Republicans have been kvetching today about the fact that, as of Sunday, the U.S. will have the highest statutory corporate tax rate in the world following a scheduled cut in Japan’s corporate tax. “The United States is a world leader in countless ways. ‘World’s Highest Taxes’ is a title we should give up as soon as possible,” wrote Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) in a Fox News op-ed.

“This isn’t an April Fool’s Day joke; as of April 1, the United States of America will have reached the inauspicious position of having the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) in a statement “I want America to be number one in many things, but having the highest corporate tax rate is definitely not one of them.”

This is constant refrain from Republicans, who then blame the supposedly high U.S. corporate tax rate for discouraging job creation. But as we’ve noted time and time again, while the U.S. has a high statutory corporate tax rate (meaning the rate on paper), U.S. corporations actually pay incredibly low taxes due to the ever-proliferating loopholes, credits, and deductions in the tax code and the use of overseas tax havens.

U.S. corporate taxes that were actually paid (the effective rate) fell to a 40 year low of 12.1 percent in fiscal year 2011, despite corporate profits rebounding to their pre-Great Recession heights. The U.S. both taxes its corporations less and raises less in revenue from corporate taxes than its foreign competitors:

Politico’s Ben White also pointed out that Japan has a value added tax, so it isn’t actually true that the U.S. will have the highest corporate tax rate on Sunday. As billionaire investor Warren Buffett has said, “it is a myth” that U.S. corporate taxes are high. “Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness,” Buffett added.

Of course, it is theoretically possible to lower the U.S. corporate income tax rate while simultaneously raising revenue to help reduce the federal deficit by closing loopholes and cracking down on tax havens. But Republicans have absolutely no interest in that.

The jackpot for the upcoming Mega Millions lottery drawing has grown to a whopping $640 million. This sky-high total has some state legislators hoping for a big payday via the tax bill that would come from one of their residents taking home the prize. “I’d love it if a Rhode Islander wins,” said Rep. Helio Melo, the chairman of his state House’s Finance Committee.

If a Rhode Islander were lucky enough to win, the state’s take would be more than $20 million. But the fact that state legislators are giddy at the prospect of a lottery-financed tax windfall merely shows how foolhardy it is that states depend on lottery revenue at all. As Elizabeth Winslow McAuliffe pointed out in Public Integrity, “while lotteries were initially perceived as fiscal saviors, they have not generated the anticipated revenue.” Many states earmark their lottery revenue for a specific purpose, most often education, but it turns out that that formula isn’t workable:

The educational “bonus” appears to be nonexistent. Miller and Pierce (1997) studied the short- and long-term effect of education lotteries. They found that lottery states did indeed increase per-capita spending on education during the lottery’s early years. However, after some time these states actually decreased their overall spending on education. In contrast, states without lotteries increased education spending over time. In fact, nonlottery states spend, on average, 10 percent more of their budgets on education than lottery states (Gearey 1997).

The National Gambling Impact Study Commission has found that “there is reason to doubt if earmarked lottery revenues in fact have the effect of increasing funds available for the specified purpose.” The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government also found that “new gambling operations that are intended to pay for normal increases in general state spending may add to, rather than ease, state budget imbalances.”

As Citizens for Tax Justice put it, “it becomes a case of diminishing returns as neighboring states introduce new and better lotto games. Then, states either lose business to another state or hit a ceiling for how many lotto tickets a population can buy. That is, as a revenue source, it’s a short or medium term quick fix but not a long term solution.”

And then there’s the simple fact that the lottery is, in essence, a regressive tax, with about a 38 percent tax rate (a rate usually reserved for the very richest Americans). According to the Bloomberg News “Sucker Index,” residents of Georgia are doing the most damage to their own finances through the lottery, followed by residents of Massachusetts.

The government programs that comprise America’s social safety net have had a profound effect on working families and the unemployed, particularly throughout the Great Recession and the slow economic recovery that has followed. But tax credits, which often go overlooked in discussions on how to prevent poverty, also have a huge impact on working families.

Many working families are now being led by single mothers or women who are primary breadwinners, and according to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, two primary tax credits are responsible for keeping millions of women and girls out of poverty each year. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which benefits low-income workers, kept an estimated 3.4 million women above the poverty line in 2010. Add in the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and the number of women who avoided poverty swells to nearly 5 million, CBPP found:

The numbers rise when you include a second federal income tax credit — the less well-known CTC, which provides up to $1,000 per child for working families: together, the CTC and EITC kept 4.9 million women and girls above the poverty line in 2010, including more than 800,000 just by the Recovery Act’s expansions of both credits.

As CBPP’s Arloc Sherman noted, research shows that the EITC continues to help women even after they retire. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the EITC helps boost Social Security retirement benefits for women, since those benefits are based on prior income history.

Unfortunately, the newly-adopted House GOP budget could end many tax breaks in order to finance a massive tax cut for the rich, though Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) refuses to say which breaks would be eliminated. If the GOP and Ryan continue their history of targeting programs that benefit the poor to pay for tax breaks for the rich, however, beneficial tax credits like the EITC and CTC could be at risk.

In response to a question from ThinkProgress at a policy summit yesterday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) not only attempted to defend the tax cuts for millionaires in his new budget, but also dove into greater detail about why he so drastically cuts support programs for poor and low-income Americans:

RYAN: With respect to these programs you mentioned. They’re growing at unsustainable rates. Food stamps have quadrupled over the last ten years, and that’s in excess of the recession. We have to remember that if we just keep these programs on this unsustainable path, then they will crash. Then we’ll have a debt crisis. Then we will not be able to service these people, because under a debt crisis you’re cutting indiscriminately across the board in a very ugly way… So what we’re saying is let’s get ahead of this problem, let’s pre-empt a debt crisis, and let’s get these programs working better so that they’re growing at a more sustainable rate.

It’s not clear what Ryan means by “quadrupled… in excess of the recession.” From 2000 to 2008, before the recession began, spending on food stamps (otherwise known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) went from $18.3 billion to $39.3 billion — barely doubling. By 2011, it had increased to $77.6 billion. That is closer to a quadrupling from 2000, but this includes the effects of the recession.

More importantly, SNAP spending as a matter of dollar amounts does not indicate whether the program is sustainable. What counts on that score is spending as a percentage of GDP, or what share of the wealth produced annually by the American economy is required to fund the program.

In 2000, SNAP accounted for 0.19 percent of GDP. By 2008 that had risen to a slightly larger small slice of 0.27 percent of GDP. It then spiked to 0.52 percent in 2011 as a result of the recession. But over the coming years, as the economy recovers and fewer Americans will be in need of economic assistance, it’s projected to drop back below 0.3 percent.

It’s also worth noting that Ryan is pushing catastrophic cuts to SNAP and similar programs as the answer to, well, catastrophic cuts that Paul Ryan fears are coming. According to CAP Senior Fellow Donna Cooper, the cuts to food stamps in the House Republican budget would “force America’s poorest families to forgo as many as 8.2 billion meals a year,” with the loss in grocery sales causing the elimination of about 184,000 jobs.

The U.S. has the weakest labor protections in the industrialized world, and is the only developed nation that doesn’t guarantee workers some sort of paid sick leave. Lost productivity due to sick workers attending work and infecting other employees costs the U.S. economy $180 billion annually.

Yesterday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) released the Rebuild America Act, and one of its many provisions would ensure that all workers have access to paid sick days. Inevitably, proposals of this sort draw the ire of Big Business, which claims that every policy meant to aid workers will drive up costs and increase joblessness. But as David Madland noted yesterday, that simply isn’t the case:

The aftermath of the Great Recession has cultivated a fear that policies that support workers and their families will subsequently constrain business profitability and cause employers to lay off workers or close their doors entirely. Contrary to fears from the business community, the passage of paid sick days legislation in San Francisco (the first city to enact such a law) did not hamper job growth. In fact San Francisco created more jobs and experienced more economic growth after passing the law than the surrounding counties without such legislation.

According to a study in the American Journal of Public Health, a lack of paid sick days led to millions of additional cases of H1N1 flu in 2009. Since the federal government hasn’t acted, several cities have passed paid sick day requirements of their own (though Republicans in Wisconsin overrode Milwaukee’s law last year). Harkin’s bill — in addition to its myriad other strong proposals — would end America’s shameful rein as the only developed nation that forces workers to choose between their health and their job.

House Republicans officially passed Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) radical budget yesterday without a single Democratic vote. Today, during an interview on Fox and Friends, Ryan was asked by Fox’s Steve Doocy whether anybody is “getting shortchanged” by the budget. Ryan, of course, neglected to mention those who would inevitably be harmed by his eviscerating of the social safety net, pointing only to federal employees who would see their pay cut:

DOOCY: But is somebody, is anybody getting shortchanged with the big cuts you’re making?

RYAN: Well, to me it’s more than a campaign document, it’s a governing document. It’s showing the country specifically how we can save and strengthen Medicare, how we can get our budget balanced and our debt paid off, and how we can grow our economy. Yeah, we’re cutting $5.3 trillion out of the President’s budget. We’re cutting every government agency, we’re taking money out of every government agency because we have to make them do more with less, we’re cutting federal pay, we’re cutting federal employee workforce, we’re restrengthening and restructuring the safety net so that we get people back to work, on their feet instead of having a welfare state. So we’re cutting all over the place.

Watch it:

To hear Ryan tell it, no one will be hurt by the budget except federal employees, because agencies will magically be able to “do more with less.” But here’s what Ryan’s budget would actually do in practice:

– Eliminate food assistance for eight million low-income Americans.

– Eliminate Pell Grants for more than one million low-income students.

– Increase health care costs for seniors by $5,900 per year.

– Cause 47 million Americans to lose their health insurance in ten years.

– Push 14 million Americans out of Medicaid.

Overall, 62 percent of the cuts in Ryan’s budget come directly from programs that aid low-income Americans, while non-defense discretionary spending, which encompasses everything from food inspection and education to veterans benefits, would fall to its lowest level in 50 years. But perhaps Ryan doesn’t consider any of this being “shortchanged.”

The women who serve as CEOs for lobbying firms earn $1 million less than men who hold the same job. In fact, the few women who head up major trade groups groups in Washington make 57 cents for every man’s dollar.

ThinkProgress reported earlier this month on the gender pay gap on Wall Street, but a new analysis out from Bloomberg News shows that the women who hold major roles at trade associations in our nation’s capital face pay discrimination that’s just as serious. And, out of the top 30 trade associations, there were only four women’s salaries to analyze:

The average annual compensation of the women who lead four of the capital’s most politically active industry groups lags behind that of male peers by more than $1 million, according to data in tax filings compiled by Bloomberg. The female CEOs took home an average $1.43 million in 2010, compared with $2.48 million paid to the other 26 executives — 57 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

Lobbying does not hold a stellar reputation, and we’ve certainly seen fit to criticize it, and the amount of money that lobbyists are paid, on many occasions. But fair pay is a right, regardless of industry. And those who are purported to be top movers-and-shakers of policy and politics are putting up poor numbers: The gap between male and female CEOs at lobbying shops is even worse than the gap between white males and Latina women in the United States overall.

Because it doles out trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the rich and corporations, the budget approved by House Republicans today — authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — would increase deficits and drive up the national debt. In fact, under the plan, “deficits would never drop below 4.4 percent of GDP, and would rise to more than 5 percent of GDP by 2022.”

Those increases would come despite the gigantic spending cuts that Ryan has in mind, which would eviscerate the social safety net and non-defense discretionary spending (even while the budget increases defense spending). As the Economic Policy Institute noted today, the plan Republicans adopted would drive discretionary spending down to its lowest level in more than 50 years.

EPI pointed out that the non-defense discretionary portion of the budget includes a whole host of things, including, “spending on areas like homeland security, veterans, nuclear weapons, and foreign operations; safety net programs like housing vouchers and nutrition assistance for women and infants; most of the funding for the enforcement of consumer protection, environmental protection, and financial regulation; and practically all of the federal government’s civilian public investments.”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) defended the GOP’s proposed tax cuts for millionaires in response to a question from ThinkProgress today at a policy summit. The House Budget Committee chairman and author of the GOP’s 2013 budget claimed, as Republicans typically do whenever this question comes up, that, “When we think of millionaires in the tax code, we often think of Aaron Rogers or Prince Fielder or a movie star… It’s mostly small businesses.”

That in itself is a strange case to make. Whatever their profession, millionaires are by definition doing much better than the low-income Americans from whom Ryan extracts two-thirds of his spending cuts. But then Ryan dove into another defense of the $187,000 tax cut his budget would provide to millionaires:

RYAN: 65 percent of our net new jobs in America don’t come from the big corporations in America, they come from successful small businesses. Half of the people in this country work for these successful small businesses. Where I come from, it’s the business out in the industrial park outside of your town that has 50 to 250 employees. The job shops, the manufacturers. Those are the people who are struggling right now to create jobs. And their tax rate is scheduled to go up to as high as 44.8 percent in January, when most of our national competitors — China, India, England, Ireland, Canada — are lowering their tax rates on their businesses. So we’re looking at raising our tax rate on these businesses to as high as 45 percent when the international average is about 25 percent.

In short, this is not true. According to estimates in 2009 by the Urban Institute and Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center, a mere 1.9 percent of American tax filers reporting any small-business income would have been subject to the top two personal income tax brackets. Those are the only brackets which — when taxes levied by the Affordable Care Act are added in, as Ryan does above — come anywhere close to the 44.8 percent tax rate Ryan is predicting. By contrast, 34 percent of small-business filers were subject to the 10 percent tax bracket, and 14.5 percent had income so low they were able to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Finally, a look into the OECD tax database reveals that three of the countries Ryan brought up as international competitors — England, Ireland and Canada — had higher marginal personal income tax rates in 2011 than the American rate Ryan fears: 50 percent, 48 percent, and 46.4 percent respectively. Hardly a portrait of an America about to spiral into international competitive oblivion.

Our guest blogger is John Griffith, a policy analyst with the economic policy team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

There’s a growing consensus that more principal reduction — the writing off of a portion of an underwater mortgage in exchange for a higher likelihood of repayment — can help avoid another wave of costly and economy-crushing foreclosures. But the country’s two biggest mortgage companies are not convinced.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs), both under government conservatorship since 2008, have yet to embrace principal reduction as a viable foreclosure mitigation tool. In fact, the mortgage giants are forbidden from lowering principal on any loans they own or guarantee by their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA.

We think it’s time for Fannie, Freddie, and FHFA to rethink that position. Here’s the basic argument in a new report.

Reams of economic evidence show that principal reduction is often the most cost-effective way to avoid unnecessary foreclosure, especially when a borrower is deeply underwater — owing significantly more on their mortgage than their home is worth — and facing a long-term economic hardship. That’s because reducing principal is the only way to rebuild an underwater borrower’s equity while permanently lowering monthly mortgage payments.

Fewer foreclosures help more than just struggling homeowners. Local housing markets are better off, as each foreclosure decreases the value of every other home in the neighborhood. And since the average foreclosure costs more than $50,000 to the lender or investor, avoiding default often helps the books of Fannie and Freddie, which in turn benefits every taxpayer on the hook for their losses.

So while principal reduction will give more struggling homeowners a fighting chance at staying in their homes, this is not a matter of charity. It’s good business. That’s why roughly one in four modifications on bank-held loans involved some principal reduction in the last quarter of 2011, according to data released yesterday by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

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2012 GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney seems unable to help himself from reminding everyone, over and over, just how rich he is. From talking about his NASCAR and pro football team owner friends to referencing his wife’s two Cadillacs, Romney continually reaffirms the stereotype that he’s an out-of-touch wealthy elite.

And his campaign certainly isn’t helping, bemoaning in today’s Wall Street Journal the “tax problem” created by Romney’s massive $100 million retirement account:

In any case, swelling the IRA to the size Mr. Romney’s reached has “created a tax problem” for the former Massachusetts governor, said a Romney campaign official. Tax-law changes since Mr. Romney’s Bain tenure mean that long-term capital gains in regular accounts now are taxed at 15%. But IRA gains are taxed at ordinary-income rates upon withdrawal, which for Mr. Romney, under current law, would be 35%.

“Who wants to have $100 million in an IRA?” said the campaign official.

Surely most people would happily accept a $100 million IRA, and all of its associated “tax problems,” if Romney is looking to offload it.

Furthermore, Romney’s own tax plan would alleviate his “problem” by implementing a 20 percent reduction in the top income tax rate. Even before he rolled out the second version of his tax plan, which took his absurd tax cuts for the rich even further, Romney’s tax plan would have cut his own taxes nearly in half.

When Congress was fighting over disaster relief funding in 2011, House Republicans passed a watered down funding bill and warned Senate Democrats not to block it. “Time for the Senate to do it’s [sic] job, stop threatening shutdown, stop playing politics, fund FEMA, and pass the CR,” Brad Dayspring, then a spokesperson for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), tweeted. There was only one catch: the Senate had already passed a bill funding disaster relief.

House Republicans are attempting a similar strategy now, just two days before the government’s spending authority for transportation expires. The Senate passed a bipartisan transportation bill last week, while House Republican leadership has struggled to get its conservative flank on board with any of its proposals.

Democrats have indeed blocked versions of the House’s disastrous transportation bill in an effort to get the bipartisan Senate bill, which garnered 22 Republican votes, passed through the House. But Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has ignored the Senate bill and has been unable to line up Republicans behind any of his proposals. Now, his spokesperson is attempting to blame Democrats for the GOP leadership’s inability to pass an extension, The Hill reports:

A spokesman for Boehner said Wednesday that the GOP had only moved to consideration of a 60-day extension because Democrats had said they would support it. The spokesman, Michael Steel, said that the fate of the extension of transportation funding is now “up to Democratic leadership.”

“It’s their choice as to whether to work in a bipartisan fashion or play political games with our country’s economy,” Steel said in a statement.

At least one Republican recognizes how ridiculous the GOP’s attempts to blame Democrats are. Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH) told reporters Wednesday that the GOP’s strategy was to “pray the Senate doesn’t call our bluff.”

The Senate’s two-year package would save an estimated 1.9 million jobs and create as many as 1 million more, according to the bill’s bipartisan sponsors. In the event of a shutdown, the Highway Trust Fund, which funds infrastructure projects, would lose $110 million a day in gas tax revenues, and states would be forced to delay entire transportation projects. Instead of passing that bill, though, House Republicans are planning to pass a short-term extension before skipping town for recess, leaving the Senate to clean up their mess.

The Wall Street Journal noted this week that that CEO pay lagged behind profits and productivity last year, mirroring a trend that has been occurring with workers’ wages for decades. But even that slight modicum of moderation regarding executive compensation evidently didn’t extend to Bank of America, which gave CEO Brian Moynihan a $7.5 million pay package — six times as much as he made in 2010 — following a year in which the company’s stock plummeted:

Bank of America gave its CEO a pay package worth $7.5 million last year, six times as large as the year before. It happened while the company’s stock lost more than half its value and the bank lost its claim as the biggest in the country.

The package for CEO Brian Moynihan included a salary of $950,000, a $6.1 million stock award and about $420,000 worth of use of company aircraft and tax and financial advice.

For those keeping score, Bank of America’s stock dropped 58 percent in 2011 and the bank surrendered its title as the nation’s largest to JP Morgan Chase. A good chunk of the stock award was actually given to Moynihan for the bank’s 2010 performance, when it lost money.

In addition to seeing its stock tank, Bank of America has also been, according to a whistleblower suit, intentionally blocking troubled homeowners from receiving mortgage aid. The whistleblower alleges that BofA misled borrowers about their eligibility for federal mortgage aid programs and that “the bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents.” (But remember, Bank of America will modify your mortgage as long as you erase all the mean things you’ve been saying about it on Twitter.)

BofA has also been tied up in the foreclosure fraud scandal, and just a few months ago paid $335 million to settle charges that its subsidiary discriminated against minorities in its lending. If this is how much Moynihan gets after that sort of year, what will he receive if the bank actually has a good one?