Congress is reportedly looking at providing another critical extension of unemployment benefits, either through the fiscal super committee (which is likely to deadlock) or in a bill extending a variety of tax and spending provisions. Of course, as the Hill reported, “some Republicans are expected to oppose extending the benefits,” just as they did the last several times and extension was brought up for a vote.

While an extension would do nothing for those who have already exhausted their maximum 99 weeks of benefits (depending on state), an extension would help people who are still eligible for their benefits up to 99 weeks or those who lose their jobs with the economy still incredibly weak. According to a report in the Associated Press, a majority of the unemployed are no longer eligible for jobless benefits:

The jobs crisis has left so many people out of work for so long that most of America’s unemployed are no longer receiving unemployment benefits.

Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent — a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America’s 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

As the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative showed last week, “in the third quarter of 2011 (the three month period from July to September), approximately 31.8 percent of the nearly 14 million Americans who were unemployed had been jobless for a year or more“:

During the recession, unemployment benefits have kept millions out of poverty. Those struggling with long-term unemployment — at a time when there are still more than four job seekers for every available position — not only need benefits, but help with job retraining. Meanwhile, far from helping to bolster the social safety net, Republicans in several states have cut back on unemployment benefits entirely.

Our guest blogger is Desmond Brown, a consultant for the Half in Ten campaign at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The U.S. Census Bureau today released new data that provided a more detailed picture of poverty and hardship in the United States. For the first time, the Bureau released 2010 poverty statistics under a new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).

The SPM includes a more comprehensive list of items in determining the number of Americans who are poor. It reflects items such as work related expenses, out of pocket medical costs, and child care expenses. At the same time, the SPM factors in tax and transfer programs such as SNAP/food stamps, the earned income tax credit, and housing subsidizes in determining those who are poor.

As a result of this more detailed analysis, the SPM offers a slightly different picture of poverty than the official poverty measure, which was released earlier this year for 2010. Overall, the SPM presented a higher rate of poverty than the official measure, showing 16 percent of Americans living in poverty, as opposed to 15.2 percent.

One of the major improvements of this new analysis is that it provides a better picture of the impact of government programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and school lunch. These safety net programs were tremendously effective in 2010 in keeping vulnerable Americans out of poverty. Below is an illustration if their impact:

To hear Republican presidential primary candidates tell it, the federal workforce under President Obama has experienced ballooning job growth and huge wage increases. Such claims are a staple of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) stump speeches, and for months, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has promised to bring the rest of the workers’ pay into line with comparable employees in the private sector.

Speaking at the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity annual summit Friday, Romney repeated this pledge, saying the pay gap between public and private workers “must be corrected.” “Public servants shouldn’t get a better deal than the taxpayers they work for,” Romney added.

But if Romney truly wants to match the pay of public employees to that of private workers, he would have to give the federal workers a raise, according to a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And such a raise wouldn’t be a small one — according to the report, federal workers are underpaid compared to their private sector counterparts by an average of 26.3 percent, and that gap is widening, the Washington Post reports:

The federal government reported Friday that on average, its employees are underpaid by 26.3 percent compared with similar non-federal jobs, a “pay gap” that increased by about 2 percentage points over last year while federal salary rates were frozen.

When asked if, given the BLS report, Romney was promising to give federal workers a raise should he become president, a Romney campaign spokesperson sent ThinkProgress a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation that said federal workers “receive 30 to 40 percent more in compensation than private-sector employees” once wages and benefits were included. “The federal pay system gives the average federal employee hourly cash earnings 22 percent above the average private worker’s. Including benefits raises the average compensation disparity to between 30 and 40 percent,” James Sherk, the report’s author, wrote.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) took an extensive look at the Heritage study, however, and found that it was riddled with errors and “methodological problems that call into question the validity of its findings and recommendations.” The Heritage study, for instance, used a BLS survey with a much smaller sample size than the one normally cited in such reports, leading to distortions in its analysis of federal worker pay. In fact, POGO found that the less reliable data distorted Heritage’s wage differentials by 21 to 146 percent.

The idea that federal workers are overpaid has become a favorite talking point of Republicans, and media outlets like the USA Today and conservative and libertarian think tanks have perpetuated the idea through reports littered with errors. As the most recent BLS report shows, however, those claims are baseless, and policies like federal pay freezes are only making pay disparities between the public and private sectors even worse.

GOP Rep. Mike Simpson (ID)

Last week, 40 House Republicans signed a letter saying they were open to revenue increases, marking a notable break from the hegemonic rule of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist. All but six Republican lawmakers signed Norquist’s pledge against tax increases and the GOP leadership seems committed to following orders.

However, more and more Republicans are becoming frustrated the Norquistian shackles that paralyze any discussion of tax reform and the need to raise revenue. Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, GOP Rep. Mike Simpson (ID) — who led the House Republicans in composing the letter — insisted that “you have to” support raising revenue. “The reality is you can’t get to $4 trillion without including additional revenue,” he said. “Revenue is key to this.”

When host Chris Wallace noted that Norquist would be none-too-pleased and asked whether Republicans were willing to “put their political futures at risk” to break that pledge, Simpson laughed: “I didn’t know I was signing a marriage agreement”:

SIMPSON: Well first, the pledge. I signed that in 1998 when I first ran. I didn’t know I was signing a marriage agreement that would last forever and I think that the majority of members of Congress understand that you have to have additional revenue. If you look at the percentage of the GDP that comes into the government right now, it’s about 14 percent — 14 to 15 percent. It’s traditionally been 18 percent, in that neighborhood. So the revenue coming into the government has decreased as a percentage of GDP. And the expenditures that used to be around 19 percent are now up around 25 percent. We’ve got to bring those closer together again.

Watch it:

Norquist is naturally not taking the pushback well, suggesting that one of his critics is senile and drunk. But, given that his pledge helped bring the nation to the edge of default in August and that the GOP’s revenue intransigence caused the first credit downgrade in national history, perhaps the GOP will relegate him to the sidelines. Then again, maybe not.

Last week, Citizens for Tax Justice released a report showing that 30 major corporations have paid no income taxes for the last three years, as they made $160 billion. CTJ looked at 280 companies in the Fortune 500, and found that “while the federal corporate tax code ostensibly requires big corporations to pay a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, on average, the 280 corporations in our study paid only about half that amount.”

In fact, over the last three years, only two industries — retail and health care — paid an effective tax rate of 30 percent or more. And as the Hill noted today, one industry is doing very well when it comes to tax avoidance — defense contractors:

American defense manufacturers pay an average annual tax rate of 17.5 percent, placing them in a class with some of the nation’s least-taxed sectors like information technology, telecommunications, financial services and energy, Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy concluded. [...]

Boeing, which also makes commercial aircraft, came in with the lowest tax rate among defense firms at -1.8 percent; SAIC had the highest at 28.7 percent, according to the report.

Boeing has been outspoken about its desire to see the corporate tax rate cut, even as it pays nothing in taxes. Prominent Republicans like House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) have joined Boeing’s griping about corporate taxes, ignoring that the company doesn’t actually pay them.

Defense contractors have made billions in profits this year, and “so far earnings by defense contractors have yet to see the effects of the end of fighting in Iraq, plans to draw down Afghanistan and expected cuts in defense spending.”

As protesters around the country take to the streets to protest the excesses of Wall Street banks that benefited from a federal bailout and quickly returned to profitability, new data from the financial industry has shed light on just how profitable those banks have been since the financial crisis brought the American economy to its knees three years ago.

Wall Street banks experienced years of unprecedented growth under President Bush, at least until the crisis of 2008. But in the two-and-a-half years since President Obama took office, the largest Wall Street banks have grown even larger, and profits at banks and trading firms have risen even faster than they did under Bush, the Washington Post’s Zachary Goldfarb reports:

Wall Street firms — independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks — are doing even better. They earned more in the first 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, industry data show. [...]

The largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, earned $34 billion in profit in the first half of the year, nearly matching what they earned in the same period in 2007 and more than in the same period of any other year.

Securities firms — the trading arms of big banks and hundreds of other independent firms — have fared even better. They’ve generated at least $83 billion in profit during the past 2 1/2 years, compared with $77 billion during the entire Bush administration, according to data from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

The relatively quick recovery on Wall Street has been bolstered not only by the policies of Washington politicians, but by questionable business practices. Banks have begun profiting off public goods such as unemployment benefits and food stamps, issuing those benefits to unemployed, impoverished Americans on debit cards that carry heavy fees. Cash-strapped state governments, meanwhile, have addressed budget shortfalls by shifting pension plans to Wall Street-run private accounts, further boosting the banks’ bottom lines.

Despite this evidence that banks haven’t suffered under Obama, Republicans and Wall Street traders and lobbyists are attempting to make Wall Street’s windfalls even larger. Industry analysts told the Post that the Dodd-Frank financial reform law will stabilize the future of the financial industry even as it has “crimped bank profits” slightly. But that hasn’t stopped lobbyists from spending millions of dollars to make its rules and regulations more Wall Street friendly, and it hasn’t stopped Republican presidential candidates from lining up to support the law’s wholesale repeal, even if they aren’t always quite sure what the law actually does.