In a wayward attempt to rebrand himself as a middle-class hero, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney is running headlong into his history with Bain Capital. Not only does the firm have a history of making millions by buying up and gutting companies, but Romney also secured a plush retirement deal from Bain that brought him “millions of dollars in income each year.”

Of course, Romney has tried to spin his private sector role as that of a “job creator.” But a closer look at Bain’s modus operandi reveals that firm spent a lot of time laying off company employees rather than hiring them — all while turning a profit. More than 20 years ago, Bain — with Romney at the helm — opened a new plant in Gaffney, South Carolina with the promise of “highly anticipated manufacturing jobs,” only to shut down that plant four years later, laying off 150 workers while making millions:

More than two decades ago, Mitt Romney’s business venture came to town with a bounty of highly anticipated manufacturing jobs. The new plant, just past the gas station off Interstate 85, needed skilled workers to churn out thousands of photo albums.

Four years later, the Holson Burns Group Inc. – the company controlled by Romney’s Bain Capital LLC – closed the factory and laid off about 150 workers. Some jobs were sent north, where months later many of those were also eliminated. Other operations went overseas. [...]

For Bain, the plan was a financial success: Holson Burnes raised $24 million from its initial public offering on the over-the-counter trading market, with Bain executives retaining the majority of the company’s shares. Bain, in the end, reaped more than double the return on its initial investment. But workers were left jobless just as the local economy began to slump.

“In the real world, some things don’t make it,” Romney offered as an explanation for the layoffs he had overseen as Bain’s CEO. However, the plant in South Carolina is not an isolated incident. Under Romney, “four of the 10 companies Bain acquired declared bankruptcy within a few years, shedding thousands of jobs.” But documents show that “Bain investors profited in eight of the 10 deals, including three of the four that ended in bankruptcy.” Indeed, the firm pointedly made higher profits “by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits.”

As Romney’s own business partner stated, “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation.” It’ll be an interesting display of acrobatics to see how Romney explains to South Carolinians that the profit his company made off the backs of 150 laid off workers proves his bona fides as a job creator.

Last month, Tea Party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) released a budget plan along with GOP Sens. Rand Paul (KY) and Mike Lee (UT) that purports to cut $5 trillion out of the federal budget over 10 years. The plan included about $4.2 trillion in direct spending cuts (with the rest coming from reduced interest payments on the debt and the sale of government assets).

The senators claim that these reductions are simply “real, sustainable spending cuts.” However, as McClatchy reported, about 70 percent of the deficit reduction in DeMint’s plan is placed right onto the backs of low-income Americans:

A plan by Republican U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina to slash the federal budget deficit would hit the poorest Americans especially hard, directing 70 percent of its $4.2 trillion in spending cuts at safety-net programs intended to help tens of millions of low-income people.

The plan proposes $20 billion in cuts that would affect the affluent. It suggests almost $3 trillion in cuts that would affect low-income Americans, leading one liberal economist to call the plan “cruel.”

“It’s cruel,” said Andrew Fieldhouse of the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s inexcusable to cut supports that help those adversely affected by the economic downturn.” Alan Viard, who was on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, added that “this plan places a disproportionate burden on low-income groups.”

Even with tax revenue at a 60 year low, DeMint proposes no new revenue other than from one-time sale of government assets, which is obviously not a sustainable revenue source. Interestingly, he also does nothing on Medicare, even while walloping Medicaid and means testing Social Security.

This is hardly the first time that DeMint has been the right-wing id on economic policy, as he also put forth the Senate Republican stimulus plan, which consisted of nothing but huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. He simply shows what the right-wing would do if it had absolute control of the budget: gut the social safety net while largely sparing the richest Americans any pain.

Payday lending companies are combining their money in order to form a corporate front group to fight for the right to charge interest rates of 445 percent and more in the state of Missouri.

Payday loan interest rates in the Show Me State average nearly 60 percentage points higher than the rest of the nation, 445 percent to 391 percent. Fed up with the disastrous effect that such predatory lending is having on poorer Missourians, a group of citizens, religious groups and civic organizations are gathering signatures for a proposed November ballot initiative that would restrict payday lending interest rates in the state to 36 percent.

Payday lending companies, ruffled by the prospect of being able to charge a mere 36 percent interest rate, have teamed up to fight the initiative. Two weeks ago, a new group – Stand Up Missouri – emerged, purporting to represent “consumers, businesses, civic groups, and faith-based organizations.” However, a look at their finance records reveals that the group is funded – to the tune of $216,000 – by just seven payday lending corporations, including Tower Loan, Western Shamrock Corporation, and Brundage Management Company. The front group’s CEO and chairman, Tom Hudgins, is the vice president of Western Shamrock Corporation.

In its first two weeks of existence, Stand Up Missouri has already taken an Orwellian approach to the term “payday lending” – they prefer the phrase “traditional installment loan” – and invoked the Civil Rights Era to defend why payday lenders ought to be allowed to gouge consumers. An ad on their homepage currently explains to viewers how payday lenders are just like Dr. King and Civil Rights Era marchers:

AD: You had poor people who followed Dr. King and walked with him hundreds of miles because they believed in civil rights that much. In this day and time, when can we say we’ve seen something like that where people are willing to leave their job to support something that they believe in? We have that statement, “actions speak louder than words,” and that’s why I’m here. That’s why it was important for me to take time off to be here because I believe wholeheartedly in the company that believes in me.”

Stand Up Missouri joins another pro-payday lending group in the state called Missourians for Equal Credit Opportunity, which has used a loophole in campaign finance law to hide whoever or whatever corporation(s) gave $600,000 to combat the initiative.

It’s not difficult to see why payday lenders are fighting the consumer effort so vociferously. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch details just how ubiquitous payday lending has become in Missouri: “In 2010, there were about 1,040 payday loan stores in Missouri, according to the Missouri Division of Finance. Missouri is second only to Tennessee among its neighbors in the number of licensed payday lenders. Some 2.43 million payday loans were made in Missouri in 2010.”

The proposed 36 percent interest rate cap is also not without precedent. Until the mid-1990s, Missouri law restricted lenders to a 28 percent ceiling.

The 99 Percent Movement effectively changed the American political debate from debt and deficits to income inequality, highlighting the fact that income inequality has increased so much in the U.S. that it is now more unequal than countries like Ivory Coast and Pakistan. While those numbers are startling, a study from two historians suggests that American wealth inequality may actually be worse than it was in Ancient Rome — a society built on slave labor, a defined class structure, and centuries of warfare and conquest.

In the United States, the top 1 percent controls roughly 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. According to the study, which examined Roman ledgers, previous estimates, imperial edicts, and Biblical passages, Rome’s top 1 percent controlled less than half that at the height of its economic power, as Tim De Chant notes at Per Square Mile:

Their target was the state of the economy when the empire was at its population zenith, around 150 C.E. Schiedel and Friesen estimate that the top 1 percent of Roman society controlled 16 percent of the wealth, less than half of what America’s top 1 percent control.

Of course, the millions of Romans at the bottom of the empire’s class structure — the conquered and enslaved, the poorest Romans, and the women who had little civic or economic empowerment — would probably disagree with the study’s conclusion. Still, it serves as yet another highlight of how large the income gap in the United States has become over the last three decades.

Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) threw cold water on a temporary extension of the soon-to-expire payroll tax cut that had passed overwhelmingly in the Senate on Friday. “Well, it’s pretty clear that I and our members oppose the Senate bill,” Boehner said, despite the fact that on Friday he had called it a “good deal” and a “victory.”

House Republicans intend to vote down the Senate’s bill tonight, leaving the issue unresolved. But what happens if the payroll tax cut is allowed to expire? According to several economic analysts, it would severely affect growth and job creation next year:

– According to Macroeconomic Advisers, allowing the payroll tax cut to lapse “would reduce GDP growth by 0.5 percent and cost the economy 400,000 jobs.”

– Barclay’s estimated that letting the cut expire would knock 1.5 percent off of first quarter growth next year.

Meanwhile:

– Ameriprise Financial Services estimated that extending the cut “is likely to add between 750,000 to 1 million jobs.”

– Susan Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, calculated that the payroll tax cut “would add 1 percentage point to economic growth and create 1 million jobs next year.”

– Regional Economic Models Inc. estimated that the cut would pump “$120 billion into U.S. households in 2012.”

“If the Europe mess weren’t there, there would be a good case for letting taxes go back up,” said Joel Prakken, the chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers. “But a combination of a big tax increase plus the threat from Europe, when the economy is still in the doldrums — why take that risk?” If the House does vote down the Senate’s bill, the Senate will have to come back into session in order to craft a final agreement.

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has been banking on his time running the private equity firm Bain Capital to be a major selling point for his campaign. “I spent my career in the private sector. I think that’s what the country needs right now,” Romney says.

Romney has had to contend with the fact that Bain made a lot of its money buying up companies, then laying off workers and reneging on benefits to gut those companies, burying them with debt as Bain walked away with millions. In fact, one of his former business partners has explicitly said, “I never thought of what I did for a living as job creation.” And as it turns out, even after Romney left the firm, he was profiting from Bain’s activities due to a lucrative retirement deal:

In what would be the final deal of his private equity career, he negotiated a retirement agreement with his former partners that has paid him a share of Bain’s profits ever since, bringing the Romney family millions of dollars in income each year and bolstering the fortune that has helped finance Mr. Romney’s political aspirations.

The arrangement allowed Mr. Romney to pursue his career in public life while enjoying much of the financial upside of being a Bain partner as the company grew into a global investing behemoth.

Since Romney left, Bain has made its money gutting companies like KB Toys and Clearchannel, laying off thousands of workers and leaving the companies under heavy debt loads, while Romney has reaped the benefit. Adding insult to injury, the money Romney has been collecting from Bain is likely not taxed as normal income but as “carried interest,” meaning it is subject to the capital gains tax rate of 15 percent rather than the top income tax rate of 35 percent:

[S]ince Mr. Romney’s payouts from Bain have come partly from the firm’s share of profits on its customers’ investments, that income probably qualifies for the 15 percent tax rate reserved for capital gains, rather than the 35 percent that wealthy taxpayers pay on ordinary income. The Internal Revenue Service allows investment managers to pay the lower rate on the share of profits, known in the industry as “carried interest,” that they receive for running funds for investors.

Because Romney’s income is almost exclusively derived from what are qualified as investments (he recently said he has no income that qualifies for the personal income tax), he is able to drive his tax rate to absurdly low levels for someone making as much as he does. Citizens for Tax Justice estimated that Romney pays about a 14 percent tax rate, below the level at which many middle-class families are paying. And he’s paying that low rate on money made via dismantling companies and eliminating jobs.