With the housing crisis still strangling a full economic recovery, President Obama used his State of the Union speech last week to call for further assistance to homeowners who have been able to stay current on their mortgages. The loosely-outlined plan would allow homeowners to refinance their mortgages at current low interest rates and would be paid for by a tax on large banks — many of which contributed to the housing bubble and its subsequent burst.

Congressional Republicans, however, aren’t willing to go along with such a plan and have declared it “dead on arrival” if Obama proposes it, the Wall Street Journal reports:

But any such scheme that relies on a bank tax “would be dead on arrival,” said Rep. Scott Garrett (R., N.J.), chairman of the subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, in an interview last week. “No one is going to suggest that the way to help the mortgage market is to propose a tax indirectly on the system,” he said.

The housing crisis, now in its sixth year, remains one of the biggest drags on the economy, with four million Americans behind on their payments or in foreclosure. The crisis has strangled homeowners who are current on their mortgages too, as housing prices continue to fall. Prices dropped to a post-bubble low in November 2011, according to analysis by Standard & Poor’s and Case Shiller, and “there are few, if any, signs in the numbers that a turning point is close at hand.”

The proposed bank fee is similar to an earlier Obama proposal, the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee, that was killed by Republicans. Such a fee would apply only to the largest banks — those with greater than $50 billion in assets. Many of those banks were at the center of the housing crisis, proliferating subprime loans and engaging in fraudulent and discriminatory lending and foreclosure practices.

The ten congressional districts that would benefit the most from mortgage relief are all represented by Republicans. But in declaring Obama’s proposal “dead on arrival,” it appears the GOP has put the interests of big banks ahead of those of struggling homeowners.

The Congressional Budget Office today released its latest budget projections, which show that the deficit in 2012 is expected to exceed $1 trillion and that economic growth is likely to slow over the next two years. Predictably, Republicans jumped to blame the large deficit on President Obama’s spending.

“The President and his party’s leaders have fallen short in their duty to tackle our generation’s most pressing fiscal and economic challenges,” claimed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). “By contrast, the new House Majority has fought to put the brakes on the President’s spending spree.”

However, as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden noted, CBO was projecting a surplus for 2012 as recently as 2007, and plummeting federal revenue — not the GOP’s imaginary “spending spree” — is responsible for the lion’s share of the swing from surplus to deficit:

Most of that swing from surplus to deficit was the result of the Great Recession’s onset. Between September of 2008 and January of 2009 alone, economic conditions prompted the CBO to revise estimates of 2012 revenue collections downward by over $240 billion. [...]

The remainder of the deterioration did happen after 2009, but higher spending wasn’t even close to the main culprit. The real problem was lower-than-expected revenues.

In January 2009, the CBO forecast 2012 revenues at $3.1 trillion. Today, the CBO expects that this year’s revenue will be just $2.5 trillion, a nearly $600 billion difference. That revenue decline accounts for fully 48 percent of the swing from projected surplus to current deficit.

And while some of that decline has to do with continued economic weakness, the majority of it, about $335 billion, is the direct result of the tax cut deal signed into law in December 2010. That deal, which extended all of the Bush tax cuts, even those that exclusively benefit the very wealthy, is the legislative factor by far most responsible for this year’s deficit.

It was Republicans who insisted that the Bush tax cuts be extended for everyone in 2010, even during a time of record deficits. Not only is revenue the main factor behind today’s deficit, but it’s also the driver behind projected deficits:

As we’ve noted, a do-nothing Congress could virtually eliminate the deficit by simply not extending a slew of expiring tax breaks at the end of the year.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) reported raising $388,895.26 in campaign contributions. According to a ThinkProgress analysis, at least 44 percent of that came from political action committees and individuals connected to real estate, insurance, banking, and finance industries — areas overseen by the House Financial Services committee Bachus chairs.

According to his latest disclosure, more than $173,000 of Bachus’ total haul came from the financial sector. Over the past quarter Bachus received at least:

– $144,805 from employees of and PACs for banks, financial services firms, and venture capitalists. This includes $7,500 from Wells Fargo’s corporate PAC, $5,000 from U.S. Bancorp’s PAC, $5,000 from UBS Americas’ PAC, and $5,000 from payday lender Advance America’s PAC.
– $15,810 from insurance industry political action committees and from insurance agents for State Farm Insurance Co.
– $12,500 from real estate PACs and individual real estate agents and realty investors.

In 2010, Bachus candidly admitted that he believes Washington’s role is “to serve the banks.” As chairman, he has sought to cut foreclosure prevention programs and to repeal many of the the key reforms in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

Bachus, now in his tenth term in Congress, has also been in hot water for his financial investments. In November, CBS News’ 60 Minutes reported that one day after receiving a private briefing from the nation’s chief economic officials on the extent of the financial crisis in 2008, Bachus bet that the stock market would tank, “buying option funds that would go up in value if the market went down” and netting about $28,000. After the report broke, Bachus attempted to seize the high ground by moving a bill to ban the sort of insider trading he was accused of, but Republican leaders blocked his effort. One colleague reportedly said at the time that House Republicans were “not going to cover Spencer’s ass by passing a half-baked bill.”

Bachus is term limited as chairman of the Financial Services Committee, and has said that he won’t seek a waiver to keep the seat in the next Congress.

House Republicans today plan to unveil a new transportation bill that would spend about $50 billion per year, setting the House GOP at odds with the Senate, which passed a bipartisan bill out of committee last year that would dedicate about $54 billion annually to transportation. The bills also have some significant policy differences — and Deron Lovaas, Federal Transportation Policy Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the GOP’s bill a “march of horribles” for the environment and public transit — and according to many experts, neither piece of legislation comes close to meeting the critical infrastructure needs of the nation:

Neither bill comes close to the $262 billion a year that a panel of 80 transportation experts said the nation should spend to rebuild roads, bridges, water lines, sewage systems and dams that are reaching the end of their planned life cycles…The gap between what experts and most members of Congress would like to spend and what’s included in the two bills exists because the Highway Trust Fund no longer takes in enough gas tax revenues to sustain surface transportation needs.

“Clearly this level of funding is inadequate to support our needs as a nation,” said Joshua Schank, president of the Eno Center for Transportation. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the shoddy state of America’s surface transportation infrastructure will actually cost the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion in lost gross domestic product over the next decade. The ASCE found that “if the nation’s infrastructure were free of deficient conditions in pavement, bridges, transit vehicles, and track and transit facilities, Americans would earn more personal income and industry would be more productive.”

Not only do House Republicans want to pass a bill woefully underfunding the nation’s infrastructure, they also want to attach approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to the legislation, preferring political theater to actually addressing one of the country’s most urgent needs.

Florida, the location of today’s presidential primary, is dealing with a host of problems, including a moribund housing market and long-term unemployment that is the worst in the nation. As if that wasn’t bad enough, according to a new study out today, Florida’s Everglades ecosystem is being devastated by Burmese pythons:

In areas where the pythons have established themselves, marsh rabbits and foxes can no longer be found. Sightings of raccoons are down 99 percent, opossums 98.9 percent and white-tailed deer 94 percent according to a paper out Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [...]

The first reports of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades began in the 1980s; a breeding population wasn’t confirmed there until 2000.

Since then, the numbers of pythons sighted and captured in the Everglades has risen dramatically. According to Linda Friar with Everglades National Park, park personnel have captured or killed 1,825 pythons since 2000.

Now researchers have shown that just as python populations established themselves, the native mammals of the regions began to decline — severely.

“What if the stock market had declined that much? Think of the adjectives you’d use for that,” said Gordon Rodda, an invasive-species specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Obama administration has actually moved on new regulations meant to limit the damage wrought by these snakes, finalizing a rule making it illegal to import or move Burmese pythons across state lines. “We must do all we can to battle its spread and to prevent further human contributions of invasive snakes that cause economic and environmental damage,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

House Republicans, notably, derided this regulation as damaging to small businesses and job creation, going so far as to bring a snake breeder to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who said the rule could “devastate a small but thriving sector of the economy.” A House Republican report even derided the regulation as “a solution in search of a problem.” But that problem is all too real in Florida, where Snakes on a Plane is closer to a horrifying reality show than it is to a job creation plan.

As Floridians head to the polls for today’s GOP primary, it is likely that many of Florida’s unemployed voters have been looking for a new job for a while. Florida has the highest long-term unemployment rate of any state, as 53 percent of unemployed workers in the state have been out of a job for six months or longer, according to Census data.

When the housing bubble imploded, so did Florida’s job growth. The state’s unemployment rate hit a high of 12 percent in December 2010 — one of the highest in the nation. Economists say it is improving, but slowly:

Although the market is starting to loosen up, there are four jobseekers for every open position in Florida, said Mason Jackson, chief executive of the WorkForce One career center in Fort Lauderdale. Businesses are still hesitant to hire because of continued uncertainty in the economy.

“If we filled every job we could find, 75% would still be unemployed,” Jackson said.

Nationally, 42.5 percent of unemployed workers have been looking for work for six months or more. Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) spent much of 2011 talking about the state’s one million unemployed workers and proposed tax credits to help spur job growth, which his aide admitted wouldn’t actually create jobs.

And the economic plans proposed by the leading GOP presidential candidates would not help Florida’s long-term unemployed workers either. Economists say Mitt Romney’s economic plan, which would lay off thousands of public sector workers, while doing nothing to alleviate the main drags on the U.S. economy. Newt Gingrich’s proposal, meanwhile, is based on a series of tax cuts that would give most of their benefits to the wealthy instead of aiding the middle and working classes.

As Reuters’ Felix Salmon noted, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit went to the Davos Economic Forum to announce that job creation should be a top priority for the international business community:

The 42nd World Economic Forum Annual Meeting closed today, with business leaders urging resolute action to promote growth and employment, particularly among young people. “Jobs should be our number one priority,” declared Annual Meeting Co-Chair Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer of Citi, in a session on the global agenda for 2012. “Ultimately it is about growth. Nothing creates jobs better than growth.”

But this proclamation comes just seven weeks after Citigroup announced 4,500 job cuts, and some analysts think those job cuts are just the “tip of the iceberg.” Overall, the financial industry cut 200,000 jobs in 2011. Bank of America has announced 30,000 job cuts that will take place over the next several years.

“Everybody knows, in any case, that profits are Pandit’s number one priority; to be honest I’d be surprised if jobs are on his priority list at all,” Salmon noted. “The markets like it when big banks cut jobs, and hate it when they add jobs. And Pandit’s job is to do what the market wants. Which is, fire people.”

To explain how to boost growth, Pandit broke out the favorite right-wing canard about “uncertainty” holding back job creation. But as economist Bruce Bartlett has pointed out, “regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out.”

President Obama renewed his call for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to help reduce the deficit during his State of the Union speech, a proposal that became known in 2011 as the “Buffett Rule” after Obama mentioned that Warren Buffett paid a lower tax rate than his secretary last year.

Obama’s State of the Union speech offered the first concrete details about the oft-mentioned idea, as he called for a 30 percent minimum tax rate for millionaires. And according to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) will introduce a bill this week that could make the Buffett Rule law:

Today, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse will unveil a new proposal — first reported on this blog — to bring the tax rate of millionaires paying less than middle class taxpayers up to 30 percent. While we don’t know if the Dem leadership will act on this particular proposal, the “Buffett Rule” will get some sort of Senate vote. Republicans are all but certain to oppose it, perhaps unanimously.

Whitehouse told reporters today that he plans to introduce the bill Wednesday, after it is scored by the Joint Committee on Taxation. As Sargent noted, Senate Republicans are likely to rule out the proposal unanimously. Republicans have, indeed, gone a long way to protect the low tax rates of the wealthiest Americans. They insisted on a one-year extension of the budget-busting high-end Bush tax cuts in December 2010 and their intransigence on taxes repeatedly took the government to the brink of shutdown and default in 2011, even costing the U.S. its first credit downgrade.

Up until now, Congress has tried to reduce the deficit through spending cuts alone, many of them to programs that disproportionately affect the poor and middle class. The one tax hike the GOP has supported, meanwhile, would primarily affect working class Americans. Whitehouse’s legislation, however, gives Congress a chance to ask the rich, who have benefited from falling tax rates even as their incomes have skyrocketed, to share in the sacrifice.

Sunday marked the third anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first legislation signed into law by President Obama. The law, which expanded the statute of limitations on fair pay lawsuits, was a response to a Supreme Court ruling against Ledbetter in her fair pay case.

Though the law expanded the legal remedies available to women who have been victims of discriminatory pay, little has been done to address the pay gap that exists between male and female employees. Since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed into law, the pay gap has closed at less than half-a-cent per year. That trend is continuing, as the pay gap barely closed from 2009 to 2010.

Women made 77 percent of men’s earnings in 2009, the year the law passed. In 2010, that was virtually unchanged, as women’s wages rose to 77.4 percent of men’s. The gap is even larger for African Americans and Latinos: black women made 67.5 percent of all men’s earnings in 2009, while Latino women made 57.7 percent. In 2010, those figures ticked up to 67.7 percent and 58.7 percent, respectively.

Women make up half of the American workforce, and in two-thirds of American families, the mother is the primary breadwinner or a co-breadwinner. But they make less than their male counterparts in all 50 states, though the size of each state’s wage gap varies. While the gap continues to close in places like Washington, D.C., where women make 91.8 percent of men’s earnings, it is growing in others, like Wyoming, where women’s earnings dropped from 65.5 percent of men’s in 2009 to just 63.8 percent in 2010.

Because of the gender pay gap, women with the same education doing the same job as men earn far less over their working lifetimes. The wage gap costs $723,000 over a 40-year career for women with college degrees. In some industries, the gap can cost women close to a million dollars.

In November 2010, Senate Republicans killed efforts to close the pay gap when they unanimously voted to block the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have updated the Equal Pay Act, closed many of its loopholes, and strengthened incentives to prevent pay discrimination.

The Commerce Department reported last week that the economy grew at a 2.8 percent rate in the fourth quarter of 2011, higher than GDP growth has been recently, but still not enough to significantly bring down unemployment. And as the New York Times’ David Leonhardt explained, one of the major drags on growth has been the budget-cutting that has been going on at all levels of government for the past year and a half:

The public sector has been shrinking for the last year and a half — mostly because of cuts in state and local government, with some federal cuts, especially to the military, playing a role as well. In the fourth quarter, government shrank at an annual rate of 4.5 percent.

Over the last two years, the private sector grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, while the government shrank at an annual rate of 1.4 percent.

The combined result has been economic growth of 2.3 percent.

“The obvious conclusion seems to be that economic growth, and employment growth, would have been significantly stronger over the last two years without government cuts,” Leonhardt noted.

Of course, Republicans in Congress have been staunchly opposed to helping states weather the nation’s continuing economic storm, forcing them to resort to layoffs that not only hurt the economy, but leave communities worse off, with fewer teachers, firefighters, and police officers. (Some teachers in Pennsylvania have decided to work without pay, while one school district in that same state decided to use sheep to cut its grass in order to minimize costs.) More than half a million public sector workers have lost their jobs in the Great Recession.

For those conservatives pushing austerity as a solution to the nation’s economic woes, these numbers should come as a bit of a warning, as should the fact that the United Kingdom’s austerity program has led it’s economy to do worse than it did during the Great Depression.