Families that depend on government assistance face countless threats, but a new study from the Urban Institute shows just how devastating budget cuts could be to America’s poorest families.

According to the report, as of 2009, low-income children received 70 percent of government funding for children — a respectable portion of overall federal spending dedicated to the needs of those under 18. But while the straight numbers look good for poor kids, those children’s future prospects are frightening.

The Urban Institute “estimate[s] that low-income children receive 99 percent of housing expenditures, 98 percent of expenditures on nutrition, 97 percent of health expenditures, and 94 percent of expenditures on social services.” So, of course, cutting the budgets for these areas would disproportionately affect children:

If these services sound familiar, it’s because many are the same programs that Republicans have aimed to cut in their most recent budget proposals — specifically, housing, nutrition, and health.

Millions of children have been kept out of extreme poverty by programs like food stamps, and the overall poverty rates would have been twice as high in 2010 without the social safety net. Surely, the opposite effect would occur with any cuts to welfare, social security, medicaid, or the other programs that keep these kids afloat.

As the improving economy has robbed conservatives of the chief talking points against President Obama, some have resorted to creative explanations for the upswing that avoids giving any credit to the current occupant of the Oval Office. Tea Party darling Rep. Allen West (R-FL) employed this tactic recently, wondering if “someone [is] playing around” with positive unemployment data, and he did so again today, this time to explain away the bullish stock market.

The Nasdaq topped 3,000 today for the first time since 2000 and the Dow finished strong, up 217 points at 13,177 — its highest level since the end of 2007.

But on Fox News this afternoon, West said the markets were only up because traders think Republicans will win big in November. Host Neil Cavuto seemed taken aback by the suggestion and pressed West for clarification, but the Congressman stood by his claim:

CAVUTO: What do you think about that? That the markets say you’re wrong, that the pick up is alive and well.

WEST: Well, I would think maybe the markets are maybe looking five to six months down the road, when we have a change in leadership in this country –

CAVUTO: Wait a minute, you think that this is built on a Republican either capturing the White House or Republicans capturing the Senate? … That might or might not be a stretch, but it is out there as a factor. You think that’s a genuine factor? You think that the markets are getting bubbly in anticipation of a Republican taking the White House?

WEST: Oh, absolutely. Well, I think that there is a hope that may be out there, is that we can get a person that has practical viable solutions for job creation here in the Unite States of America [in the presidency].

Watch it:

Our guest blogger is Sabina Dewan, Director of Globalization and International Employment at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Republican lawmakers are moving to block a job-creation package because it includes a provision that would help U.S. companies access the capital they need to sell their products and services abroad. The party of no’s latest target is the U.S. Export Import Bank (ExIM) — the government agency that provides loans, guarantees and insurance products to enable US companies, especially small businesses, to export.

The ExIm Bank’s charter caps its overall outstanding commitments at $100 billion and Senate Democrats are seeking to raise the cap to $140 billion and reauthorize ExIm for another four years.

But this doesn’t sit well with conservative lawmakers. They object to the reauthorization calling Ex-Im’s activities “corporate welfare” that distorts the free market. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor suggested that, instead of reauthorizing the bank, the U.S. talk to our major trading partners to get them to “end subsidized export financing programs and other forms of export subsidies.”

By all means, lets talk. But in the meantime, there’s no need to pull the rug out from underneath firms and workers that export now. After all, at a time when millions of Americans are unemployed, we need to do everything in our power to create jobs by helping businesses export more — not cut off their financing to do so.

What GOP lawmakers forget is that state-capitalist economies like China don’t abide by our free market rules. Their state-owned enterprises provide seemingly unlimited access to cheap capital. Cutting off ExIm’s ability to finance exports, especially for some of our most competitive sectors like aerospace, will seriously hurt American workers and firms.

What’s more, phasing out Ex-Im’s financing will disproportionately affect America’s small businesses, which are a critical source of middle class jobs and incomes. While large firms with big operating budgets can either afford to finance their own operations or obtain bank financing, small businesses don’t have access to credit because they are considered a riskier bet. They turn to ExIm for their export financing instead.

Not only should Congress immediately reauthorize Ex-Im to operate for another four years, it should raise the bank’s statutory cap well beyond $140 billion to benefit America’s companies, their workers and to create more jobs. And this doesn’t cost us anything — Ex-Im is self-sustaining and even profitable.

This latest ploy by conservative lawmakers is no more than an attempt to stymie the real progress the Obama administration has made on boosting our nation’s exports.

Florida’s GOP dominated legislature, along with Republican Gov. Rick Scott, has already decided that it would be prudent to pay for a corporate tax break by slashing the state’s unemployment insurance program, even though one of Scott’s aides admitted that the tax break likely wouldn’t create jobs. And evidently thinking that Florida’s problem was not enough corporate welfare, the Sunshine State’s legislature was back in action last week, doling out more corporate tax breaks, while closing a $2 billion budget hole via cuts to higher education and public sector layoffs:

The 60-day legislative session that ended Friday was largely dominated by small reforms on a few pocketbook proposals. Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican-led legislature honored their pledge not to raise taxes, an article of faith for them in an election year. But to fill a $2 billion budget gap, they cut $300 million from universities and colleges, $1 billion from state worker pensions, and made another round of deep spending cuts in prisons, health care and social services…The $70 billion budget eliminates an estimated 4,400 state jobs and continues to rely on a three percent reduction in state worker salaries.

The budget includes a grab-bag of giveaways to various industries, including aviation companies, real estate brokers, and fruit packinghouses. It also increases the size to which a business needs to grow to qualify for the state’s corporate income tax. All told, the tax cuts will cost $2.5 billion over the next three years.

Scott has promised that these tax cuts will help jobs “grow like crazy.” However, that confidence belies the fact that Scott has been walking back his job creation promises since coming into office. He even flatly denied promising to create 700,000 jobs, in addition to those created by natural economic growth, despite video evidence showing that he most certainly did.

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist — who said last month that he would not approve of tax increases even in the case of war, natural disaster or “beard flu” — has come under fire over the last year from Republican lawmakers who signed his pledge requiring them to oppose all new taxes. Lawmakers have slammed the Norquist pledge as “disingenuous and irresponsible,” saying it “restrains your ability to think creatively” and takes away the “flexibility to do the right thing for the American people.”

On The Daily Show last night, host Jon Stewart asked Norquist if former President Ronald Reagan should be admonished for his tax-increasing ways. Reagan, after all, was a serial tax-raiser both as governor of California and later as president. But Norquist refused to criticize Reagan, laughably excusing the tax increases because Reagan “hadn’t signed the pledge”:

STEWART: I mean, Reagan raised taxes, I don’t know, seven times, eight times?

NORQUIST: And George Washington lost the Battle of New York. It wasn’t on purpose. Reagan didn’t want to raise taxes.

STEWART: Wait, Reagan didn’t want to raise taxes, but he did it eight times?

NORQUIST: He had a Congress with whom he raised taxes a number of times. [...] The ’82 tax increase, which was the large one, he said was the biggest mistake of his presidency because of course remember he was promised, ‘Oh, if you raise taxes we’ll give you three dollars of spending cuts.’

STEWART: But then he kept raising them. ’82, ’83, ’85, I have a whole list here. So, would you have run somebody against him?

NORQUIST: No.

STEWART: Why not?

NORQUIST: One, he hadn’t signed the pledge.

Watch it (at 3:10):

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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The 1982 tax increase Norquist is excusing was the largest peacetime tax increase in American history, and calling it the “biggest mistake” of the Reagan presidency requires ignoring the fact that it was immediately followed by “exceptionally strong” economic growth and falling unemployment. And if the 1982 increase was Reagan’s biggest mistake, he didn’t show much contrition during the rest of his presidency — he went on to raise taxes in seven of his eight years in office.

Back in January, American Banker reported that JP Morgan Chase — the nation’s biggest bank — was potentially robo-signing credit card documents. Robo-signing, of course, is the pernicious practice banks used to approve foreclosures without verifying basic information about borrowers or complying with property law.

Today, American Banker is back with allegations from former JP Morgan employees that the bank did indeed robo-sign documents when suing delinquent credit card borrowers, enabling it to run up its credit card collections into the billions of dollars, while short-circuiting the legal process:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. took procedural shortcuts and used faulty account records in suing tens of thousands of delinquent credit card borrowers for at least two years, current and former employees say. [...]

“We did not verify a single one” of the affidavits attesting to the amounts Chase was seeking to collect, says Howard Hardin, who oversaw a team handling tens of thousands of Chase debt files in San Antonio. “We were told [by superiors] ‘We’re in a hurry. Go ahead and sign them.‘”

In many instances, the records of the firms that JP Morgan had contracted with to handle the documents did not match the records that the bank itself had, but the lawsuits against borrowers went ahead anyway. Some firms’ records didn’t match the banks in 20 percent of cases. In many instances, a whistleblower alleged, the bank was claiming borrowers had much more debt than they actually had.

Two former employees also allege that the bank directly destroyed borrowers’ records. “I understand there were documents trashed, yes,” one said. An internal Chase document also shows that borrowers’ correspondence with the bank was being dumped onto an unmanned desk and left unanswered.

Last year, a former JP Morgan Chase employee candidly admitted that commercial bankers see customers simply as people to be “exploited” via fees. “I don’t say this lightly, but the consumer is simply an income stream and exploiting that is the purpose of the banking organization,” he added. And when it comes to collecting on credit card debt, it seems there are no lengths to which the bank will not go, legal or not, to make sure it gets paid.

Scandal enveloped multiple Wall Street megabanks in 2010 when it was discovered that throughout the housing bust and the foreclosure crisis that ensued, the nation’s largest banks were caught robo-signing — the practice of approving foreclosures without verifying mortgage information and fabricating other loan documents. At the time, the banks promised to end the practice and attempted to escape blame by tying the scandal to low-level employees.

In reality, bank managers knew about the potentially illegal and fraudulent practices and in some cases directed them, according to a report by the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and other banks, documents were rarely verified, and even when employees raised concerns they were told by management to proceed, the New York Times reports:

At Wells Fargo, now the nation’s largest mortgage servicer and originator, employees told the inspector general’s office that the company’s management had assigned them bogus titles, including “vice president of loan documentation,” even though they had no training in document review. Before becoming vice president, one employee worked at a pizza restaurant. [...]

As at Wells Fargo, employees at JPMorgan Chase took on titles like “vice president of Chase Home” even though “the titles were given by Chase for the sole purpose of allowing individuals to sign documents and came with no other duties or authority.”

There were other indications that management knew about the practices. At Bank of America, employees raised concerns but were told by management to proceed; Wells Fargo squashed a study into foreclosure practices and told the employee conducting the study to continue signing documents without reading or verifying data; and Citigroup management admitted that the bank regularly signed foreclosure documents without verification, even as the bank was telling regulators that internal reviews found its practices to be sound. Despite promises to stop when the scandal broke, banks continued robo-signing for at least another year.

The IG report falls in line with recent accounts provided by former Wall Street employees and whistleblowers. A Bank of America whistleblower last week said the bank had intentionally prevented homeowners from getting federal mortgage help, and a former JPMorgan employee told Reuters in November that exploiting consumers was “the purpose of the banking industry.” An investigation into 400 San Francisco-area foreclosure cases, meanwhile, found that nearly every one of them had potential legal issues.

“I believe the reports we just released will leave the reader asking one question — how could so many people have participated in this misconduct?” HUD Inspector General David Montoya said in a statement. “The answer — simple greed.”

While Americans have focused on rising fuel prices over the past month, food prices around the world are also skyrocketing, outpacing the rate of inflation for other consumer products and threatening to create a price bubble for the third time since 2008. Food prices have increased 4.4 percent in the last year compared with a 2.9 percent rise for all consumer goods. Prices on products like coffee and peanut butter have risen as much as 27 percent.

And as with the spikes of 2008 and 2011, commodity investors and speculators are largely to blame, according to one study highlighted by Time:

The New England Complex Systems Institute released a study last week linking speculation in global commodity markets to rising food prices. The study indicates that spikes in food prices in 2008 and ’11 came largely as a result of investor speculation and increased ethanol conversion, in which corn is used for fuel rather than food. The authors expect another “food bubble” to occur by 2013, which “may lead to major social disruptions” on par with the riots and unrest in North Africa and the Middle East in 2008 and ’11.

Speculation on other commodities has also drawn recent attention. After blaming speculators for oil and gas price spikes in 2008 and 2010, experts are again pointing to “speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year” for the current rise in fuel prices. As with the fuel spike, rising food costs could have a dampening effect on the recovery of the American economy while also triggering social disruptions around the world — rising food prices were a factor in the unrest that led to the Arab Spring, according to some analysts.

The study also blamed increased conversion of corn from a food product into ethanol used for fuel. Corn prices spiked to a record high in 2011, and the U.S. now uses more corn for ethanol than it does for food production, a practice that has been propped up by federal ethanol subsidies that have been targeted for elimination by bipartisan groups of lawmakers.

House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) — who said in an interview that he believes Washington’s role is to “serve the banks” — is facing one of the stiffest primary challenges of his long career. State Sen. Scott Beason (R) has been chasing Bachus ahead of today’s Alabama elections, helped by some hefty spending from a political action committee and ill-sentiment towards Bachus as a result of a 60 Minutes report showing that Bachus profited from information he received in private briefings during the 2008 economic crisis.

But Bachus has received a little last minute help, courtesy of the financial firms he thinks its his duty to assist:

Bachus’s coffers have been filled by a long list of financial firms whose interests are affected by the congressman’s committee. Over the past several days alone, he’s received donations from the likes of Citigroup, Barclays and RBS.

Bachus has relied on the financial industry for nearly half of his fundraising during this election cycle, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from commercial banks and securities firms. Over his career, the financial industry has been far and away Bachus’ biggest donor.

And it’s really no mystery why the financial industry is so keen on keeping Bachus around. As chairman, he has sought to water down and weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, gut the budgets of financial markets regulators, and undermine foreclosure prevention programs.