The National Labor Relations Board today dropped a complaint against mega-manufacturer Boeing that had been used as a political football by Republicans for months. Of course, the GOP rushed forward to hail this as some sort of win for conservatism.

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich called it “a victory for South Carolina and all right-to-work states,” while Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said it is “a victory for American manufacturers, workers and the cause of job creation.”

Ever since the NLRB first filed the complaint, the GOP has mischaracterized it as having something to do with so-called “right-to-work” states, states where workers are allowed to free-ride on union contracts. However, the actual complaint was about whether or not Boeing moved a production line from Washington to South Carolina in retaliation against workers for striking.

It is illegal to shift production in order to retaliate against workers, and Boeing executives, on-tape, pretty clearly said that their motive for moving to South Carolina was to do just that. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote, “there is ample precedent for the argument that threatening to move facilities because of strikes is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act. And certainly the NLRB might reasonably have taken a Boeing executive at his word when he told the Seattle Times (on video!) that this was precisely what motivated the relocation.”

However, Boeing and its workers this week completed a new contract, in which the company agreed to build a new line of airplanes in Washington:

About 74 percent supported the contract on Wednesday in a ballot among 31,000 union members, mostly in the Seattle area, who accepted the surprise proposal unveiled last week.

Boeing plans to increase output by 60 percent after four union walkouts since 1989 delayed hundreds of deliveries. Workers were promised that a revamped 737 jet would be built at a current factory near Seattle, and the union requested that the N.L.R.B. retract the complaint filed over a new 787 plant in South Carolina.

The moral of the story is that collective bargaining worked and the workers in Washington will not be unfairly punished by Boeing for exercising their rights. “Both sides were faced with uncertainty and real losses, and the nature of collective bargaining is seizing the moment,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “The agreement reached between Boeing and workers in Washington demonstrates that the law that protects workers’ rights is vital to our economy and necessary to enforce,” Rep. George Miller (D-CA) added.

NLRB’s dropping of the complaint doesn’t mean that the initial charge was without merit or that union-busting is any less of a concern. It signals that the workers were able to work through their differences with the company, rendering the complaint unnecessary. Contrary to everything Republicans, at both the federal and state level have been saying for the last two years, collective bargaining is a critical tool to ensure a fair deal for workers, and the case with Boeing reflects that reality.

When President Obama introduced the “Buffett rule,” aimed at ensuring that millionaires and billionaires can’t pay a lower tax rate than middle-class families, 2012 GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney called it “class warfare,” adding that it is “simply the wrong way to go.” At the time, we noted that Romney may be sensitive to the Buffett Rule because it likely applies to him.

One of the major ways in which the wealthy are able to pay lower taxes than the middle-class is through the preferential treatment of investment income. The top capital gains tax rate of 15 percent — as opposed to the 35 percent top income tax rate — means that those wealthy individuals who make their money from investments pay a lower tax rate than middle-class families in the 28 percent or 25 percent brackets, and the same as those in the 15 percent bracket.

A Citizens for Tax Justice analysis found that Romney would have paid about a 14 percent tax rate in 2010, because of his millions in capital gains income.

Romney won’t release his tax returns, so it’s impossible to tell with complete precision what his tax rate actually is. However, during an interview today with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, Romney said that all of his income is from interest, dividends and capital gains, meaning that the CTJ analysis of his tax plan likely has a lot of truth to it, if it doesn’t overestimate how much he paid:

My own calculation is, if that were the case, for anybody, no taxes on interest, dividends, and capital gains, I would have paid no taxes in the last ten years, because all my income is from dividends, interest, and capital gains.

Watch it:

So it would seem that there really is a Romney rule: lower taxes for investors like him than for working middle-class families. Romney claims that his economic plan would provide the middle-class with a tax cut because it completely eliminates the tax on capital gains for anyone making less than $200,000 annually. However, the vast majority of people who make that much have literally no capital gains income whatsoever.

This week, a super PAC backing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a huge ad buy in Iowa to run commercials proclaiming that Romney “helped create thousands of jobs” as the CEO of Bain Capital. Romney has touted his experience at the private equity investment firm, claiming it gave him the necessary experience to create jobs as president.

However, the firm was responsible for laying off at least 1,700 workers at companies it owned. When FactCheck.org tried to square the ad’s claim with the reality of Bain’s layoffs, the super PAC refused to say where the statement came from, saying, “We aren’t supplying that information”:

We contacted a spokeswoman for Restore Our Future, Brittany Gross, and asked for backup for the claim that Bain created a net of thousands of jobs while Romney was employed there, as the ad claims. Gross emailed back: “We aren’t supplying that information.”

Since Romney himself has claimed “in those 100 businesses we invested in, tens of thousands of jobs, net-net, were created,” we also reached out to the Romney campaign for backup. But we did not get a response.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, while Bain expanded some companies, “Romney and his team also maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits.” It’s also worth noting that at the time he was governor, Massachusetts was 47th out of 50 in job creation.

Yesterday, Republicans again shot down an extension of a payroll tax break for middle-class families due to their objection to a 1.9 percent tax increase on the top 0.2 percent of income earners. Naturally, Republicans are recycling their spurious claim that taxing America’s millionaires will somehow hit small businesses and stifle job creation. “It’s just intuitive that, you know, if you’re somebody who’s in business and you get hit with a tax increase, it’s going to be that much harder, I think, to make investments that are going to lead to job creation,” said Sen. John Thune (R-SD).

Hoping for more than Thune’s intuition, NPR put out a request to Republican offices and the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax to find business owners who’d be affected. Unsurprisingly, Republican leadership and the business groups came up empty:

We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So, NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.

So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to. A group called the Tax Relief Coalition said the problem was finding someone willing to talk about their personal taxes on national radio.

There’s good reason why Republicans came up empty. Just 2 percent of people with any business income, large or small, would be affected by this tax increase.

Contrary to the GOP’s rhetoric, NPR found several business owners who’d be affected who insisted that the tax wouldn’t hurt hiring at all. “It’s not in the top 20 things what we think about when we’re making a business hire,” said one business owner. It “didn’t even make it on the agenda.” Another business owner said that, even with slightly less disposable income, the marginal tax rate “has nothing to do with what my business does.”

Indeed, business owners have long been telling Republicans that the marginal tax change makes “zero difference” in hiring. “I’m no sure what the connection is” between raising tax rates and hiring, said Anchor Brewing CEO Keith Greggor, adding that not a lot of “small-business owners I know are millionaires.” But Republicans like Thune refuse to let facts challenge their dogma. “I think most small-business owners who are out there right now would argue that raising their taxes has the opposite effect that we would want to have in a down economy,” he said.

Eric Cantor (right) and his ideological muse Newt Gingrich (right)

Earlier this year, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) made a series of major missteps when he decided the House GOP would not release federal disaster funds unless it included offsetting spending cuts following a deadly Missouri tornado, a hurricane that hit the east coast, and an earthquake in Virginia.

Though Cantor was roundly criticized for the move, a look back to the 104th Congress revealed the origins of Cantor’s idea: Newt Gingrich.

Less than two months after Gingrich took over as House speaker in 1995, one of his first orders of business was to propose holding off on federal disaster aid unless it was accompanied by spending cuts elsewhere in the budget. Gingrich downplayed the long-held system of sending federal relief money to areas stricken by natural disaster without making it contingent on ideologically-driven cuts, telling reporters, “you don’t have this thing of waving a magic wand and saying, ‘Well, this is an emergency.’”

This was not simply a theoretical exercise. When the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing occurred later that year, Gingrich held federal disaster aid hostage unless he received offsetting spending cuts, prompting the Philadelphia Daily News to write that “Even Newt Gingrich must lose a little sleep at the idea of making political hay out of the mini-civil war that struck Oklahoma City.”

The Free Lance-Star from February 11, 1995, has more:

President Clinton last week asked Congress for an extra $4.9 billion in emergency aid to pay for repairs lingering from the Northridge earthquake in Southern California a year ago. He also is seeking an additional $500,000 to repair damage from last month’s record flooding in the state.

Typically, those funds are sent to states under special budget rules that do not require Congress to earmark offsetting cuts.

But that practice, Gingrich said, is about to change.

“We’re going to have to find a way to offset that,” he said.

Gingrich went on to criticize President Clinton for refusing “to suggest where to cut to pay for federal disaster aid.” Not all congressional spending proposals were held to this same standard though. As the Washington Post wrote in July 1996, Gingrich “instructed a House Appropriations panel to earmark an additional $15 million for water projects to boost reelection prospects of Republicans in California, Illinois, New Jersey and Washington state.”

Pork-barrel projects like these were deemed important enough to merit a special earmark, but Gingrich held disaster relief money hostage unless Congress and the president agreed to offsetting spending cuts elsewhere. Sixteen years later, Cantor took up the mantle and used the devastating Joplin tornado, which killed 159 people, to try to extract spending cuts from congressional Democrats.

More and more of America’s wealthy are coming out in support of paying their fair share in taxes. Two dozen millionaires came to Capitol Hill recently simply to say, “tax me.” Now, multiple Grammy Award-winning hip hop artist Jay-Z is joining the chorus. “I wouldn’t mind paying more taxes if it went to the things that really mattered,” he told CNN, adding that, if the money goes towards health care, education, and to help people, “most people with a conscience, with some integrity, and moral fiber wouldn’t have any problem paying more taxes.” Watch it:

The “99 problems” artist also applauded the 99 Percent. “I think it is saying a lot all over the world that people can get their voice out there and fight for a better world, education and health care, and poverty. There’s so many different fights that we must take on,” he said. “It’s good. It’s a good thing that young people are getting out and getting their voice heard.”

Republicans, while claiming to support a payroll tax cut extension that will primarily benefit the middle class, have cycled through a list of reasons to oppose proposals from Senate Democrats. The GOP refuses to pay for the cut with a surtax on millionaires, even as the wealthiest Americans’ tax rates have fallen to historic lows. Other GOP members have claimed the extension — which would put an extra $1,000 a year in the average American’s pocket — would undermine Social Security (it wouldn’t).

Now, with some members of the party worried that opposing the extension would cause it to lose its reputation for anti-tax zealotry, House Republicans are attempting to make it look as if they support the extension by proposing an alternative plan full of demands they know Democrats won’t accept. One of those demands, the Hill reports, is a drastic reduction in unemployment insurance that lowers a person’s maximum time on benefits from 99 weeks to 59 weeks:

The Republican proposal is expected to reduce the total number of weeks unemployed workers are eligible for aid by as much as 40 weeks and tighten rules for eligibility.

Such a reduction would significantly reduce the cost of extending federal unemployment benefits, making it easier to secure GOP support for a measure that will also include an extension of a payroll tax cut many conservative Republicans dislike.

Unemployment insurance remains one of the GOP’s favorite targets. Republicans have decried the program as a “lifestyle” that creates laziness among its recipients, ignoring the fact that nationally, there are four job applicants for each open job. The idea that unemployment insurance keeps people from seeking jobs is also betrayed by fact: a San Francisco Fed study found that those who qualify for unemployment insurance remain unemployed, on average, just 1.6 weeks longer than those who don’t.

Meanwhile, unemployment insurance remains one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, since the money is put directly back into the economy. Failure to extend benefits would cost the U.S. economy $57 billion in the first three months of 2012, a 0.38 percent loss in GDP growth over that period. That’s roughly the same rate at which the American economy grew in 2011.

Democrats like Rep. Sander Levin (MI) dismissed the Republican proposal, saying the GOP was more interested in “confrontation” than “common ground.” “They are following a path of blaming victims of the economic downturn,” Levin told the Hill. “I can only hope that when Republicans go home this weekend they will talk with unemployed Americans and begin to understand the exceptionally challenging circumstances they face.”

Income inequality in the U.S. is currently the highest its been since the 1920s, with the 400 richest Americans (who are all billionaires) having as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined. And as it turns out, just one wealthy family has managed to amass a fortune equal to that of the combined net worth of the bottom 30 percent of Americans — the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune, as Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, found:

The triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is one of the best sources for data on wealth in the U.S. And, of course the Forbes 400 estimates the worth of the wealthiest amongst us—all 400 wouldn’t be captured in the SCF. If we look at both the SCF and the Forbes 400 we can glean some interesting insights.

In 2007 (the most recent SCF) the cumulative wealth of the Forbes 400 was $1.54 trillion or roughly the same amount of wealth held by the entire bottom fifty percent of American families. This is a stunning statistic to be sure.

Upon closer inspection, the Forbes list reveals that six Waltons—all children (one daughter-in-law) of Sam or James “Bud” Walton the founders of Wal-Mart—were on the list. The combined worth of the Walton six was $69.7 billion in 2007—which equated to the total wealth of the entire bottom thirty percent!

Not only have the Waltons gathered a fortune equal to that of the bottom third of the country, but they spend it lobbying to cut their own taxes. For years, the Waltons have been supporting efforts to cut the estate tax, the tax levied on inheritance. Conservatives intent on cutting this tax — which they’ve brilliantly dubbed the “death tax” — led to President Obama agreeing to a “compromise” last year that lowered the rate and increased the tax-free exemption, giving a senseless tax break to extremely wealthy families.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, “for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007,” while it grew by just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent of the income scale. In a given year, the richest ten percent of the country takes home about one quarter of total income. But Congress still saw fit last year to give a tax break to the very richest families, who have collected fortunes that dwarf anything the rest of the country will ever see. (HT: Huffington Post)