As ThinkProgress has reported, millions of struggling Americans have resorted to taking out payday loans in a desperate attempt to pay for unexpected expenses. But too often the loan is a trap for borrowers who are stuck in a cycle of loan “churning,” paying off exorbitant interest costs for years.

Now, Faith in Public Life reports that payday lending companies are trying to intimidate churches in Kansas City, Missouri that are educating their communities about the dangers of these loans. The Kansas City Star describes threatening letters that suggest church members could face prison time for circulating a petition in favor of a ballot initiative that would cap payday loan interest rates at 36 percent:

The letter from the Texas law firm, Anthony & Middlebrook, advised churches in bold letters that “strict statutes carrying criminal penalties apply to the collection of signatures for an initiative petition.”

That’s true, of course, if one distributes a false affidavit or signs someone else’s name to a petition. No one has accused the payday loan opponents of doing any of those things.

The letter also warns churches that their tax-exempt status could be threatened if they engage in lobbying or attempts to influence legislation. The letter interprets “influencing legislation” to include “supporting or encouraging action with respect to the (payday lending) petition.”

That is intimidation, pure and simple.

The law firm represents a campaign committee that has already raised $850,000 to stop the initiative petition regulating payday lenders. They’ve insisted the menacing letters were simply intended as an “educational tool.”

Forty-four percent of payday loan borrowers ultimately default, even after paying back their loans several times over, pushing them even closer to poverty. Payday lending has ballooned to a $7 billion industry by charging interest rates as high as 1,950 percent, which is still allowed under current law in many states.

During an interview with Univision, Romney was pressed on whether it was fair for him to pay about 13 percent of his income in taxes — as he did in 2010, according to his recently released tax returns — when many middle class families pay far more. Romney proceeded to claim that his actual rate is “closer to 45 or 50 percent.”

To justify his figure, Romney relied on his belief that “corporations are people.” When Univision’s Jorge Ramos asked Romney if his 13 percent tax rate is “fair,” Romney suggested adding the maximum corporate tax rate (35 percent) to his personal taxes to calculate his real rate:

RAMOS: You just released your tax returns. In 2010 you only paid 13 percent of taxes while most Americans paid much more than that. Is that fair?

ROMNEY: Well, actually, I released two years of taxes and I think the average is almost 15 percent. And then also, on top of that, I gave another more 15 percent to charity. When you add it together with all of the taxes and the charity, particularly in the last year, I think it reaches almost 40 percent that I gave back to the community. One of the reasons why we have a lower tax rate on capital gains is because capital gains are also being taxed at the corporate level. So as businesses earn profits, that’s taxed at 35 percent, then as they distribute those profits as dividends, that’s taxed at 15 percent more. So, all total, the tax rate is really closer to 45 or 50 percent.

RAMOS: But is it fair what you pay, 13 percent, while most pay much more than that?

ROMNEY: Well, again, I go back to the point that the, that the funds are being taxed twice at two different levels.

Watch it:

Romney glosses over the fact that he is not a corporation and doesn’t pay corporate taxes. Additionally, most corporations pay far lower than a 35 percent rate. In fact, many profitable corporations pay nothing at all.

In the alternative, Romney suggested that his tax rate should be considered “almost 40 percent” because he gave a substantial amount of money to charity, mostly to the Mormon church. Romney should be lauded for his charitable contributions — and received a tax deduction for them — but charitable contributions are not taxes.

It’s already well established that the tax plans put forward by the 2012 GOP presidential nominees would dramatically lower taxes for the 2012 GOP presidential nominees. Newt Gingrich’s own tax plan, for instance, would give him a tax cut of nearly half a million dollars every year.

The candidates fare so well under their own plans because those plans dramatically slash taxes for the richest one percent of the country. So how would America’s richest family — the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune — make out if one of the GOP’s plans actually came into effect? Quite well, according to an analysis provided to ThinkProgress by the Making Change at Walmart campaign.

The Walton family has a combined wealth of more than $93 billion. Collectively, the Walton family controls nearly half of all Walmart shares, which helped them family receive more than $2 billion in dividends from their Walmart stock alone in 2010.

Since the GOP candidates (with the exception of Mitt Romney) want to lower or, in the case of Newt Gingrich, eliminate the tax on capital gains and dividends, under their plans, the Waltons would receive millions of dollars per year in tax cuts:

While Gingrich and Santorum would give the Waltons huge new tax breaks — and Romney would maintain the status quo — President Obama’s tax plan would cost the Waltons $107 million per year.

As a family, the Walmart heirs have the same net worth as the bottom 30 percent of Americans. And if Gingrich or Santorum had their way, that number would only increase.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has repeatedly slammed President Obama as the “most successful food stamp president in history” on the campaign trail, and that line of attack — blaming Obama for the ill-effects of the recession and the pain that followed — has become a familiar GOP talking point. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) struck a similar tune in his response to Obama’s State of the Union speech last night, ignoring his own state’s high poverty rate and blasting Obama for pursuing “pro-poverty” policies:

DANIELS: Contrary to the president’s disparagement of people in buisness, it’s one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs, what a fitting name he had, created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew. [...] The extremism that stifles the development of home-grown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands…is a pro-poverty policy.

Watch it:

While Daniels claims Obama is “pro-poverty,” a closer look at his own state shows that it’s Daniels who is a pro at making people poor. Under Daniels’ leadership, Indiana’s poverty rate ballooned to 16.3 percent in 2010 — a three-decade high that is more than a full percentage point above the national average. In 2008, before Obama took office but a full three years into Daniels’ first term as governor, five Indiana cities had poverty rates of at least 20 percent.

Despite the rising poverty rate, Daniels has remained committed to making it harder for Hoosiers to get assistance. Enrollment in Indiana’s welfare program — which is among the stingiest in the nation — decreased during the recession because of stringent qualification requirements. The state cut food assistance programs, made it harder for kids to qualify for Medicaid, and cut funding for programs like Planned Parenthood that provide health care to low-income women. Daniels has also promised to sign right-to-work legislation, even though such laws reduce take-home pay by about $1,500 a year.

Meanwhile, Daniels’ criticism of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ignores the 64,000 Indiana jobs it had saved as of March 2010, and his “pro-poverty” quip fails to acknowledge that Obama’s defense of the social safety net from budget-cutting Republicans kept millions of Americans out of poverty.

In the middle of Indiana’s explosion of poverty and cuts to programs to help the disadvantaged, Change.org asked if Indiana was “the worst state for poor people.” While the answer to that isn’t clear, what is obvious is that when it comes to being “pro-poverty,” Mitch Daniels doesn’t have room to criticize anyone.

Last night in his State of the Union address, President Obama once again urged Congress to pass the Buffett rule, noting that 25 percent of American millionaires pay less in taxes that millions of families in the middle-class. Republicans were quick to dismiss his request as “the politics of envy and division.” However, multi-billionaire Bill Gates called his policy something else entirely: “That’s just justice.”

In an interview with the BBC, Gates noted “taxes are going to have to go up” and thus he’d prefer that they “go up more on the rich than everyone else.” There needs to be “a sense of shared sacrifice,” he said, adding, “right now, I don’t feel like people like myself are paying as much as we should”:

GATES: Well the United States has a huge budget deficit, so taxes are going to have to go up. And I certainly agree that they should go up more on the rich than everyone else. That’s just justice.

BBC HOST: Is that a message you think that works with other people as wealthy as yourself, or is it just a small circle of friends — yourself, Warren Buffet, a few others.

GATES: Well, I hope we can solve that deficit problem with a sense of shared sacrifice — where everybody would feel like they’re doing their part. And right now, I don’t feel like people like myself are paying as much as we should.

Watch it:

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has declared that people with Gates’ view are just riddled with “envy.” But considering that Gates’ wealth dwarfs Romney’s millions, it’s highly doubtful that Gates is envious. He, like an increasing number of millionaires, just views paying his fair share as the right thing to do.

During last night’s State of the Union, President Obama unveiled a series of proposals aimed at addressing growing income inequality, a shrinking middle class, and abuses by the nation’s biggest banks. “We will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last,” Obama said. Here are five economic proposals Obama laid out that, though they don’t have high prospects of getting through the Republican House, would help achieve the goal of making the economy work for everyone:

– WIDESPREAD MORTGAGE REFINANCING: Obama called for a program to give “every responsible homeowner” the chance to refinance their mortgage at lower interest rates. The plan aims to expand a previous administration refinancing effort so that it applies to those homeowners with privately backed mortgages, instead of only those with government backed mortgages. “It’s going to help homeowners who are struggling and it’s likely to be a first step to really opening up the market to more normal credit standards,” said Columbia Business School professor Christopher Mayer. Incidentally, the ten districts that could benefit most from mass refinancing are all represented by Republicans.

– MINIMUM TAX FOR MILLIONAIRES: Due to the preferential treatment of investment income and the widespread use of tax deductions, loopholes, and tax havens, one quarter of millionaires are able to drive their tax rates down to a level below that of middle class families. In 2009, nearly 1,500 millionaires paid no income tax at all. To rectify this, Obama proposed a minimum 30 percent tax rate for millionaires.

– MINIMUM TAX FOR CORPORATIONS: Many of the country’s largest, most profitable companies have been able to avoid paying corporate income tax on billions in profits, driving corporate tax revenue down to historic lows. Though not as straightforward as simply eliminating the ability of multinational corporations to delay paying taxes on offshore profits, Obama’s proposed minimum tax would limit the ability of corporations to exploit low-tax havens like Ireland or the Cayman Islands.

– FINANCIAL FRAUD COMMISSION: Obama last night announced the creation of a commission, co-chaired by New York Attorney General Eric Schneidermann, to investigate and prosecute fraud committed by the financial industry. The administration had been taking some heat for its possible willingness to settle foreclosure fraud charges with the country’s five largest lenders, but this commission is a change of course (assuming it does more than the three year old Financial Fraud Task Force, which has done precisely nothing).

– BANK TAX TO FUND AID FOR HOMEOWNERS: The mortgage refinancing plan Obama proposed would be paid for in part by a fee on the nation’s biggest banks (those with more than $50 billion in assets), akin to the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee that the administration had previously proposed, but dropped due to Republican intransigence.

A ThinkProgress examination of Mitt Romney’s presidential personal financial disclosures from May 2011 reveal that the former Massachusetts governor and his wife own or owned millions of dollars worth of a Goldman Sachs investment fund invested heavily in mortgage-backed obligations. And the current owners of those mortgage debts began foreclosure proceedings against thousands of Floridians.

Along with his investments in Bain Capital funds linked to offshore tax havens, the Romneys have large investments in the Goldman Sachs Strategic Income Fund (institutional class). The firm’s March 2011 annual report for the fund notes that about 8 percent of the fund is invested in banks and 24.5 percent is invested in mortgage-backed obligations. Romney’s form says he has invested between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 in the fund and his wife Ann has invested an additional $1 million-plus. Since the 2008 economic meltdown and the enactment of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, this fund has done quite well, growing 7.88 percent between April 2010 and March 2011.

The mortgage-backed securities in the fund include adjustable rate mortgages from Bear Stearns, Countrywide, IndyMac, and Washington Mutual. A 2009 Center for Public Integrity report identified all four of those companies as among the top-25 subprime lenders in the lead-up to the market’s collapse. Countrywide ranked first in that report and Washington Mutual ranked second. While the remnants of those companies have been purchased by major financial institutions, an array of mortgage loan service companies bought up the individual mortgages.

An examination of civil cases filed in Miami-Dade county alone, by just the current owners of the mortgage obligations for now-defunct Washington Mutual and Countrywide, suggests more than 5,000 foreclosure cases were filed in 2010.

And Miami-Dade makes up only about 13 percent of the Florida population, suggesting that these and the other owners mortgage-backed securities included in this fund likely have attempted to foreclose on tens of thousands of Floridians.

A review of Romney’s August 2007 financial disclosure for his 2008 campaign reveals no mention of the Goldman Sachs Strategic Income Fund, suggesting the investment was made at some point between the two campaigns.

The funds are identified on the disclosure form as technically being in a “blind trust,” but now that he has publicly disclosed these assets, the trust is no longer functionally “blind.” The trustee for the trust, R. Bradlford Malt, said this week that he dropped some other Romney investments that conflicted with the Republican Party’s values.

In October, Romney suggested that the solution to the foreclosure crisis was “don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” While that process is bad for Florida homeowners, these investments show it may have been good for the Romneys.