Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) narrowly won the Michigan primary last night despite his rampant opposition to the auto industry rescue that saved the state’s largest industry, likely because his main competition for the primary victory also wanted to let Detroit go bankrupt. But in the two weeks before the primary, Romney’s position was criticized by Michigan Republicans, auto industry insiders, and reporters who covered the rescue, many of whom said Romney’s plan would have killed the American automotive industry.

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), a former candidate for president who endorsed Romney after leaving the race, piled onto that criticism last night during MSNBC’s election coverage, telling the network’s panel that not rescuing the auto industry would have hastened the “deindustrialization of America.” McCotter also criticized Republicans who, like Romney, supported the Wall Street bailout while opposing the auto rescue:

MCCOTTER: But it’s not simply the auto industry. It’s about blue collar jobs, white collar jobs, non-unionized jobs, unionized jobs, and the deindustrialization of America that would have even hastened had those companies been allowed to seize up, go into bankruptcy and put hard-working men and women…high and dry. [...]

Now when you also look at what happened with the bridge loan, as we talked about at the time, President Bush authorized that money to come out of the already-appropriated funds that were targeted to the Wall Street people that caused the problems in the first place. So to my fellow Republicans I’ll simply remind them, if you were in Congress at the point in time or if you were President Bush, you could leave all $700 billion of taxpayers hard-earned money with the Wall Street people, or you could take some back to Main Street to keep America a balanced, vibrant economy. To me there was no choice.

Watch it:

Romney’s position on Wall Street bailout has varied, but most recently, he offered support for it in a way that resembled the support many of his fellow Republicans had for the auto rescue. “The TARP program, while not transparent and not having been used as wisely it should have been, was nevertheless necessary to keep banks from collapsing in a cascade of failures,” Romney told Reuters. “You cannot have a free economy and free market if there is not a financial system.”

Unfortunately, Romney never felt the same way about the failure of the auto industry, which, according to one estimate, would have lost 1.3 million jobs without the rescue.

Billionaire Warren Buffett’s call to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans has led to a predictable response from Republicans, who think Buffet should just “write a check” if he wants to pay more in taxes. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has repeatedly urged Buffett to do so, and last week, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) went farther, calling on Buffett to “write a check and shut up.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who introduced legislation containing a version of the Buffett Rule, slammed Republicans like Christie and McConnell today, saying that their “write a check” defense the tax code makes taxes “optional” for the wealthy, allowing them to “decide whether or not” they have to pay taxes:

WALDRON: Chris Christie, Mitch McConnell, a couple of the others have criticized Warren Buffett over the last couple weeks and said, you know, if he’s so disappointed he should just write a check.

WHITEHOUSE: You gotta love this idea that if you’re rich enough, the tax code becomes optional for you and you decide whether or not you’re going to write a check. You’re in a special category of people who doesn’t actually have to pay taxes, they just kind of get to if they feel like it. Let’s just say I haven’t heard them say that about working families.

Watch it:

Republicans like McConnell and Christie have done their part to make taxes on the wealthy as optional as possible. Despite the fact that the wealthiest Americans have seen their tax rates plummet even as their income rises, McConnell and his Republican colleagues have fought attempts to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy or to close loopholes that primarily benefit the rich. Christie, for his part, recently released a tax plan that would give 40 percent of its benefits to New Jersey’s richest one percent.

Buffett, meanwhile, has offered to write a check — as soon as Republicans do too. In January, he told Time Magazine he’d match any voluntary contribution made by Republicans. “I’ll even go three-to-one for McConnell,” Buffett said. So far, he has had to match only one Republican.

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist — the president of Americans for Tax Reform — has gotten most of the Republican members of Congress to sign his anti-tax pledge, which says that the signing lawmaker will not raise taxes under any circumstances. Last night, during an interview with The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee, Norquist revealed the absurdity of this position, explaining that he is not okay with the government raising taxes even in cases of war, natural disasters, “beard flu,” or to fight “the rise of the apes”:

BEE: Is there a scenario in which you would be comfortable with someone raising taxes?

NORQUIST: No.

BEE: No? War?

NORQUIST: Right now the federal government spends about four percent of GDP on national defense.

BEE: Natural disaster?

NORQUIST: Okay, your house gets knocked down and the federal government is going to raise your taxes? That makes you better off?

BEE: Beard flu?

NORQUIST: Beard flu, I’m not familiar with that.

BEE: What about the rise of the apes?

NORQUIST: If, there, look, there are legitimate [cut off]

BEE: If the chimps took over would you be comfortable raising taxes?

NORQUIST: We’d prefer that not to happen. But I think raising taxes would not solve that.

Watch it:

Norquist then explained that he thought up the ATR pledge when he was 12, prompting Bee to ask, “what other impossibly reductive gridlock inducing ideas did you have when you were 12?”

This interview laid quite bare the absurdity of the ATR position, as the organization believes that there is literally no circumstance, even a global calamity, that justifies the need for more federal revenue. And ATR’s stance has brought Norquist into conflict not only with progressives, but with Republicans as well. “I didn’t know I was signing a marriage agreement that would last forever and I think that the majority of members of Congress understand that you have to have additional revenue,” said GOP Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID).

In an effort to head off former Sen. Rick Santorum’s push on manufacturing in the key Super Tuesday state of Ohio, Mitt Romney this morning announced an “Ohio Manufacturers for Romney” coalition. A search of Recovery.gov shows that the corporations of two members of the group received nearly $1.6 million in Recovery Act funds.

Lincoln Electric of Cleveland received a sub-award of $1,125,00 on April 7, 2010 from the Ohio Department of Communications Development for an energy-related project in Euclid, Ohio. RPM International of Medina received two sub-awards in 2010, totaling $458,758 for two U.S. Army projects.

Romney, meanwhile, recently used the occasion of the Recovery Act’s third anniversary to continue attacking the law:

The Congressional Budget Office reported last week that up to 2 million people were employed in December because of the stimulus.  Manufacturing jobs have also grown for the past two years in a row after previously seeing no annual growth at all since 1997.

The housing crisis remains one of the biggest drags on the nation’s economy, with millions of Americans mired in the foreclosure process or delinquent or underwater on their mortgages. Few places have been hit as hard as Florida, the state with the fourth-highest foreclosure rate in the country.

In what has been billed as an effort to mitigate the economic impact of the high rate of foreclosures, the Florida state Senate Banking and Insurance Committee passed a measure (over the objections of consumer advocates and homeowners) that would speed up the foreclosure process, SaintPetersBlog reports:

One of the most contentious provisions would reduce the time in which a bank could try to go after a foreclosed-on homeowner for a “deficiency judgment,” which is a court order that requires the former homeowner to pay the bank for the outstanding amount on the loan over the value of the property.

The bill would reduce the time that a bank has to get such an order on a homeowner from five years to one year.

Cutting the time for banks to foreclose on properties to one year would force the process to move much faster than it does now. Nationally, homeowners with mortgages worth less than $250,000 are in default an average of 611 days before they go into foreclosure; for borrowers with $1 million mortgages, the average wait is an average of 792 days. The waiting period in states with high volumes of foreclosures, including Florida, is often even longer.

Such efforts to speed up the foreclosure process, meanwhile, could have widespread negative ramifications for homeowners. In their own efforts to speed up foreclosures, banks have propagated fraudulent techniques like using robo-signers to forge foreclosure documents. As a result, major banks have foreclosed on homeowners who shouldn’t have been in foreclosure (some over mere pennies), attempted to foreclose on homes they don’t even own, or foreclosed on homeowners who were attempting to modify their loans.

If anything, the foreclosure process needs to slow down. In California, another high-foreclosure state, Attorney General Kamala Harris has called on federal housing authorities and Wall Street banks to suspend foreclosures. With big banks and business advocates cheering them on, Florida seems poised to do just the opposite.

Moments ago, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed over 13,000 for the first time since May 19, 2008. The stock market is now up over 56 percent since Obama took office. Today, the stock market was buoyed, in the view of one economist, by “job and income gains…leading to higher confidence and spending growth, in turn driving further spending gains.” Here’s how the stock market has fared under our last three presidents:

The success of the stock market under Obama is particularly notable considering the majority of Republicans believe he is a “socialist,” presumably out to destroy private enterprise.

As House Republicans and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce team up for their latest assault on the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, specifically a rule reining in banks’ risky trading, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has released its latest Quarterly Banking Profile, which shows that GOP claims regarding Dodd-Frank killing America’s banks have little truth behind them.

The release reports that FDIC-insured commercial banks and savings institutions earned $26.3 billion in profits at the end of last year — a figure that is up 23 percent from earnings reported in the final quarter of 2010 — making 2011′s fourth-quarter the most profitable period for the industry since 2006:

For the year, earnings hit $119.5 billion — the most since 2006.

Banks with assets exceeding $10 billion accounted for almost all of the earnings growth in the fourth quarter. While they make up just 1.4 percent of U.S. banks, they accounted for more than 81 percent of the earnings.

Those banks include Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. Most of them have recovered with help from federal bailout money and record-low borrowing rates.

Many of these same banks complained last year that new regulations mandated by Congress have hurt their ability to make money and moved to charge new fees to make up the difference.

Clearly, the FDIC’s findings stand contrary to the GOP’s claims that the law “hinder[s] American markets, competitiveness and job creation” and is “killing the banking industry now.” In fact, the number of banks on the FDIC’s “problem list” declined 11 percent, from 844 to 813, while total loans and leases increased by $130.1 billion, as did insured deposit accounts, which increased by $249.7 billion during the quarter.

– Fatima Najiy

Back in November, we noted how Bank of America was raking in millions of dollars in fees by contracting with states to put unemployment benefits on BofA debit cards. By using those cards, people can get hit with all manner of charges — including ATM fees — when they attempt to access their benefits. One woman estimated that she had paid $350 just to withdraw her own unemployment benefits.

And it’s not only unemployment benefits that are now being loaded onto pre-paid debit cards, giving BofA the chance to reap a profit on a public service. As Logan Smith at the Palmetto Public Record noted, BofA could also be cashing in on tax returns that have been loaded onto debit cards in South Carolina:

The state Department of Revenue announced the program back in December, but conveniently left off the long list of fees which customers without BofA accounts will be subject to.

For every withdrawal from a non-Bank of America ATM, BofA will take $2.50 off the top — in addition to any fees the ATM owner might charge. Want to get your money directly from the bank? The first time’s free, but every withdrawal after that comes with a $10 fee. Leaving the country? Bank of America takes 2% of every single transaction you make outside the United States. [...]

Bank of America didn’t have to bid for the program, according to a Department of Revenue spokesperson who told Palmetto Public Record the state chose BofA over South Carolina-based banks because “they were the best fit.”

As Smith also pointed out, BofA doesn’t even bother charging South Carolina to provide this particular service, figuring it can make its entire profit off of fees and interest. Additionally, the program is opt-out, meaning unwitting South Carolinians are automatically signed up to fork over some of their tax return to the nation’s second largest bank.

BofA already had to quickly backtrack when it proposed a monthly debit card fee, and fees are currently the number one reason that millions of Americans are moving their money out of the nation’s biggest banks.

Bernita Jones (Washington Post)

Bertina Jones, of Prince George’s county, a suburb of DC, was “a perfect example of a woman who was making her payments, and they still foreclosed on her,” said Maryland Legal Aid Bureau’s Vicki King Taitano, who is helping Jones. Jones, a grandmother and accountant, got a mortgage modification in 2009 from Bank of America, “but the bank repeatedly lost the accompanying documents” and Freddie Mac bought the house at 2010 in a foreclosure auction.

Jones has yet to be evicted, however, and Occupy DC rallied to support her after hearing about her case from Taitano. The Washington Post’s Annie Gowen reports:

Jones, who can’t afford a private attorney, said she has been working on her own for months — heading to the law library, making repeated calls and sending e-mails — to try and resolve the situation. It has taken a toll, she said. [...]

After working on her own for so long, she said it was “great” to rally with supporters outside the Freddie Mac government relations offices Monday. The 50 or so Occupier protesters marched in a circle around her, chanting “housing is a right” as she clutched a sign that said “Stop Foreclosures and Evictions Now.”

Occupy protesters across the country have been trying to find a purpose after being evicted from encampments in public parks, and a growing number are finding success with targeted actions like this. Occupy Nashville helped saved the home of civil rights activist Helen Bailey, while activists in Detroit have helped saved at least five homes, and protesters in California camped outside a former Marine’s home to help him fight foreclosure.

Jones’ case also shows how difficult it can be for people to fight mortgage providers — Jones is an accountant who seemed to work hard and do everything right, but still faced eviction. “I’m glad I stood up and fought,” Jones said. “I hope more homeowners will join us. I’m not an icon, I’m just a homeowner trying to save her home.”

The stock market has been flirting with 13,000 for days, a level at which it has not closed since 2008. As ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes reported, Republicans have been at pains to explain why President Obama deserves no credit for the Dow’s rebound (even though the GOP was quite willing to blame Obama when the Dow tanked in 2008 and 2009).

But as it turns out, Obama is not the only Democratic President under whom the stock market has done well for investors. A Bloomberg Government report shows that since the 1960′s, stocks have done significantly better under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones:

The BGOV Barometer shows that, over the five decades since John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, $1,000 invested in a hypothetical fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) only when Democrats are in the White House would have been worth $10,920 at the close of trading yesterday.

That’s more than nine times the dollar return an investor would have realized from following a similar strategy during Republican administrations. A $1,000 stake invested in a fund that followed the S&P 500 under Republican presidents, starting with Richard Nixon, would have grown to $2,087 on the day George W. Bush left office.

Even eliminating the best stock performance under a Democrat, which occurred under President Clinton, and the worst under a Republican, which was under President George W. Bush, the Democrats still come out ahead. “I dare say that most people on Wall Street are Republicans,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at S&P Equity Research. “But it appears the bread is buttered on the Democratic side.”

Of course, the stock market is a terrible proxy for actual economic health, giving little to no indication of how the economy is working for the average American, but these numbers should put the lie to the constant GOP claim that Democrats and the policies they pursue are anti-business and anti-investor.

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

An article in The Hill today describing the results of a new poll inaccurately reports that voters want “a lower tax bill” for wealthy individuals and businesses. If anything, the poll shows the opposite.

In tax policy, it’s critical to distinguish between marginal tax rates and effective tax rates. Marginal rates are the rate paid on a person or corporation’s last dollar of income. Effective rates are the overall share of income paid in taxes.

Effective tax rates are the better measure of what taxpayers actually pay: They take into account the numerous tax breaks that individuals and corporations use to lower their tax bills, and the fact that people in top tax brackets have income in lower tax brackets.

The Hill article fails to sort out this very basic distinction, then proceeds to make a number of apples-to-oranges comparisons that paint a misleading picture of what wealthy people and corporations are paying in taxes now and what people want them to pay. For example:

– The article’s lede asserts that, “three-quarters of likely voters believe the nation’s top earners should pay lower, not higher, tax rates.” That’s not what the poll reveals. The poll apparently asked respondents to identify the “most appropriate top tax rate” for families earning more than $250,000, a vague formulation that is very likely to prompt most respondents to say how much of their income these families should pay in taxes — in other words, what their effective rate should be. Fully 60 percent of respondents who expressed an opinion said that the “most appropriate” rate for families earning $250,000 or more should be 25 percent or higher. That is, in fact, higher than what the average effective income tax rates are today for all levels of income. And it is significantly higher than many extremely wealthy households now pay. Read more