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?

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Earlier today ThinkProgress reported that the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to approve a proposal by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) that is misleadingly entitled the Small Business Tax Cut Act.

People who have read the bill and not just its title, however, have noted that it is extremely poorly targeted at small businesses. It is, in fact, just another tax cut for rich people. Among the biggest beneficiaries would be the owners of extremely profitable businesses like Oprah Winfrey’s production company and professional sports teams like the Super Bowl champion New York Giants, as well as highly paid professionals like lawyers, lobbyists, doctors, and consultants.

The Tax Policy Center has now estimated who benefits from Cantor’s bill. Among TPC’s findings:

– The top 1 percent would receive an average tax cut that is 1000 times bigger than the average tax cut for people in the middle quintile ($23 vs. $23,000). The top 0.1 percent would receive an average tax cut of more than $130,000.

– Half of the tax benefits would go to millionaires, who comprise less than one-half of one percent of all taxpayers and only 4 percent of actual small business owners according to a recent Treasury study. Millionaires, on average, would get a tax cut of $45,000 — almost as much as median household income in 2010.

– Business owners with annual income of $200,000 or less — who comprise more than 75 percent of small business owners — would receive only 16 percent of the benefit from Cantor’s bill.

The Cantor bill would cost $46 billion and is not paid for. More debt-financed tax cuts for the rich: haven’t we tried that before?

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

Conservatives for years have pushed a flawed and largely-debunked narrative about the origins of the financial crisis. They claim that misguided government housing policies forced Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac (the GSE’s), and other financial institutions to take on unprecedented levels of risk, creating a bubble and bust in the subprime housing market that sparked financial catastrophe.

To test that theory — which New York Times columnist Joe Nocera dubbed the “Big Lie” — the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis recently investigated whether affordable housing policies had any influence on the price or proliferation of subprime mortgages in the mid-2000s. Spoiler alert — they didn’t:

We find no evidence that lenders increased subprime originations or altered pricing around the discrete eligibility cutoffs for the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) affordable housing goals or the Community Reinvestment Act. Our results indicate that the extensive purchases of risky private-label mortgage-backed securities by the GSEs were not due to affordable housing mandates.

The study analyzed loan- and neighborhood-level data in California and Florida. It found no statistical relationship between the two federal housing policies — which have been the central focus of conservative attacks in recent years — and the price or availability of subprime loans, even after controlling for the loan size, loan type, borrower characteristics, and other factors.

These findings shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed, CAP’s housing team has been making this point for years.

Here’s what really happened. During the housing bubble of the mid-2000s, over-leveraged shadow banks packaged risky subprime mortgage loans into securities and passed them along to consumers that were often unaware or misinformed of the underlying risks. It was the poor performance of these private-label securities — not those issued by Fannie and Freddie — that led to the financial meltdown, according to the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

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During an interview with The Today Show’s Matt Lauer that aired this morning, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) admitted that the economy is improving, though he went to great lengths to argue that the economic policies of the Obama administration have held it back from recovering even more:

LAUER: You talk about the economy. Is it recovering?

BOEHNER: It is. There are certainly signs of life. But I would argue that it should be doing a lot better. It’s doing better in spite of what Washington is doing to the economy.

LAUER: But it does put some Republicans in a difficult position. You’ve got better job numbers, you’ve got better manufacturing numbers, consumer debt is down, consumer confidence is up. Isn’t it hard to run against a recovering economy?

BOEHNER: But Matt, my point is it should be doing better.

Watch it:

A slew of Republicans, acknowledging that continuing to bash the economy in spite of the good news that keeps coming out may not be a workable strategy, have pivoted to claiming credit for the recovery. But thus far, Republican leaders like Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor have not followed suit. As we’ve noted, the employment picture would have been significantly better were it not for the Republican insistence on cutting federal spending and laying off hundreds of thousands of public employees.

The House Ways and Means Committee today marked up a bill sponsored by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) that purports to give small businesses a 20 percent tax cut in order to spur hiring. We’ve already noted that the bill’s overly expansive definition of small business means super profitable hedge funds and law firms that don’t need additional employees would still receive a huge tax break.

And the bill’s problems certainly don’t end there. As Citizens for Tax Justice noted today, Cantor’s bill will also give hugely profitable operations like Oprah Winfrey’s production company and professional sports teams a big tax break:

While the legislation caps the amount of the deduction (at half of non-employee payroll), there is no limitation on the type or amount of income that business can have. So highly profitable operations like Oprah Winfrey’s production company or the Trump Tower Sales & Leasing office would both qualify for the deduction simply because they have fewer than 500 employees on payroll.

Who else would qualify? Professional sports teams (including teams owned by Mitt Romney’s friends) with their multi-million-dollar salaries to non-owner players. So would private equity firms, hedge funds, and other “small businesses” with income in the millions, or even billions, of dollars, along with most of the top law and lobbying firms inside the Beltway and elsewhere.

Adding insult to injury, many truly small businesses won’t qualify for the tax break because the cut is only available to businesses whose employees are non-owners. So a family business in which all the family members share ownership will get nothing at all, while Oprah’s production company walks away with a tax cut

This bill, like so many put forth by the GOP, fundamentally misunderstands the problems facing actual small businesses, which is that there’s no demand in the economy for their goods or services. Businesses simply have no reason to expand without the reasonable expectation of more customers, and giving an already profitable firm a big tax break won’t entice them to act any differently. As the chief economist for the conservative National Federation of Independent Business explained, “if you give a small business guy $20,000 he’ll say, ‘I could buy a new delivery truck but I have nobody to deliver to.’”

Instead, the GOP is hoping once again that its tax cut snake oil will have some effect. But as a new study released yesterday shows, “there’s no there there” when it comes to tax cuts promoting economic growth.

Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson (R) is among the growing cadre of Republicans that has denounced Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist and the GOP’s staunch anti-tax zealotry, as he says any serious budget plan should balance revenues and spending cuts. The current House GOP budget proposal, authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), certainly doesn’t do that; instead, it cuts revenues to a level that would force draconian across-the-board spending reductions.

According to Politico, Simpson and other Republicans are “furious” with the direction Ryan’s budget takes in ignoring revenue. Simpson is so furious, in fact, that by the time the budget passes the House tomorrow, he will have voted for it twice:

It was Simpson’s vote that allowed Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to get the resolution out of his committee last week — and Simpson will stand again with the leadership on the floor. But there’s no hiding the fact that he and many Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are furious with the course taken in this budget and more willing to lend support to those who feel revenue must also be part of the equation.

“This is going to be the most partisan debate of the year and it will set up the election for the year,” Simpson said. “But I don’t think it’s the balanced plan to get us out of the hole we are in.”

Simpson is correct that Ryan’s budget isn’t “the balanced plan to get us out of the hole we are in.” Instead of raising revenue and reducing the debt, it gives each millionaire a $187,000 tax cut, cuts taxes for corporations, slashes programs for the poor and middle class, and makes the debt worse. But instead of taking a stand against the radical proposal, Simpson toed the party line and voted “yea” during a Budget Committee hearing last week. Ryan’s plan passed the committee by one vote, meaning it was the ever-so-furious Simpson who cast the deciding vote to send a plan he doesn’t like to the full House, where he’ll fall in line and vote for it all over again.