The 2012 Republican candidates are largely in lockstep when it comes to economic policy, wanting to give huge tax cuts to the rich and corporations while doing next to nothing to boost consumer demand or help the middle class and the unemployed who have been battered by the Great Recession. In fact, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, the average tax cuts received by the richest 1 percent of Americans under the Republican plans would be 270 times as large as the cut received by the middle class:

The share of tax cuts going to the richest one percent of Americans under these plans would range from over a third to almost half. The average tax cuts received by the richest one percent would be up to 270 times as large as the average tax cut received by middle-income Americans.

Perry wins the award with a tax cut for the richest 1 percent that is 270 times larger than his middle class tax cut, while Gingrich’s is 190 times larger. Santorum and Romney pull up the rear with tax cuts for the rich that are 100 times larger than the cuts for the middle class, while CTJ did not analyze Jon Huntsman or Ron Paul’s plans. (CTJ uses a current law baseline, rather than a current policy baseline, to calculate its cuts. Using a current policy baseline, millions of middle class families would see a tax increase under Romney’s plan.)

CTJ also noted that “the cost of the tax plans proposed by Republican presidential candidates would range from $6.6 trillion to $18 trillion over a decade.” Therefore, “even the meager tax cuts that would go to low-income and middle-income taxpayers under these plans would almost surely be offset by the huge cuts in public services that would become necessary as a result.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook will receive a $378 million pay package this year, consisting of a $900,000 base salary and $376.2 million in stock options. This is a six-fold increase over his compensation last year, and could very well make Cook 2011′s highest paid CEO.

At the same time that the company is handing such a huge package to its chief executive, though, the workers in China who make Apple’s most well-known products continue to toil in tough conditions. Last year, a report from Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based advocacy and research group found that the Chinese workers at the Taiwanese-based company FoxConn — who assemble the iPad, as well as other high tech gadgets for Apple, HP, Microsoft and others — were forced to work loads of overtime, stand on their feet 14 hours a day, and live packed together in squalid dormitories.

So many FoxConn workers committed suicide that the company instituted a no-suicide pact for workers to sign and installed nets on factory roofs to prevent workers from jumping. In fact, reports surfaced today of a group of FoxConn workers threatening to commit suicide after the company reneged on payments it had promised them. Atlantic Wire has the details:

300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times. It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things.

Instead of the raise they requested, these workers were given the following ultimatum: quit with compensation, or keep their jobs with no pay increase. Most quit and never got the money. That’s when the mass suicide threat came in.

Apple has said that it is addressing the plight of its Chinese workforce — particularly after an internal audit last year showed that 137 workers at a Chinese factory “had been seriously injured by a toxic chemical used in making the signature slick glass screens of the iPhone” — but so far not much seems to have changed.

In the GOP’s concerted campaign against Americans who use food stamps, Republicans on every political level are searching for the fastest way to kick low-income people off the rolls. In Michigan, GOP Gov. Rick Snyder implemented a new eligibility rule that prevents anyone with more than $5,000 in a bank account or, in some cases a car, from receiving benefits.

Charmed by the idea, Gov. Tom Corbett (R) is now bringing that “asset test” back to Pennsylvania. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, Corbett’s administration announced that, starting May 1, anyone with more than $2,000 in assets will be disqualified from receiving benefits in order to ensure that “people with resources are not taking advantage of the food-stamp program”:

Specifically, the Department of Public Welfare said that as of May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings and other assets would no longer be eligible for food stamps. For people over 60, the limit would be $3,250.

Houses and retirement benefits would be exempt from being counted as assets. If a person owns a car, that vehicle also would also be exempt, but any additional vehicle worth more than $4,650 would be considered a countable asset.

Anne Bale, a spokeswoman for DPW, said the asset test was a way to ensure that “people with resources are not taking advantage of the food-stamp program,” funded by federal money.

In addition, Bale said, the test was related to DPW Secretary Gary Alexander’s initiative to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse across all department programs.

While 1.8 million Pennsylvanians are currently receiving food stamp benefits, “Pennsylvania has one of the lowest food-stamp fraud rates in the nation: one-tenth of 1 percent.” What’s more, 30 percent of those who qualify for food stamps are not in the program. Rather than address an real problem of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the new rule, critics note, will only hurt “elderly people saving for their burials, poor people trying to save enough money to get out of poverty, and working-and middle-class people who lost their jobs in the recession and may now have to liquidate assets to feed their families.”

Indeed, as the number of beneficiaries continue to hit record highs during the recession, it seems particularly cruel and counterproductive to cut vulnerable people from the rolls. After all, one dollar in food stamps actually increases GDP by as much as $1.79. Perhaps that’s why former Gov. Ed Rendell (D-PA) actually eliminated the state’s asset test at the onset of the recession in 2008, a move that not only helps the economy but also “streamlines administrative costs.”

Instead, Corbett is bringing back the state asset limit to a “comically low” $2,000, the same level it was in 1980. The limit, therefore, also ignores over 30 years of inflation. As the New America Foundation points out, $2,000 in 1980 is more than $5,400 today. But Corbett’s priorities don’t lie with the most vulnerable Pennsylvanians, they lie with the corporations. While instituting corporate tax cuts for the gas and tobacco industries, Corbett slashes away at the social safety net people need most under the guise of “fraud.”

This is the final part of a three-part series about college football’s bowl system, the Bowl Championship Series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Alabama trounced LSU 21-0 in last night’s Bowl Championship Series National Championship game, earning the school’s 14th national championship. But while the game settled questions regarding who receives college football’s top prize, many other questions about the BCS remain unresolved.

The BCS, a consortium of the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and the University of Notre Dame, manages college football’s five biggest bowl games — the Rose, Fiesta, Orange, and Sugar bowls and the BCS National Championship. Because those bowls are set up as tax-exempt, nonprofit charities, they pay little, if any, taxes on huge profits, even as they receive millions in taxpayer subsidies from state and local governments.

Amid recent scandals and reports involving the Fiesta and Sugar bowls, critics have raised questions about why the games are classified as charities and whether they should continue to be classified that way in the future.

The question of whether bowl games should or should not be classified as nonprofit charities is ultimately up to the IRS. But recently, public scrutiny toward the BCS has intensified. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the BCS violated federal antitrust laws, and after scandals involving potentially illegal political donations from Sugar and Fiesta Bowl employees to officials in Arizona and Louisiana, anti-BCS group PlayoffPAC asked the IRS to investigate multiple bowls. That bowl CEOs are making, on average, more than $500,000 a year and spending money on lavish trips for executives, donors, and other affiliates has raised even more questions and prompted an internal investigation at the Fiesta Bowl.

Bowl games claim that they are nonprofit charities by touting the fact that they generate hundreds of millions of dollars in economic benefits for state and local economies, help universities, and provide aid to charities in the communities that host the games. But separate investigations into such claims have found that the bowls provide much less aid than they claim, particularly to public universities and local charities. An HBO Real Sports investigation, for instance, found that while bowls claim to give “tens of millions” to charity, they actually gave just $4 million in 2009 — despite generating $261 million in revenue.

BCS officials did not respond to requests for comment on the bowls’ nonprofit statuses. But Dan Wetzel, author of Death To The BCS, laughed off the notion that the BCS games were comparable to smaller, more traditional charities. ”They classify themselves as charities, and say they give a certain percentage to local charities,” Wetzel told ThinkProgress. “But the idea that this is the homeless shelter down the street is ridiculous. It’s not.” Of the bowls’ classifying as nonprofit charities, Wetzel said, “It’s a sleight of hand.”

Meanwhile, the games are generating huge profits and giving CEOs huge salaries. The Sugar Bowl, which hosted its own bowl and the BCS title game in New Orleans this week, made $11.6 million in tax-free profits in 2007, the last time it hosted both games. And the schools that participate, most of which are taxpayer-financed public universities, continue to lose money at alarming rates just to play in the games.

Calls for changes to the BCS from fans, newspaper columnists, and even President Obama have thus far gone unheeded, though there are signs that changes in structure could come when the organization’s current contract with the six major athletic conferences ends in 2014. But when it comes to using their nonprofit status to avoid paying taxes, the bowls may have too sweet a deal to change unless the IRS forces it upon them.

“Just like most things in America, there’s a problem, and somebody is profiting off of it,” Wetzel said. “It’s a massive boondoggle.”

It’s a common trope that women in the workplace don’t advance as quickly or make as much as their male counterparts because they simply don’t ask for raises and promotions. But according to new research published today in the Washington Post, this is a myth — women do ask, they just don’t get as much in return:

The research focused on career paths of high-potential men and women, drawing on thousands of MBA graduates from top schools around the world. Catalyst found that, among those who had moved on from their first post-MBA job, there was no significant difference in the proportion of women and men who asked for increased compensation or a higher position.

Yet the rewards were different.

Women who initiated such conversations and changed jobs post MBA experienced slower compensation growth than the women who stayed put. For men, on the other hand, it paid off to change jobs and negotiate for higher salaries—they earned more than men who stayed did. And we saw that as both men’s and women’s careers progress, the gender gap in level and pay gets even wider.

Catalyst’s research debunks the myth that women themselves are to blame for the gender gap in the workplace. As the Catalyst authors put it, “If women are asking, but are still not advancing as quickly, maybe we need to frame things differently.”

Nationally, American women still earn only 81 cents to the male dollar. The median income for women is lower than men in all 50 states.