Occupy Homes MN and a coalition of faith leaders and community organizations are claiming a small victory in Minneapolis today after helping local resident Monique White stay in her home, despite attempts from Freddie Mac and U.S. Bank to evict her during foreclosure proceedings. Freddie Mac had previously defied the state attorney general’s order to halt foreclosure proceedings and pursued an eviction, which would have taken place today.

But after a meeting between White’s attorneys, local officials, and Freddie Mac representatives, a hearing on the foreclosure has been moved to Friday, according to a press release from Occupy Our Homes MN.

White, like millions of American homeowners, fell behind on her mortgage and had applied for a loan modification with U.S. Bank, the original servicer of her loan. The modification was denied, however, and Freddie Mac took control of the loan and initiated court proceedings to foreclose on the home. Occupy Homes MN, the attorney general’s office, and White’s attorneys are now investigating the case to see if White’s mortgage and modification applications were mishandled by either U.S. Bank or Freddie Mac, a spokesperson for Occupy Homes MN told ThinkProgress.

“We’re looking to find evidence of mishandling of the foreclosure practices by Freddie Mac or U.S. Bank,” the spokesperson, Anthony Newby, said. “We believe they did not negotiate in good faith. It’s unclear why she was turned down (for the modification), when she was turned down. All of that is up in the air.”

According to Newby, White currently works two retail jobs and lives with a relative who is also willing to make payments toward the mortgage if it gets a modification. White has lived in the house in north Minneapolis since 2003, but sought the modification after losing an earlier job as a counselor helping troubled teens.

Her case has also received support from Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), who represents the district in which she lives. Citing privacy reasons, Ellison’s office declined to comment on action he had taken on behalf of White, but he released a statement today, saying, “I encourage US Bank and Freddie Mac to act in good faith and negotiate a solution that works well for all parties and allows Monique and her children to keep their home.”

North Minneapolis is among the worst hit areas in the state for foreclosures. According to Newby, 56 percent of North Minneapolis homes are facing foreclosure, and 40 percent of the Minneapolis’s foreclosures occurred there. White, who is black, is also facing a dilemma many minority homeowners have faced. According to a report by the Center on Responsible Lending, black and Latino homeowners were twice as likely to have been affected by the housing crisis as white borrowers.

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) received more than $880,000 in contributions from large-dollar individual campaign donors in the financial services sector in 2011, according to an Associated Press analysis. The freshman Republican also got at least $60,000 in contributions from corporate political action committees aligned with the financial sector.

Among the PAC contributors to Brown were:

American Bankers Association PAC: $2,000

American Financial Services Association PAC: $1,000

Citigroup Inc. PAC: $2,000

Credit Suisse Securities LLC PAC: $6,000

USAA PAC: $2,500

Wells Fargo and Company PAC: $3,000

Why the support? Well, it was Brown who threatened to join a Republican filibuster of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010, using that threat to significantly water down the bill. Among the industry-favored concessions he extracted were removal of a $19 billion bank tax and weakening of the “Volcker rule,” restrictions on risky trades made with dollars backed by the government.

“Sen. Brown’s politics are tailor made for New York Republicans,” Wayne Berman, a lobbyist for several financial sector companies observed last December. And if the financial sector’s donations are any example, New York Republicans certainly agree.

Mitt Romney — due, in part, to a tax loophole that benefits wealthy money managers — is able to drive his tax rate down to 15 percent, below that of many middle-class families. That tax loophole, which allows money managers to pay the capital gains tax rate of 15 percent on income they are paid for investing other people’s money (known as “carried interest”), saved Romney $2.6 million in taxes in just the last two years.

Democrats, including President Obama, have proposed closing this particular tax loophole for years. The Romney camp, when it rolled out its second major tax plan just a few weeks ago, said that it would examine whether or not it would eliminate the break, with economic adviser Prof. Glenn Hubbard calling it a “devilishly hard question.”

But evidently the campaign is leaning away from closing the carried interest loophole, as another Romney economic adviser, Prof. Gregory Mankiw, penned a piece in yesterday’s New York Times largely defending it. While admitting that “some reform may well be appropriate,” Mankiw lays out some scenarios under which a carpenter plays the role of the Romney-type money manager, making carried interest for the work he put in renovating a home. The New Republic’s Alec Macgillis, rightly, isn’t buying it:

[Mankiw] did an impressive job of muddying the water around a question that truly is as as clear-cut as they come: why should investment managers have the compensation for their labor taxed at a far lower rate than all other professionals? You’ll have to read it to believe it, but Mankiw’s trick is to bring in the more sympathetic example of a carpenter who teams up with an investor on a real estate project that turns a profit. Under current law, the carpenter’s share of the profits are taxed as capital gains, just as the investor’s are, even though in the carpenter’s case what he was putting into the project was his sweat equity, not an investment stake. If the carried interest loophole were closed, notes Mankiw, the carpenter would be taxed at a far higher rate than the investor he teamed up with. Well, yes — but that’s only because we tax capital gains at a much lower rate than ordinary income. If Mankiw is so bothered by the carpenter’s fate after the closing of the carried interest loophole, then he should be pushing for the equalization of the tax rate for investments and earned income.

Indeed, the concern Mankiw expresses for the carpenter could be alleviated simply by shrinking or eliminating — as Ronald Reagan did — the difference between investment taxation and wage taxation. Reagan, in fact, equalized the two entirely, even though conservative dogma says that a lower capital gains rate is necessary to incentivize investment.

Two-thirds of Americans have said that the carried interest loophole should be closed. And once upon a time, Mankiw seems to have counted himself amongst that group. Now though, Mankiw and the Romney camp seem to favor obfuscation of an easy question, in order to avoid the conclusion that Romney and other money managers are benefiting from a tax loophole that simply needs to go.

Ignoring the warnings of economists and clear evidence in Europe that austerity would only hold back an economic recovery, Republicans in Washington have pushed for deep spending cuts and other austerity measures. One side effect of those spending cuts is that state and local governments, already facing budget crunches because of the slow economy, have been forced to make even deeper reductions to their own budgets. Hundreds of thousands of public sector employees — teachers, police officers, and firefighters included — have lost their jobs as a result of those cuts.

The economy is now slowly recovering, enough that Republicans are left just criticizing the pace of the recovery, not its existence. But without the GOP-backed austerity measures and the job losses they’ve caused, the recovery would be moving at the speed of the Reagan recovery of the 1980s, according to an analysis from economist Paul Krugman:

In fact, if it weren’t for this destructive fiscal austerity, our unemployment rate would almost certainly be lower now than it was at a comparable stage of the “Morning in America” recovery during the Reagan era. [...]

If government employment under Mr. Obama had grown at Reagan-era rates, 1.3 million more Americans would be working as schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, etc., than are currently employed in such jobs.

And once you take the effects of public spending on private employment into account, a rough estimate is that the unemployment rate would be 1.5 percentage points lower than it is, or below 7 percent — significantly better than the Reagan economy at this stage.

At this point in the Reagan recovery, Krugman notes, government purchases rose 11.6 percent; they’re down 2.6 percent under Obama. During the Reagan recovery, government employment rose 3.1 percent; under Obama, it is down 2.7 percent. Under Obama, government spending rose 2.6 percent during the first two-and-a-half years of the recovery, compared to a 10.2 percent rise under Reagan.

Despite those numbers, Republicans continue to blame “out of control spending” and a growing federal government for holding back the economy, holding Reagan’s recovery up as an example of the success of the party’s policies. As Krugman’s analysis shows, however, Reagan’s recovery wasn’t constrained by the austerity measures that are now barreling Europe toward a second recession and preventing the U.S. economy from growing at a faster pace.

Thanks in large part to the lingering impact of the recession, more than 46.5 million Americans received food stamp aid last December, a 0.5 percent increase from November. According to the USDA, most households can only have $2,000 in countable resources in order to qualify, which makes food stamps a potentially life-saving part of the safety net for poverty-stricken Americans.

But apparently, Minnesota state representative Mary Franson (R) believes this program is akin to feeding deer at a national park. In a YouTube video released last Friday, Franson spent a few minutes going through some of the news of the previous week. After discussing Minnesota’s budget, Franson read a clip comparing the food stamp program to the Park Service’s plea to “not feed the animals”:

And here, it’s kind of ironic, I’ll read you this little funny clipped [sic] that we got from a friend. It says, ‘Isn’t it ironic that the food stamp program, part of the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing the greatest amount of food stamps ever.

Meanwhile, the Park Service, also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks us to please not feed the animals, because the animals may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves.’

The video has been removed from YouTube, but you can still watch it here — the pertinent portion is about two minutes in (HT: Crooks and Liars):

Within a matter of hours, Franson offered an apology of sorts, tweeting, “For those offended at the video, I deeply apologize. I have asked for the video to be taken down.” This has not been the end of the controversy, however: A group called The Alliance for a Better Minnesota has launched a petition drive calling on Franson to make a second video apologizing for the first one.

Comparing needy Americans to wild animals is in particularly bad taste. And sadly, this is not the first time Republicans have decided to make that comparison.

– Zachary Bernstein

Though the economy is slowly recovering from the Great Recession, large swaths of the American public are still bogged down by joblessness, underwater mortgages, and falling incomes. In fact, “between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909.”

But as the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal pointed out, 2010, the first full year of the recovery, was very good for America’s richest 1 percent. In fact, that year the richest 1 percent captured 93 percent of the nation’s income gains:

Well, we finally have the estimated data for 2010 by income percentile, and it turns out that the top 1% had a fantastic year. The data is in the World Top Income Database, as well as Emmanuel Saez’s updated Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States…The takeaway quote from Saez should be: “The top 1% captured 93% of the income gains in the first year of recovery.”…The bottom 90% of Americans lost $127, the bottom 99% of Americans gained $80, and the top 1% gained $105,637. The bottom 99% is net positive for the year because of around $125 in average capital gains. They can take comfort in efforts by the Right to set the capital gains tax to 0%, which would have netted them an addition couple dozen bucks.

This chart shows that, even discounting capital gains (which are overwhelmingly made by the very rich), the very richest Americans have seen the fastest bounce back in terms of income (the blue line is the richest 0.1 percent, while the red is the richest 1 percent):

During the slow recovery, corporate profits have already roared back to their pre-recession heights. Wages, however, have yet to follow suit, leaving the 99 percent to struggle as the 1 percent enjoys a real recovery.