Bank of America has been notoriously slow in getting borrowers into mortgage loan modifications over the last few years, losing paperwork, running borrowers in circles, and then resorting to foreclosure fraud to push borrowers out of their homes. And as it turns out, it’s not only loan modifications that the bank can’t keep straight. As Eamon Murphy laid out at Daily Finance, one couple needed to cut a music video mocking the bank in order to finally get BofA to close on its mortgage after a more than two month delay:

Ken and Meredith Williams’ humorous music video, the centerpiece of a no-holds-barred social media campaign waged against Bank of America (BAC), convinced the bank to finally close on the couple’s mortgage — despite the lyric, born of frustration with a 72-day waiting period, “Don’t let anybody tell you you’re too big to fail/Cause you belong in jail.”

As AOL Real Estate’s Teke Wiggin reports, Bank of America’s social media team took note. Not only did the bank finally close on the $203,000 loan on Dec. 16 — seven weeks after the Oct. 31 date given originally by a senior mortgage officer — it also agreed to pay the $50-a-day late fees the couple owed to the seller.

Watch it:

This isn’t the first time it has taken a public information campaign to shame BofA into treating a borrower properly. Back in August, the bank foreclosed on a New Jersey man two days after approving him for a loan modification, and didn’t correct the error until New Jersey’s largest newspaper pointed it out.

“The Williams’ loan closed December 16. We apologize for the delay in closing, and for the inconvenience, we provided a credit at closing,” Bank of America said in a statement. Perhaps those waiting on loan modifications from the bank should pick up a guitar and pen a tune if they want to get some attention?

Rick Santorum, the GOP 2012 presidential hopeful who has seen his support triple in Iowa, laid out a plan to end poverty at a campaign stop yesterday. As the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel noted, one of the plan’s two components is more marriage:

“Do you know if you do two things in your life — if you do two things in your life, you’re guaranteed never to be in poverty in this country? What two things, that if you do, will guarantee that you will not be in poverty in America?” he asked the crowd.

“Number one, graduate from high school. Number two, get married. Before you have children,” he said. “If you do those two things, you will be successful economically. What does that mean to a society if everybody did that? What that would mean is that poverty would be no more. If you want to have a strong economy, there are two basic things we can do.”

An Economic Policy Institute report from September explained that poverty is “is a jobs
and employment problem, not a marriage problem.” But Santorum’s stance is not surprising considering that he considers “huge moral failings” — among them “letting the family break down” — to be the “root” cause of the nation’s economic woes. And as Terkel pointed out, Santorum “is virulently against same-sex marriage, even though it would increase the number of marriages in the country and theoretically lower the nation’s poverty rate, according to his logic.”

Santorum said earlier this month that he is “for income inequality,” even as he rails against slowing economic mobility as he travels the campaign trail. And though equalizing marriage treatment would, according to his theory, lower the poverty rate, it’s not likely that Santorum is going to be changing his tune on that subject anytime soon.

2012 GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich executed a high-profile flip-flop on cap and trade, saying in 2007 that “mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system” were something he “would strongly support,” before disavowing that position this year. “I never favored cap and trade,” he claimed during a Fox News interview earlier this month.

It turns out that this move was more than politically convenient for Gingrich. As the Washington Post noted today, Gingrich’s climate flip-flop was also quite lucrative, with millions of oil dollars pouring into his now defunct energy non-profit after he announced it:

Within weeks, the money began pouring in from major U.S. energy firms, which eventually contributed more than $2 million to American Solutions’ pro-drilling and anti-cap-and-trade campaign for the next two years, according to a review of disclosure reports and other records by The Washington Post.

The top contributors included Peabody Energy of St. Louis, which gave $825,000, and Devon Energy of Oklahoma City, which contributed $500,000.

Gingrich also has a complicated relationship with oil subsidies, deriding Congress for not cutting them, but also mocking progressives for wanting to cut them.

Gingrich, of course, has been quote cozy with corporate interests in the last few years, making and taking millions from various corporations for work in a variety of areas. And those corporations have seen their investment pay off, as Gingrich has peddled his influence to secure earmarks and push for deregulation. His cap and trade flip-flop is simply part of a larger pattern of Gingrich saying what he needs to say to keep corporate dollars flowing.

Last month, there was finally some good news on the jobs front, as the unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent and the economy created 140,000 private sector jobs. However, the continued slow-burning crisis in housing could easily short-circuit any burgeoning labor market recovery, as the Wall Street Journal detailed today:

Some economists fear the continued slump in housing could short-circuit the recovery in jobs by making it harder for Americans to relocate to find work.

In theory, as the economy improves, people tend to relocate from places where jobs are scarce to areas where companies are hiring…While some relocation continues, economists believe mobility overall has been muted in part because of the housing bust.

Low home values have made it much harder for Americans to move because selling a home is so difficult. That is especially true for the 10.7 million Americans—or 22% of homeowners with a mortgage—who owed more than their homes were worth as of the end of September, according to figures from real-estate firm CoreLogic.

According to work by Prof. Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, homeowners who are underwater — meaning they owe more on their mortgage than their home is currently worth — are 30 percent less likely to move than non-underwater borrowers. So the housing crisis is locking people in place, even if moving could help them find a job and increased mobility could alleviate the unemployment crisis.

Borrowers being stuck underwater is bad enough, but adding to the bad news is the fact that, after slowing down their foreclosure processes to deal with the fallout from the foreclosure fraud scandal, banks have picked it back up, with foreclosure jumping 21 percent last quarter. And there’s little reason to believe things are going to get much better in 2012, as scheduled foreclosure hit a nine-month high in November, meaning a slew of foreclosure is right around the corner. Continued foreclosures will drag home prices down even further, sinking those already underwater down even deeper, in a vicious cycle that will weigh down the wider economy.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) rebuked House Republicans yesterday for suggesting the government require drug tests of individuals seeking unemployment insurance, calling such proposals “insulting” and a “red herring” in the unemployment crisis:

VAN HOLLEN: I think the drug testing thing is a red herring. The reality is that people are not out of work because they have substance abuse problems, people are out of work because there are four people looking for every job that’s available in America.

We’re willing to look at reforms, but the Republican rhetoric has been insulting to a whole lot of working Americans who lost their jobs through no fault of their own… I have to say, this Republican effort to kind of blame people who lost jobs through no fault of their own shows a total insensitivity to the stories that we’re hearing from districts around the country. Frankly I think the American people are hearing that tone and they’re not very appreciative, because they know that everybody, but for the grace of God, could also be in that position.

Watch it:

Republican presidential candidates such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have also endorsed drug testing for recipients of federal aid, but this is an invented problem that does not need a solution. Van Hollen was correct that there are four unemployed job seekers for every available job, suggesting the real reason unemployment benefits are needed is unemployment, not some fabricated reality where government benefits are supporting drug dependencies. Mandatory drug testing could create complications for employers and additional delays for job seekers but would do little to put more Americans back to work.

In the last few weeks of 2011, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) rounded out his concerted campaign against Michigan workers with a few final laws. In a prejudicial move against the LGBT community, Snyder signed a measure prohibiting all public employees from providing benefits for their unmarried partners. In considering his state’s 10.6 percent unemployment rate, Snyder also signed a law forcing some of Michigan’s over 400,000 unemployed workers to take low-wage jobs after 10 weeks of benefits, even if those jobs pay less than they were making before:

The measures require some unemployed workers to take new jobs after 10 weeks of benefits even if the available work is outside their previous experience or pays lower wages than they were making before. They also make it harder for someone to collect jobless benefits if they’re fired for cause or leave a job voluntarily.[...]

Snyder disagreed with critics who say requiring jobless workers to take a job paying 120 percent of their weekly benefit could trap them in a low-wage position by leaving them little time to look for work in their area of expertise.

“It’s to encourage people to work. It’s not to have them go backward,” Snyder said of the legislation. “It’s easiest to find a job when you’ve gotten a job.”

This new requirement comes in addition to Snyder’s decision to cut the availability of unemployment insurance from 26 weeks to 20 weeks starting in 2012. The measure also encapsulates Snyder’s priorities over his first year in office — placing the burden on the most vulnerable for the sake of the state’s bottom line. In 2011, he “shaved billions of dollars off future health care and retirement commitments,” proposed ending the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, cut funding for school districts by eight to ten percent, cut aid for 11,000 low-income families and nearly 30,000 children, and enacted a regressive increase in personal taxes — all in the name of the deficit.

Naturally, not all Michiganders were asked to share in such sacrifices — namely, corporations. While more than 1.5 million of his constituents faced poverty, Snyder enacted a $1.7 billion tax cut for corporations, or about “$30 in corporate tax cuts for every dollar saved in welfare benefit cuts.” Indeed, Snyder pushed to cut the state’s business taxes by nearly $2 billion, or 86 percent.

In enacting such preferential treatment for those who need it least, Snyder did earn an impressive recognition in 2011. For his first year in office, Snyder ranked as one of the most unpopular governors in the country.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has faced scrutiny from his fellow Republican candidates over his career at Bain Capital, the venture capital firm that, despite his retirement, still pays him millions of dollars a year. Bain, and Romney, often raked in profits while companies were shedding jobs, as was the case in New Hampshire and South Carolina, among others.

Anticipating that Democrats and President Obama would pick up on those attacks, Romney told Politico last week how he plans to respond. Apparently, his plan is to toss around blatant falsehoods, as he told reporters that Obama “has not created any new jobs” as president:

“I know that the Democrats will try and make this a campaign about Bain Capital; … 25 million people are out of work because of Barack Obama. And so I’ll compare my experience in the private sector where, net-net, we created over 100,000 jobs.”

“I’ll compare that record with his record, where he has not created any new jobs.”

Of course, like Romney’s repeated assertions that Obama made the economy “worse,” the claim that he hasn’t created any new jobs is false. As Steve Benen noted, the private sector has added 2.3 million new jobs since March 2010, and it took the Obama economy one year to create more jobs than the economy under President Bush did in eight. There are, indeed, fewer net jobs now than when Obama took office early in the recession, but his policies, including the stimulus, effectively turned months of job losses into months of consistent job gains.

Many of the jobs lost under Obama — more than 600,000, to be exact — are public sector jobs, the type Romney considers outside “the real economy.” And while he touts his own business success, Romney has promised to slash even more public sector jobs, doing to government employees what his former company has done to thousands of workers.

Along with distorting Obama’s record, Romney is distorting his own. While he claims his record includes plenty of job creation, he ignores his time as governor of Massachusetts. From 2003 to 2007, in fact, the state ranked 47th in job creation. Romney also refuses to provide evidence to back up the claim that Bain created 100,000 jobs on his watch. Romney may want to talk about jobs, but without adding distortions and baseless claims, his record sure doesn’t appear like something worth touting.

The economy continued to struggle through 2011, with persistently high unemployment, a foreclosure crisis that kept on burning, and banks behaving badly in a whole host of ways. And there were plenty of ideas from economists, lawmakers, and pundits about what to do about it. But some ideas were, shall we say, more…unique than others.

Here are ThinkProgress’ nominations, in no particular order, for the ten craziest economic ideas of the last twelve months. Think we missed a good one? Let us know in the comments below:

Florida State Rep. Proposes Ending Ban On Dwarf Tossing To Create Jobs: In October, Florida state Rep. Ritch Workman (R) filed a bill to end the state’s ban on dwarf tossing — the practice of “launching little people for the amusement of an audience.” Workman may not condone throwing little people across his lawn, but he introduced the bill because he wanted to remove a “Big Brother law” that would create jobs: “Well, there is nothing immoral or illegal about that activity,” Workman said. “All we really did by passing that law was take away some employment from some little people.”

New Jersey Gives MTV’s ‘Jersey Shore’ A Film Credit Worth $420,000: Despite Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) unapologetic hatred for the MTV series Jersey Shore, the state Economic Development Authority awarded the series $420,000 in taxpayer funds to pay for the show’s production costs. Not only does the credit fail to create virtually any long-term, stable jobs, the EDA offered the credit without even considering the show’s content. The Jersey Shore cast, however, did succeed in producing rare a agreement among Democrats and Republicans to veto the credit, a veto Christie happily delivered.

Kentucky Provides Tax Credit To Build Theme Park Modeled After Noah’s Ark: In May, Kentucky gave a Bible-themed amusement park — replete with a model Noah’s Ark and Tower of Babel — a $43 million tax break, even as the state was cutting social services. In August, the state went even farther, giving the Ark Encounter theme park a 75 percent property tax discount for the next three decades (the tax break, it turns out, will last 10,580 days longer than the Great Flood itself). The justification for the tax breaks? Ark Park officials say it’ll create 900 jobs — based on a study Ark Park officials did themselves and never showed state officials.

Virgina Bill Provides Tax Credit For Blasting Cremated Remains Into Space: A Virginia state representative proposed a bill that “would provide a state tax credit of up to $8,000 to those who agree to have their cremated remains loaded onto a rocket and blasted into space,” in an attempt to bolster Virginia’s nascent space industry. There’s just one catch: Virginia’s lone spaceport doesn’t actually offer space burials. The bill is scheduled to be debated in January.

Read more

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has jumped on Mitt Romney’s lucrative career in the private sector as head of Bain Capital, a private equity group that paid Romney generously while closing companies and cuting thousands of jobs. But Romney’s high net worth — estimated to be in excess of $200 million — and his ongoing retirement from package from Bain — understood to pay Romney millions of dollars per year — has put new scrutiny on the former Massachusetts governor’s unwillingness to disclose his tax returns.

Last night, Newt Gingrich’s campaign sought to capitalize on Romney’s unwillingness to release tax returns and sent reporters the following email:

Just in case you were curious, Newt Gingrich plans to release his income tax returns if he is the GOP nominee.

The move by the Gingrich camp comes after multiple news organizations reported on the Romney campaigns unwillingness to release the returns. Yesterday, Romney told reporters, “We don’t have any current plans to release tax returns but never say never.” In an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Romney went further:

Mr. Romney made the statement in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday, but the network did not show that part of the interview. Mr. Romney, a multimillionaire who made his fortune running a private equity firm, was asked whether he planned to release his tax return.

“I doubt it,” Mr. Romney said, according to a transcript of the interview provided by NBC News. “I will provide all the financial info, which is an extraordinary pile of documents which show investments and so forth.”

“But you won’t do the tax returns?” asked Chuck Todd, host of “The Daily Rundown.”

“I don’t intend to release the tax returns. I don’t,” Mr. Romney responded.

Watch it:

In 1994, Romney challenged Sen. Ted Kennedy to disclose his state and federal taxes to prove he has “nothing to hide.”

Indeed, scrutiny on Romney’s tax returns lies in the fact that Romney is likely not paying normal income tax rates on the ongoing payments from Bain. He is likely paying a capital gains tax rate of 15 percent instead of an income tax rate which, in his bracket, would be 35 percent.

Romney’s unwillingness to release his tax returns, and the Gingrich camp’s efforts to capitalize on Romney’s secrecy, could pose a challenge as Romney continues his assault on Gingrich’s lobbying and business dealings.

The House is expected to pass the two-month payroll tax cut extension today, preventing taxes from increasing for millions of Americans on Jan. 1. The Senate approved the deal Friday morning. House Speaker John Boehner caved under the enormous pressure and dropped his opposition to the extension, telling reporters late Thursday that the House had reached a deal to pass the Senate’s two-month extension deal after minor modifications, according to the Washington Post:

The agreement resolved the last stalemate in a year of bitter congressional fighting that earned lawmakers their lowest approval ratings in recent memory.

In exchange for supporting the 60-day patch, Republicans secured minor face-saving concessions from Senate leaders, who had already passed a two-month deal on an overwhelming vote of 89 to 10. Senate leaders had balked at the House’s demand to restart talks over the holidays on a full-year extension of the tax cut.

The Senate agreed to make a technical change to the payroll tax reporting requirements, designed to lessen the burden on small businesses of implementing the two-month deal.

And Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) promised he would appoint a conference committee to take up negotiations after New Year’s Day on ways to pay for a full-year tax cut.

Both chambers will pass the plan by unanimous consent so long as no member shows up to voice opposition in person, which lets the deal pass even though most members have gone home. There was no opposition to the deal in the Senate Friday morning. The two-month extension gives House and Senate leaders time to negotiate for a yearlong extension after the holiday recess. “I am grateful that the voices of reason have prevailed,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said in a statement.

But so far, a few House freshmen have threatened to stop the deal. Freshman Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said he was “not yet sure” if he would protest the deal, and Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) told CNN’s John King Thursday night, “I’m not so sure I’m not going to do that,” when asked if he’d drive to Washington, D.C. to stop the deal.

Boehner acknowledged the pressure he has felt, telling reporters Thursday that “I talked to enough members over the last 24 hours who say we don’t like the two-month extension and if you can get this fixed, why not do the right thing for the American people even if it’s not exactly what we want.”

Boehner received pressure from his own party — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called on the House to pass the two month extension yesterday — as well as the public. After the White House asked people to say what $40 — the average amount an American worker would lose per paycheck without the extension — would mean to them, thousands of people responded on Twitter using the #40dollars hashtag.

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

One of Mitt Romney top fundraisers and fellow 1-percenter Stephen Schwarzman was recently on television questioning the civic involvement of nearly half of Americans. Asked on Bloomberg TV whether he would be willing to pay higher taxes to help solve the country’s fiscal challenges, the billionaire Schwarzman responded by pointing at the approximately 45 percent of households who will not owe income taxes this year (an abnormally high number due to the recession) and said:

You have to have skin in the game….The issue is the concept that we’re all in this together, solving problems together…. The concept that half of the public isn’t involved with the income tax system is somewhat odd, and I’m not saying how much people should do, but we should all be part of the system.

This “skin in the game” myth, which implies that people who don’t owe federal income tax in a given year don’t contribute to the public good, is both factually misleading and fundamentally insulting. And it’s particularly offensive coming from a guy who’s been the most zealous defender of a loophole that allows billionaires like him to pay a lower federal tax rate than many middle-class workers.

First, all Americans pay taxes. The “tax system” Schwarzman refers to includes federal payroll taxes and state and local sales taxes, which claim a bigger share of income from those in the middle and bottom than from those at the top. All told, even the very poorest quintile pays about a sixth of their modest incomes in taxes. These other, more regressive taxes may not be noticeable to billionaires like Schwarzman, but the fact that everyone pays them shows that we are all already “part of the system.”

Moreover, it’s likely that many families won’t owe federal income tax this year precisely because they have too much skin in the game. Among the major reasons a household might not owe income taxes:

– They worked (paying both income and payroll taxes) for years or even decades but lost their jobs in the Great Recession and saw their incomes fall under the low thresholds where the income tax kicks in.

– They worked their whole lives (again, paying taxes on their wages) but are now retired and rely principally on Social Security benefits, which are mostly untaxed.

– They are students and their income-earning years are mostly ahead of them.

– They work at low-paying jobs while raising children, and qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Tax data shows that most EITC recipients only claim the credit for short periods; on net, recipients pay hundreds of billions in federal income tax over time.)

What’s particularly galling is to hear Schwarzman, of all people, sermonize about how low-income people need to pay higher income taxes to prove that they have skin in the game. Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group private equity firm, is the most zealous defender — and probably one of the biggest beneficiaries — of the “carried interest” tax loophole. Read more

Last month, 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich called for drug-testing recipients of federal aid. “Unemployment compensation, food stamps, you name it,” he said.

And Gingrich now has a kindred spirit in the GOP race when it comes to drug-testing those who need to access federal programs and the social safety net — Texas Gov. Rick Perry:

“I don’t have a problem with before you get any dollars from the federal government that you’re drug tested,” Perry said in response to a man who suggested the idea in a question to him at a meet-and-greet in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, that drew over 80 people. Perry pointed out that as a pilot in the Air Force, he himself had been drug tested. “I don’t have a problem in the world with that,” he said.

As ThinkProgress’ Justice Ian Millhiser has noted, this sort of policy “would likely run headlong into the Constitution,” as it constitutes a “suspicion-less search,” nevermind the fact that drug testing requirements cost more money than they save and welfare recipients actually use drugs less than other groups. Even 2012 GOP candidate Rick Santorum, a big fan of rabid right-wing causes, wouldn’t endorse federal drug-testing for benefits.

Republicans in several states, however, have embraced testing those who need benefits, as have House Republicans at the federal level. In Georgia, one Democratic lawmaker responded to his Republican colleagues’ desire to test beneficiaries by introducing a bill to drug-test lawmakers.

Minutes after House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) delivered a press conference vowing to stand firm on the payroll tax holiday, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) delivered a major blow to Boehner’s position, calling on the lower chamber to pass the Senate’s two-month extension, something which Boehner has refused to do. “The House should pass an extension that locks in the thousands of Keystone XL pipeline jobs, prevents any disruption in the payroll tax holiday or other expiring provisions, and allows Congress to work on a solution for the longer extensions,” McConnell said in a statement.

McConnell’s statement further isolates Boehner, who has found little support from fellow Republicans in his position, and gives President Obama new ammunition with which to attack Boehner in an upcoming speech today.

Boehner initially appeared to support the Senate’s bill, but quickly backtracked in an “apparent breakdown between Boehner and McConnell.” McConnell had remained silent on the payroll tax dispute since the Senate passed its version with overwhelming bipartisan support last week, likely could have avoided delivering a rare intra-party rebuke longer.

But Boehner’s intransigence, which risks raising taxes on 160 million Americans next year, is increasingly hurting the GOP, according to many leaders in the party, and perhaps McConnell felt he had to speak up before more damage was done. As The Hill reports today:

Senate Republicans are worried the standoff over extending the payroll tax holiday could hurt their chances of winning the upper chamber next year.

Senior Republican aides have made clear in private conversations that their bosses are not happy with how House Republicans have handled a bipartisan Senate compromise to extend tax relief for two months.

“It’s not helping,” a veteran Senate Republican strategist said of the House GOP fight against the Senate package. “Senate Republicans are tired of paying the price for the lack of legislative thoughtfulness in the House.”

Indeed, House Republicans have drawn the public ire of Karl Rove, the Wall Street Journal, conservative pundits, and five Senate Republicans, while they’ve found little support among the GOP 2012 presidential candidates. It’s still unclear what the endgame for the payroll tax issue will be, but it’s looking increasingly like it won’t be one in which Boehner comes out winning.

Though the economy has struggled throughout 2011, one sector that saw some significant improvement was the American auto industry. In fact, about one million more cars are expected to be sold this year than last year, and American automakers are once again claiming a larger share of the American auto market than their foreign competitors:

After selling roughly 11.8 million cars and trucks last year, U.S. vehicle sales to businesses and consumers are expected to hit nearly 12.8 million in 2011…That’s up from 10.6 million at the height of the Great Recession in 2009. Through November, new-vehicle sales had logged six straight months of year-over-year gains. That should continue in December, when 1.2 million vehicles are likely to be sold.

In addition, U.S. and foreign automakers “are poised to add nearly 167,000 U.S. jobs by the end of 2015.” “The industry has pretty much hired back just about everybody from the automotive side that had been laid off. And now they’re hiring fresh, so they’re actually adding to their rosters. And it’s not just the Detroit automakers. It’s everybody,” said Aaron Bragman, a senior analyst at IHS Automotive.

Of course, this wouldn’t be possible if the Obama administration hadn’t stepped in to rescue the American auto industry, protecting it from an uncontrolled bankruptcy. Remember, at the time, Republicans were convinced that the rescue would set the country on the “road to socialism,” raging about the “war on capitalism.” However, it seems that the rescue is going to turn out to be one of the most important steps the administration took in 2009.