Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released his latest tax reform plan today in Arizona and highlighted specifically the fact that it provided a 20-percent across-the-board cut in marginal tax rates for all Americans.

Upon unveiling the plan, Romney claimed that it would actually force the richest Americans to pay their fair share. Speaking of tax exemptions and deductions, Romney said, “For the high-income folks, we’re going to cut back on that, so that we make sure that the top 1 percent keeps paying the current share they’re paying or more.”

But when former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) attacked Romney at the GOP debate tonight, Romney admitted that his tax plan contained a massive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans:

SANTORUM: Governor Romney even today suggested today raising taxes on the top 1 percent, adopting the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric. I’m not going to adopt that rhetoric. I’m going to represent 100 percent of Americans. We’re not raising taxes on anyone.

ROMNEY: Number one, I said that we’re going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20 percent, including the top 1 percent. So that’s number one.

Watch it:

According to analysis by Center for American Progress Tax and Budget Policy Director Michael Linden, Romney’s claims that his plan would raise taxes on the rich was false. His later claims, that it would provide a tax break to the rich, are indeed true.

Romney’s plan to give a 20-percent tax cut, lowering rates for the wealthiest Americans from 35 percent to 28 percent, and repeal the alternative minimum tax would, as Romney admitted tonight, provide a huge tax break to the richest Americans, at a cost four times higher than the Bush tax cuts. “The enormity of these tax cuts is mind-boggling,” Linden said. “Even more unbelievable is how skewed they are to those the very top of the income ladder.”

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has already run into some trouble on the topic of tax havens. The company that he ran — Bain Capital — not only abused tax havens while he was at the helm, but Romney also saw his lucrative Bain retirement package boosted by the company’s use of offshore tax sheltering. Romney also had a Swiss bank account until 2010, which his money manager only closed because such an account would look bad politically.

Adding another twist to the tale today, Bloomberg News reported that, while Romney was the head of its audit committee in the 90s, the hotel chain Marriott abused tax shelters, prompting multiple run-ins with the IRS:

During Romney’s tenure as a Marriott director, the company repeatedly utilized complex tax-avoidance maneuvers, prompting at least two tangles with the Internal Revenue Service, records show. In 1994, while he headed the audit committee, Marriott used a tax shelter known to attorneys by its nickname: “Son of BOSS.”

A federal appeals court invalidated the maneuver in a 2009 ruling, siding with the U.S. Department of Justice, which called Marriott’s transaction and attempted tax benefits “fictitious,” “artificial,” “spectral,” an “illusion” and a “scheme.”

Bloomberg noted that “during Romney’s years on the board, Marriott’s effective tax rate dipped as low as 6.8 percent, compared with the federal corporate statutory rate of 35 percent.” Marriott’s tax dodging even drew the ire of Congress, with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a Romney endorser, calling the company’s use of one tax shelter an “expensive hoax” and a “scam.”

Today, Romney released an updated version of his tax plan, which, in addition to including $10.7 trillion in personal income tax cuts, would also implement a “territorial” system for corporate taxation. Citizens for Tax Justice has noted that such a system would allow companies to permanently avoid paying taxes on their offshore funds, increasing the incentive to move funds to other nations.

As the improving economy has robbed conservatives of their chief talking point against President Obama, they’ve turned to rising gas prices as the next problem to pin on the president.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) “instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger,” while Rick Santorum conspiratorially claimed Obama is intentionally pushing up prices to cut carbon emissions. Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich released a 30-minute video today about how “the Obama administration is so anti‑oil” that they’ve forced the price of gas to go up.

But there’s little truth to claims that Obama has curbed U.S. oil production and driven up gas prices in the process. As NPR noted this morning, the number of drilling rigs in U.S. oil fields has quadrupled under Obama and domestic oil production hit an 8-year high in 2011. For the first time in 60 years, the U.S. is now a net fuel exporter.

Oil demand was actually down 4.6 percent last week over last year, while the supply of gasoline has actually increased slightly since a year ago. So why are gas prices so high? As McClatchy’s Kevin Hall explains today, there is a systemic problem: speculation.

Energy futures markets serve a legitimate role in helping producers (like oil companies) and big end users (like airlines) hedge against price volatility, but lately, they’ve been taken over by Wall Street speculators who never intend to actually use the fuel they’re betting on. As Hall reports:

Historically, financial speculators accounted for about 30 percent of oil trading in commodity markets, while producers and end users made up about 70 percent. Today it’s almost the reverse.

A McClatchy review of the latest Commitment of Traders report from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates oil trading, shows that producers and merchants made up just 36 percent of all contracts traded in the week ending Feb. 14 while speculators who will never take delivery of the oil made up 64 percent.

Many experts, lawmakers (Democratic and Republican), and government regulators have expressed similar warnings.

Finally, after many delays, the government board responsible for regulating commodity futures markets finalized a rule in October to limit speculation, a power it was given by the Dodd-Frank Wall street reform law. However, the rule won’t go into effect until next October, as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) needs to collect “one year of interest data” first. The financial industry is fighting the new rule, but just today, the CFTC took action against a company in different market, providing an example of how the energy regulation can effectively work.

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released his first tax reform plan last year, he asserted that he was “proposing no tax cuts for the rich.” The claim was blatantly false — the vast majority of Romney’s $6.6 trillion in tax cuts went to the wealthy, while it raised taxes on many middle class families. Since then, Romney has continued repeating that he isn’t “concerned about the very rich,” who he says are “doing fine” in America.

Romney revealed his second tax reform plan in Arizona this afternoon, and again he claimed that he wasn’t providing cuts to the wealthiest Americans. In fact, he said, his plan would ask the top 1 percent to pay as much and maybe more than they were currently contributing:

ROMNEY: I’m going to lower rates across the board for all Americans by 20 percent. All right? And in order to limit any impact on the deficit, ’cause I don’t want to add to the deficit, and also to make sure we continue to have progressivity the way we have in the past in our code, I’m going to limit deductions and exemptions particularly for high-income folks. [...] For the high-income folks, we’re going to cut back on that, so that we make sure that the top 1 percent keeps paying the current share they’re paying or more.

Watch it:

According to preliminary analysis of that tax plan, though, Romney’s assertions are as absurd as they were the first time. According to Center for American Progress Tax and Budget Policy Director Michael Linden, Romney’s tax plan contains budget-busting tax breaks for the richest Americans in the form of a permanent 20 percent across-the-board cut to marginal rates and a repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which prohibits the wealthy from artificially lowering their tax rates. “The enormity of these tax cuts is mind-boggling,” Linden said. “Even more unbelievable is how skewed they are to those the very top of the income ladder.”

Romney’s claim that his plan would promote job and economic growth while reducing the deficit is also likely false. The Bush tax cuts were promoted under the same guise, only to blow a $2.5-trillion hole in the federal budget that was accompanied by worst performance of any post-war expansion” for growth in investment, GDP, and job creation. Romney’s tax cuts are even more expensive, clocking in at a cost of more than $10.7 trillion over the next decade and reducing revenue to a paltry 15 percent of GDP, according to Linden. Balancing the budget on those terms, as Romney claims he will do, would be next to impossible.

Romney has built his presidential campaign on his knowledge of how to create jobs and build economies. His willful ignorance of economic facts, his penchant for distorting the true effects of his proposals, and his desire to repeat the mistakes of the last decade, however, seem to prove otherwise.

Earlier, we noted the headline points from the Obama administration’s corporate tax reform, which aims to cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, while doing away with a host of loopholes, credits, and deductions. It would lower the rate further, to 25 percent, for domestic manufacturers, while raising about $250 billion to permanently extend and pay for some favored tax credits, like that for research and development.

But aside from the big initiatives, the proposal also includes some important smaller changes that will make the tax code fairer and more equitable. They include:

– A minimum tax on corporations’ overseas profits: Companies like Google are able to use offshore tax havens to drive their tax rate all the way to practically nothing. As Center for American Progress Director of Fiscal Reform Seth Hanlon explained, “among the main reasons the U.S. tax code rewards offshore investment are the loopholes and porous rules that allow multinational companies to avoid U.S. taxes by reporting much of their profits in tax havens such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.” The U.S. loses more to corporate profit shifting than it spends on several federal agencies.

– Ending “last in, first out” accounting: This accounting boondoggle allows companies to assume, for tax purposes, that their entire inventory was purchased for the last (most expensive) price. Thus, when they sell off their inventory, their taxable income looks smaller. International accounting standards do not allow the use of LIFO accounting, and both parties have supported its repeal in the past. Ending LIFO accounting could raise $72 billion over five years.

– Taxing carried interest as normal income: Hedge fund managers and private equity managers are able to use a pernicious tax loophole to pay a lower tax rate on their (often) billions in annual income than middle-class families pay on their wages. The administration’s plan would treat the so-called “carried interest” earned by money managers as normal wages for tax purposes, instead of its current treatment as capital gains.

These measures, alone, would not make the tax code perfect, of course. But they would certainly help by ending some of the more abusive practices that have made the U.S. tax code the mess that it is.

As we’ve been noting, corporate profits have made it back to their pre-recession heights (even if corporate tax revenue hasn’t followed suit). In fact, in 2011, corporate profits hit their highest level since 1950. But as Bloomberg News noted today, this hasn’t translated into wage growth or more purchasing power for workers:

Companies are improving margins and generating profits as wage growth for the American worker lags behind the prices of goods and services…While benefiting the bottom line for businesses, the decline in inflation-adjusted wages bodes ill for the sustainability of economic growth as consumers may eventually be forced to cut back. [...]

Of the 394 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index that have reported since Jan. 9, earnings for the quarter ended Dec. 31 increased 5.1 percent on average and beat analyst estimates by 3.2 percent. Some 70 percent of the companies have posted better-than-projected results.

This pattern has become all too familiar during the slow economic recovery. In fact, real wages fell in 2011, despite record corporate profits. “There’s never been a postwar era in which unemployment has been this high for this long,” explained labor economist Gary Burtless. “Workers are in a very weak bargaining position.”

Between 2009 and 2011, 88 percent of national income growth went to corporate profits, while just 1 percent went to wages, a stat that is “historically unprecedented.”

More than 200 protesters have been fighting to save the home of Arturo de los Santos, an ex-Marine who went into foreclosure after Chase Bank advised him to skip payments to speed up a loan modification he never received. In early February, amid rumors that Riverside, California sheriff’s deputies could serve papers on the home at any time, organizers from the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and other groups surrounded the home, and de los Santos petitioned the sheriff to prevent eviction.

At the time, de los Santos said he was prepared to get arrested to save his home, and last Thursday, he was, according to The New Bottom Line:

Arturo de los Santos, his family, and scores of supportes went to the Los Angeles headquarters of Freddie Mac on Thursday, February 16 to protest his foreclosure and eviction, to ask Freddie to restore his mortgage, and to let his family keep their home. After refusing to leave the lobby of the office, the police were called and Arturo was arrested.

Watch video of de los Santos’ arrest:

De los Santos took his case to Freddie Mac because it insured his original mortgage and is thus servicing the foreclosure. Before taking his case to Freddie Mac, de los Santos offered to make the payments he had been advised to miss, but Chase refused his money. “Chase told me to talk to Freddie Mac, because they were only servicing the loan and Freddie underwrote it, but Freddie told me to talk to Chase,” he told the Huffington Post.

De los Santos was served with another eviction notice last week, asking him to vacate the property by 6:01 a.m. yesterday, but said he would not comply with the notice. Though the deadline passed more than 24 hours ago, de los Santos, his wife, and their four children are still in the home and have not been evicted, according to those with knowledge of the situation.

The problems facing de los Santos’ mortgage are not unique. Banks have come under fire for illegal, mistaken, and fraudulent foreclosures — the same day de los Santos was arrested, an examination of 400 San Francisco-area foreclosures found that nearly all of them had legal issues, and 84 percent had “one or more clear violations of law.” The home modification programs meant to help struggling homeowners like de los Santos, meanwhile, have fallen woefully short of their goals.

President Obama’s tax plan has, in part, focused on making the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes through a provision known as the Buffett Rule, which is named after famous investor Warren Buffett and would place a minimum tax on the income of millionaires. The plan, included in Obama’s budget last week, has led to predictable claims of class warfare from Republicans, many of whom are crafting ways to give the wealthy even larger tax breaks.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is one of the Republicans incensed by Obama’s plan. When CNN’s Piers Morgan asked last night what he thought about Buffett, Christie responded by saying he “wasn’t going to get into this class warfare business,” then told Buffett to “write a check and shut up”:

MORGAN: You know where I’m going at with that. Warren Buffett keeps screaming to be taxed more.

CHRISTIE: Yeah, well he should just write a check and shut up. Really. And just contribute. The fact of the matter is that I’m tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check. Go ahead and write it.

Watch it:

Buffett, perhaps unbeknownst to Christie, has offered to write a check to the government — as soon as any of the Republicans who have called on him to do so write one first. In January, Buffett told Time Magazine he’d match dollar-for-dollar any voluntary contribution made by Republicans. “And I’ll even go three-for-one for McConnell,” he added, referring to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Thus far, Buffett has had to match just one Republican — Rep. Scott Rigell (R-VA). The rest of the GOP has chosen to ignore inequities in the tax code and rising income inequality, choosing instead to balance the budget solely through spending cuts to vital programs that help the Americans most in need of help.

Just yesterday, Christie himself unveiled a tax plan that would give 40 percent of its benefits to New Jersey’s richest one percent.

The Obama administration today is unveiling an overhaul of the corporate tax code, proposing to lower the top corporate income tax rate while eliminating a host of deductions and loopholes. The plan will be formally unveiled later today, but here are some of the important facts released already:

– The administration is proposing a top corporate income tax rate of 28 percent, lowered from its current 35 percent.

– The top tax rate for domestic manufacturers would be 25 percent.

– The plan would implement a minimum tax on overseas profits, as President Obama proposed in his most recent State of the Union address. The minimum tax would limit the ability of corporations to exploit low-tax havens like the Cayman Islands. The U.S. currently loses more to corporate profit shifting than it spends on several federal agencies.

– The plan would pay for the rate reduction by eliminating credits, loopholes, and deductions, including those for the oil and gas industries. Obama’s budget already proposed eliminating 12 tax breaks to oil, gas, and coal companies, saving $41 billion over 10 years.

– The plan would raise $200-$300 billion, depending on which baseline is used, as it would pay for the extension of a host of tax credits — such as the R&D tax credit — that are usually extended without pay-fors. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein explained, “their definition of revenue neutral is closer to what the corporate tax code actually says, but it’s about $200 billion above the Joint Tax Committee’s baseline.”

The U.S. already has the second lowest effective corporate tax rate in the world, and is raising historically low amounts of revenue from the corporate income tax. In fact, corporate tax revenue is at a 40 year low, according to the Congressional Budget Office, even though corporate profits have rebounded to their pre-recession heights. And the U.S. effective corporate tax rate is low compared to other developed economies, while U.S. corporations are taxed less than their foreign rivals, as these charts show:

However, despite these numbers, the plan does not aim for an increase in revenue, above that which would allow for the extension of some credits to be paid for. “Everyone agrees on the basic principle of lowering rates in exchange for eliminating loopholes,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “However, I think it is important that the target be some increase in tax revenue.” Otherwise, the burden of deficit reduction will fall upon middle-class and low-income Americans and the services upon which they depend.