call it a small business tax, and therefore I could never support something like that.

Listen to it:

Conflating millionaires and small businesses in order to argue against increasing taxes on the wealthy is a common tactic on the right. However, as ThinkProgress economics editor Pat Garofalo explained in U.S. News & World Report, “fewer than 2 percent of small businesses make enough to file in the top two income tax brackets.”

A millionaires tax isn’t just supported in Hawaii, one of the most liberal states; it’s supported across the country. Polls regularly show overwhelming support for raising taxes on the wealthy — 73 percent of Americans, including two-thirds of Republicans, supported the idea in a September poll. Under the American Jobs Act, that money would be used to put 5,000 construction workers and teachers back to work in Hawaii.

GOP candidate Mitt Romney traveled to Ohio today to meet with about 100 volunteers who are fighting to keep Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s (R) deeply unpopular anti-worker law alive by promoting a yes vote on Issue 2, an Ohio ballot referendum. Issue 2, if approved, would preserve Ohio’s union-busting law, known as SB5.

Walking into the phone bank, Romney delivered a brief speech in which he did not mention the work the volunteers have been doing on Issue 2. He refused to talk to reporters about Issue 2. However, he told Ohio Republican Party chairman Kevin DeWine as he left that “he was not endorsing” Issue 2:

Romney, who would not speak to the media, told Ohio Republican Party chairman Kevin DeWine as he left the building on Wooster Pike in Terrace Park that he was not endorsing either Issue 2 – which would repeal the GOP backed bill that limit collective bargaining for public employees, or Issue 3, which would allow Ohioans to opt out of the mandatory health care coverage portion of the health care law passed by Democrats in Congress last year.

“I’m not saying anything one way or the other about the two ballot issues,” Romney told DeWine. “But I am supportive of the Republican party’s efforts here.”

A Republican candidate supporting “Republican efforts” hardly depicts political conviction — which isn’t something Romney is known for anyway. But with Issue 2 losing serious ground in the polls and even losing the support of top conservative voices, Romney’s lack of position isn’t surprising. But the fact that he specifically traveled to Ohio in order to announce his non-stance is.

As Politico reported, Romney’s non-endorsement looks even worse in light of the fact that, back in June, he said “my friends in Ohio are fighting to defend crucial reforms that the state has put in place to limit the power of union bosses and keep taxes low…I stand with John R. Kasich and Ohio’s leaders as they take on this important fight to get control of government spending.” Evidently, something changed in the last four months to make Romney think that backing SB5 is a political loser.

In the name of “no taxes,” Republicans have slashed state budgets across the country, forcing schools to sell advertising space, firefighters to lose their jobs to prison labor, and cities to decriminalize domestic violence in order to save money.

In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie (R) instituted severe cuts to education funding, public employee benefits, and public sector jobs, while calling his action the “day of reckoning.” Christie cut $3 billion in his first two years, leaving low-income New Jerseyans with half the number of legal aid lawyers, the mentally ill without a home after a hospital had to shut down, and thousands of women without health clinics to visit. Those cuts have also left 4,000 New Jersey police officers without a job and left drug-related crime to flourish:

In Newark, police no longer respond to motor vehicle accidents without injuries. In Paterson, the police department’s Narcotics Squad was cut by half.

In Newark, 162 officers were laid off; in Camden, 167; Trenton, 105. [...]

Statewide, about 4,000 police officers have lost their jobs in the past two years, said Anthony Wieners, president of the state’s Policemen’s Benevolent Association. There were about 25,900 municipal police officers in New Jersey in 2009, according to State Police statistics.

“All the advancements we made since the late 1970s, in community policing, getting out into the communities and building a trust, are going to be lost,” Wieners said.

In Little Egg, the police department had to disband its drug unit after 11 of the town’s 49 cops were laid off last year. In the six months that followed the layoffs, “burglaries in the township jumped 61 percent, assaults rose 22 percent, and larceny increased 54 percent.”

Christie’s “day of reckoning” has fallen hard on low-income New Jerseyans and public servants. But, thanks to Christie, the reckoning never reached the state’s millionaires. Last year, the state legislature passed a tax on millionaires that would help alleviate Christie’s budget cuts. Christie vetoed it — twice. In under two minutes flat. His argument: A tax increase is a “failed, irresponsible” policy that will “set our economy further back from recovery.” But it’s hard to see how his current policies are doing anything different.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) views on Social Security have been well-chronicled since he jumped into the Republican presidential primary in July. In the past, Perry has called Social Security unconstitutional and a Ponzi scheme, and in his first debate appearance, he called it a “monstrous lie.” Perry’s assertions were obviously incorrect, and he drew the ire of fellow candidates like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) and GOP strategists like Karl Rove, who called Perry’s extreme views “toxic” for the Republican Party.

At other points, Perry mentioned that Social Security should be returned to the states, a “solution” that is economically impossible. Today, however, Perry walked all of that back, choosing instead to join his GOP colleagues in their support of privatizing Social Security. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed outlining his new economic plan, Perry touted the benefits of “personal” accounts, the GOP’s buzzword for privatization:

Cut, Balance and Grow also gives younger workers the option to own their Social Security contributions through personal retirement accounts that Washington politicians can never raid. Because young workers will own their contributions, they will be free to seek a market rate of return if they choose, and to leave their retirement savings to their dependents when they die.

Unfortunately for Perry, this move amounts to dropping support for a plan so toxic it couldn’t even garner consideration in favor of a plan that, while slightly less toxic, has already been rejected by the American people. Republican attempts to privatize Social Security went down in flames in 2005, and even now, with the GOP telling Americans the system is broken and ignoring the easiest way to shore up its long-term solvency, voters continue to reject the idea of privatizing one of the government’s most popular programs.

Perhaps that’s because the American people know just how dangerous private Social Security accounts could be. According to a Center for American Progress study, an October 2008 retiree would have lost $26,000 in a private Social Security account due to the financial crisis, and that analysis was done before the market hit its floor in the spring of 2009. When millions of senior citizens lost nearly all of their retirement savings in their own private investment accounts, Social Security was the only income they had left. As a result, the program kept 14 million seniors out of poverty in 2010.

While Perry has apparently ditched his Ponzi scheme talk, the idea that his plan for Social Security is as safe as the current program is its own monstrous lie. If that wasn’t bad enough, Perry also supports raising the age at which retirees would become eligible for Social Security, another incredibly regressive idea.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) today became the latest GOP presidential hopeful to release a tax plan, as he tries to catch up in the polls, some of which even have him trailing former Speaker Newt Gingrich and libertarian favorite Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). The plan, as Perry has been explaining, revolves around a 20 percent flat tax.

Perry’s flat tax was designed with the help of billionaire media mogul Steve Forbes, who ran twice for president, unsuccessfully, on a flat tax plan. As we noted yesterday, Forbes’ plan would have provided a $1.9 billion tax cut for…Steve Forbes.

Perry’s plan is slightly different that Forbes’ flat tax of a decade ago, as it has a higher rate and preserves some popular deductions. But, like with all flat tax plans, Perry’s plan would give the rich a huge tax cut, since it drops their rate from 35 percent to 20 percent and exempts their investment income from taxation at all. When CNBC’s John Harwood asked Perry today why — in an era of massive income inequality — the rich should be given a tax break worth “hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars,” Perry replied, “but I don’t care about that”:

HARWOOD: Dividends, capital gains, interest income taxes would provide a huge tax cut for wealthy people in this country. Given what’s happened with income inequality, why is that a good idea?

PERRY: We’re trying to get this country working again. And that’s what I focus on. As a matter of fact, as we looked and as we talked and as we went through what are the ways to really get incentives to those who are going to risk their capital to create the jobs. [...] Those that want to get into the class warfare and talk about ‘oh my goodness,’ there are going to be some folks here who make more money out of this or have access to more money, I’ll let them do that. I’m worried about that man or woman sitting around the coffee table tonight or in their kitchen talking about how are we going to get to work, how are we going to have the dignity to take care of our family. This plan does that. And it also is a tax cut across the board, it doesn’t make any difference what strata you’re in. It gives a tax cut across the board.

HARWOOD: But for those at the top, it is hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars for them.

PERRY: But I don’t care about that. What I care about is them having the dollars to invest in their companies.

Watch it:

Former pizza magnate Herman Cain and former Govs. Mitt Romney (R-MA) and Jon Huntsman (R-UT) have all laid out tax plans that give huge tax breaks to the wealthy, while claiming that they want to help the middle-class. It seems that Perry is now finally hopping on that train.