Angry at the Wall Street banks that were at the center of the financial meltdown, Americans have spent the last six months moving their money to credit unions and community banks in unprecedented numbers. More than 650,000 people moved to credit unions in one month last year, and 5.6 million Americans switched banks in the last three months.

Religious organizations have been at the forefront of movements to get consumers to move their money. The New Bottom Line, a coalition of faith groups, pledged to move $1 billion this year, and before Thanksgiving, churches moved $55 million away from Wall Street banks with pledges to remove as much as $100 million more. This week, churches in San Francisco announced they were moving another $10 million, Faith in Public Life reports:

This week, a group of clergy in San Francisco added another $10 million to that total with an Ash Wednesday press conference calling on Wells Fargo to put an immediate freeze on its foreclosures and repent for their misconduct.

Watch a news report about the group’s efforts:

Wells Fargo issued a statement on the protest, saying, “We make every effort to avoid foreclosure.” The bank’s practices, however, tell a different story. Last July, it foreclosed on a family after telling it to skip payments in order to get a loan modification. It was found to have engaged in discriminatory lending practices, investigated for illegal foreclosures on military veterans, and fined for its subprime lending practices.

According to consulting firms, the nation’s 10 biggest banks could lose $185 million in customer deposits because of customer defections.

In what one state Democrat has called “Robin Hood in reverse,” Kansas’ tax committee this week approved a bill that would cut taxes on the wealthiest Kansans to the tune of $1,500, while raising taxes on those residents making less that $25,000 per year. About half a million of the state’s poorest residents will see their taxes hiked under the plan:

A Kansas House tax committee passed a bill in which anyone making less than $25,000 a year — roughly half a million of the state’s 2.9 million residents — will pay an average of $72 more in taxes, while those making more than $250,000 — about 21,000 people — will see a $1,500 cut, according to Kansas Department of Revenue estimates cited by the Kansas City Star.

The hike would come from the elimination of tax credits typically benefitting the poor.

This plan was actually amended from an earlier one proposed by Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) that would have been even worse for low-income Kansans, raising their taxes by hundreds of dollars while cutting them by more than $16,000 for a millionaire. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Kansas’ tax system is already regressive, with the poorest 20 percent of Kansans paying more than 9 percent of their income in taxes, while the richest 1 percent pay less than 6 percent of their income.

Former Reagan economic adviser and supply-side guru Art Laffer has been consulting with Kansas lawmakers about the state’s tax overhaul. In fact, Laffer has been peddling bogus research in several states in an attempt to get them to make regressive tax cuts. And considering that Laffer openly brags about Reagan raising taxes on low-income Americans, perhaps its not surprising that Kansas’ plan does what it does.

Last week, on the three-year anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e. the stimulus), the GOP went well out of its way to portray the plan as “an abject failure” that not only “failed to create the jobs that Americans were promised,” but also “made things worse.” But plenty of recent independent analyses have debunked that myth, including a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

According to CBO, between 300,000 and 2 million people who were employed in December owed their jobs to the stimulus. The Recovery Act’s impact on jobs peaked in 2010′s third quarter, when an estimated 3.6 million people were employed in jobs that were either saved or created by the Recovery Act. CBO also found that the stimulus:

– Raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.2 percent and 1.5 percent.

– Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.2 percentage points and 1.1 percentage points.

– Increased the number of people employed by between 0.3 million and 2.0 million.

– Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 0.4 million to 2.6 million. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

The CBO also projects that in the first quarter of 2012, compared to what might have happened without ARRA intervention, CBO estimates the ARRA will raise the GDP by between 0.1 percent and 0.8 percent and will increase the number of people employed by between 0.2 million and 1.1. million.

– Fatima Najiy

The broad corporate tax reform plan released by the Obama administration this week included a provision for a minimum tax on corporate profits earned overseas, a rule aimed at preventing corporations from taking advantage of offshore tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. The U.S. loses billions of dollars a year in tax revenue because of corporations parking money in low- or no-tax countries.

Closing a loophole that could cost the U.S. $90 billion this year, however, isn’t popular among Republicans like Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. While Obama’s plan represents “a step forward,” it still double-taxes corporations who have to pay taxes both in the U.S. and in the country where foreign profits were earned, Camp claimed. Camp instead wants the U.S. to switch to a “territorial” tax system, in which companies wouldn’t pay any taxes on profits earned overseas, as he told NPR this morning:

CAMP: They don’t really address the territorial reforms that I think are so essential to make our companies competitive. [...] We tax them here and we tax them there. … This double taxation traps money overseas, and we think there’s about a trillion dollars that could be brought back to the U.S. and invested here — private money — that would really help get our economy going again. That’s a piece they didn’t include. … I hope we can develop into something that will do a better job making sure American companies that make profits overseas can bring those back and invest them in jobs for Americans.

Under current law, companies can defer taxation on profits earned overseas until they return the money to the U.S. Under the territorial system Camp wants, however, companies would never pay U.S. taxes on overseas profits. As Citizens for Tax Justice explained, this would obviously increase the incentive to shift profits overseas and to hide money in tax havens. “We should be able to agree that our tax system should not favor investment and job creation offshore over investment and job creation in the U.S,” CTJ noted. “Our current system does exactly that, and a territorial system could actually increase this bias in the tax code.”

The minimum tax on overseas profits, in contrast, would help shut down the tax havens that shield companies from American taxes and end one of the nation’s biggest tax expenditures. As the Center for American Progress’ Seth Hanlon has noted, corporate tax dodging through tax havens increases the tax burden on individuals and domestic businesses, worsens the country’s fiscal situation, and actually spurs overseas job creation. A minimum tax, in contrast, would combat this abuse without harming American economic competitiveness.

Back in December 2008, laid off workers at Republic Windows and Doors — a factory in Chicago — occupied their workplace to demand back vacation and severance pay, and to protest the fact that they were given just three days notice of impending job cuts. Eventually, the bank’s lender, Bank of America, relented, giving the workers what they were owed. At the time, then President-elect Obama offered his support to the protesting workers, saying, “the workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned, I think they’re absolutely right.”

More than three years later, the same factory has had to be occupied again. Now owned by California-based Serious Energy, the factory was going to be closed until workers locked themselves inside. Now, Serious has vowed to keep the factory open for 90 days, giving workers time to either find a new buyer or purchase the business themselves:

Workers at a window factory on Goose Island ended a sit-in early Friday morning after the company agreed to keep the plant open for 90 days, union leaders said.

California-based Serious Energy will work with the workers to find a new ownership.

“We are committed to finding a new buyer for the plant or if we can, buy the place ourselves and run it. Either way, we are hopeful,” Armando Robles, president of UE Local 1110, said in a statement.

“We can run this company,” said Juan Cortez, a worker at the factory for 23 years. “We got smart people [to] manage the money. We can find customers. We know how to run the company.”

The protesting workers were joined by members of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But such moves by workers are becoming increasingly rare. Work stoppages last year were the second lowest on record, according to data from the Labor Department.

Mitt Romney this week unveiled a new tax plan that includes a 20 percent reduction in all marginal income tax rates. Previously, Romney had said that he’s not concerned about the very rich and is “proposing no tax cuts for the rich.” But during this week’s GOP primary debate, he reneged on that position, saying, “number one, I said that we’re going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20 percent, including the top 1 percent.”

Romney’s new tax cut may reduce all tax rates by the same amount, but it gives most of its benefits to the already wealthy. The Tax Policy Center had modeled a 20 percent reduction in all income tax rates, and as this table shows, nearly half the benefit of such a cut would go to the richest 5 percent of Americans, with more than 25 percent of the benefit going to the richest 1 percent, compared with current policy.

Under the plan, someone in the richest 1 percent of Americans would receive a $60,000 tax cut, while someone in the richest 0.1 percent — those making $1.7 million or more — would receive a $264,000 tax cut.

This analysis actually understates how much of the benefit would go to the wealthy under Romney’s plan, because the TPC included in its model a 20 percent reduction in the Alternative Minimum Tax, whereas Romney would abolish the AMT completely. Meanwhile, Romney’s cuts would cost $10.7 trillion over ten years, four times the cost of the Bush tax cuts.

Romney insists that his tax cut will be deficit neutral, because of unspecified deductions and credits that he is going to eliminate. But as Prof. James Kwak noted, the math for Romney simply doesn’t add up. So all he’s doing is promising a massive tax cut for the rich now, with some hand-waving about how he’d pay for it later.