Bank of America has been involved in a slew of consumer catastrophes recently, from stealing a woman’s pet parrot and foreclosing on a home that had literally been destroyed by a hurricane to putting an elderly couple into foreclosure for paying their mortgage too early. This week, Bank of America agreed to a $410 million settlement for charging excessive overdraft fees (which won’t even cover the money the average BofA customer lost unfairly).

In the latest example of BofA’s consumer ineptitude, the Chicago Tribune reported that the bank charged a man $39.23 in interest on a credit card bill of $0:

Roger Greenwood thought he had heard of every conceivable bank fee. Then he received his September credit card bill.

Bank of America charged the Jacksonville, Ill., man $39.23 in interest — on a $0 balance…His statement clearly showed that between the credits and his payment, Greenwood paid off the entire $5,734.13.

Of course, if there is a $0 balance, there is nothing on which to be charging interest. Both the Tribune and the Consumerist contacted the bank, which said the problem arose when one of the merchants Greenwood interacted with credited his account with $1,450. Bank of America, for whatever reason, decided that the merchant’s credit didn’t count towards Greenwood’s balance, and therefore charged him interest. As the Tribune explained, Greenwood “would have had to overpay his balance by $1,450 to avoid the interest charge.”

Bank of America is a huge institution, so some mishaps are almost inevitable. But the bank has shown an extremely consistent pattern of incompetence, which has manifested itself not just in headaches like the one Greenwood faced, but in improper foreclosures and seizures of property. As one BofA customer put it, “Bank of America is ruthless in their incompetency.” (HT: Huffington Post Business)

Republicans have vociferously fought new banking regulations in the name of job creation, with many lawmakers and presidential candidates even calling for undoing existing ones, such as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, which was passed in order to guard the financial system against a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.

So it was surprising to hear Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the powerful chairman of the House Budget Committee, say he’d be interested in reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that curbed speculation by separating deposit and investment banks. The law was repealed in 1999, but on conservative host Bill Bennett’s radio show last week, Ryan said he “agree[d]” with a caller who wanted to reinstate the law:

CALLER: Hasn’t there been a separation with the removal of Glass-Steagall and the uptick rule to let Wall Street go wild? When is someone going to put that back in place? We need to put that back in place to help stabilize things.

RYAN: Yeah, I agree with that. [...] Mixing banking and commerce, meaning allowing banks to go do non-banking activities, by leveraging their deposits. [...] The way I look at this, there’s a lot of merit to what you just said. [...] If banks want to make hedge fund-like returns, then they should go be a hedge fund. But if you want to be a bank, then be a bank. Don’t try to be a hedge fund and take undue risks with your depositors money. So the way I see it, we need to have more conservative leverage limits, so you can’t leverage too much, and keep these firms within the silos where they are supposed to operate based on the degree of risk that they’re supposed to take. And if you’re just taking deposits, then I think we need to reestablish those kind of limits.

Listen here:

The repeal of Glass-Steagall led to the creation of mega-banks like Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase that combine traditional lending with risky investment banking. Many economists believe the repeal played a key role in the financial crisis of 2008. “As a result [of the repeal], the culture of investment banks was conveyed to commercial banks and everyone got involved in the high-risk gambling mentality. That mentality was core to the problem that we’re facing now,” said Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Indeed, two of the repeal’s chief proponents, former President Clinton and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R), have recanted. “In retrospect, repealing the Glass-Steagall Act was probably a mistake,” Gingrich said yesterday. “I made some mistakes, too,” Clinton wrote in his new book, including, “signing the bill repealing the Glass-Steagall Act.”

The reinstatement of Glass-Steagall would go much farther than Dodd-Frank does in breaking up the big banks, yet Ryan has been a vocal opponent of the milder law, and the GOP budget he authored would have repealed some of its provisions. Still, it’s welcome to see Paul embrace support for Glass-Steagall. Perhaps he could use his considerable influence in the GOP caucus to advance a bill reinstating it.

A slew of multinational corporations, joined by their allies in Congress, have been pushing for the enactment of a tax repatriation holiday, which would allow companies that have stashed money overseas to bring it back to the U.S. at a tax rate far below the usual 35 percent corporate income tax rate. Sen. Johm McCain (R-AZ) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) have proposed a plan under which corporations could repatriate money at an 8.25 percent tax rate, which would be lowered to 5.25 percent if they use the money to create jobs.

The problem with this plan is that it’s already been tried, and it didn’t work. In 2004, corporations used the money they brought back to enrich executives and buy back stock, not for job creation. In fact, the corporations that benefited the most from the tax break cut tens of thousands of jobs in the subsequent years, and companies pushed huge amounts of money offshore in anticipation of a future holiday.

McCain is evidently well aware of the shoddy history of these holidays, because why else would he include a special, even lower rate for companies that use the money to create jobs? In fact, McCain said at a Reuters summit yesterday that he is fine with giving corporations this big tax break so that they can use it to buy yachts and jets:

In defense of legislation he is offering in Congress, McCain said his bill would try to ensure that profits brought into the country from abroad at a reduced tax rate would be devoted by corporations to investment and job creation.

“If you brought $1.5 trillion back to the United States of America, it’s bound to have some positive effect somewhere,” he said at the Reuters Washington Summit. “I don’t see how it would not. Even if they buy more yachts and … corporate jets and all that, it’s bound to have some effect.“

McCain is technically correct that having corporations spend money on yachts and jets is stimulus in the truest sense of the word. But providing corporations with a huge tax break in the hopes that they purchase luxury goods is hardly the most efficient way to boost employment. At the same time that McCain is promoting this cockamamie idea, he is joining his party in blocking each and every portion of President Obama’s Jobs Act that comes up in the Senate.

The Joint Tax Committee has found that a repatriation holiday would add billions to the deficit, and the previous holiday shows that there would be very little bang-for-the-buck in terms of jobs. But McCain would still forge ahead, so that companies have extra cash to buy some “jets and all that.”

During his current campaign for the presidency, Mitt Romney has been desperately trying to shed his image as an elite millionaire out of touch with the concerns of average Americans. He’s ditched his business wardrobe and now tries to look like a man-of-the-people in jeans and plaid shirts.

Romney’s also made some laughable claims trying to relate to voters, telling a group of unemployed people that he’s “also unemployed.” But far from sympathizing with the plight of the jobless, on Monday Romney promised to put even more people out of work by cutting 10 percent of the federal workforce if elected. He even complained that government employees make more than he does:

Multimillionaire Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R) told employees at a steel fabrication plant on Monday that government employees “are making a lot more money than we are.”

Wearing his best plaid work shirt and Tommy Bahama blue jeans, the candidate explained to workers at Giese Manufacturing that he would slash the number of federal employees if elected.

“We have to cut back on the scale of the federal government,” Romney declared. “And for me that will start by reducing federal employees by 10 percent. You do that through attrition.”

“And then something else that is just as important, and that’s to make sure the people who work for government don’t get better pay and better benefits than people that work in the private sector.”

Romney’s complaint that he’s worse off than federal workers is hard to take seriously given that he has a net worth of $250 million. In September, he claimed that he was part of the middle class.

More importantly, Romney’s claims about the salaries of public versus private sector employees are patently false. As ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron recently reported, public sector employees are underpaid compared to their private sector counterparts.

The proposal to cut 10 percent of the federal workforce (or nearly 500,000 jobs) when 14 million Americans are already out of work illustrates Romney’s misguided public policy. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) authored a bill to do just that last month, and although both men say those jobs would be eliminated “through attrition,” the language and short timeline make it obvious that only mass layoffs could accomplish their goal.

At least 600,000 government workers have lost their jobs since the recession began, but Romney and other Republicans keep scapegoating public employees who have shouldered more than their fair share of economic pain during the Great Recession.

In fact, massive job losses in the public sector are dragging down the recovery and keeping national unemployment higher than it needs to be. According to the New York Times’ David Leonhardt, if state and local governments had continued to hire at their previous pace, they would have added half a million jobs to the economy. In other words, government austerity have “has cost the economy about one million jobs.”

As the Occupy Wall Street protests continue — and the U.S. grapples with its worst level of income inequality since the 1920s — a new survey shows that a strong majority of Americans believe that the country would be in better shape with a more equitable division of wealth. According to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, 60 percent of Americans believe that the country “would be better off if the distribution of wealth was more equal.” Big majorities also approve of raising taxes on millionaires and increasing the minimum wage to $10 per hour. Here are some of the poll’s major findings:

– A strong majority (60 percent) of Americans agree that the country would be better off if the distribution of wealth was more equal, while 39 percent disagree.

– Seven in 10 (70 percent) Americans favor “the Buffett rule,” a proposal to increase the tax rate on Americans earning more than $1 million per year, compared to only 27 percent who oppose it.

– Overall, two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans favor increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10 an hour. Support for raising the minimum wage has remained stable since 2010.

Even a majority of Republicans agree with the Buffett rule, aimed at ensuring that millionaires can’t pay a lower tax rate than middle-class households. The PRRI’s findings are in line with a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 65 percent of Americans say that the government should pursue policies that “try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans.”

The economy, understandably, has been the most widely discussed topic in the Republican party’s presidential campaign, with candidates proposing various tax plans, deficit reduction proposals, and ideas they say will help put Americans back to work. Many of those plans, like Herman Cain’s 999 tax plan and Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s flat tax proposal, have been widely panned by economic analysts. Other ideas, like Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s pledge to return gas to $2 a gallon and Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s ubiquitous calls to return to the gold standard, have been laughed off as unserious ways to address economic problems.

It turns out, however, that forcing poor and middle-class Americans to pay the price of deficit reduction while pushing huge tax cuts for the rich aren’t just bad policies for major party presidential candidates to put forward — they’d be failing proposals even from 18-year-old college students. According to professors surveyed by CNN Money, the GOP proposals are so bad, they wouldn’t even pass an Economics 101 class:

Stephen Golub, who is teaching Econ 101 at Swarthmore College this semester, said some of the ideas floated by Presidential candidates would earn a failing grade in his class.

“I think it’s grossly irresponsible what they are saying,” Golub said. “It’s not about economics. It’s about getting elected. They are promising things that are impossible to deliver or make little sense.” [...]

Another professor who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Michael Salemi, was able to identify statements from six candidates that “would earn failing grades in my Econ 101 class.” [...]

Bernard Salanie, an economics professor at Columbia University, said Perry’s simplified tax form just won’t cut it.

“It is a bit depressing to again hear the argument that we will be well on the road to recovery once our tax returns fit on a postcard,” Salanie said.

Econ professors aren’t the only ones giving failing grades to the GOP’s economic proposals. Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have continually pushed for a Balanced Budget Amendment, an idea former Reagan economist Bruce Bartlett said looked “like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin.” Meanwhile, the American people also gave Republicans failing marks, blaming the GOP for intentionally sabotaging the economy to hurt President Obama politically.