Back in November, we noted that New Jersey was foolishly set to give the food company Goya $80 million to create just nine (nine!) jobs. But according to the New York Times, this is just par for the course for New Jersey Gov/ Chris Christie (R), who has already approved a record number of corporate tax subsidies:

Since taking office in 2010, Gov. Chris Christie has approved a record $1.57 billion in state tax breaks for dozens of New Jersey’s largest companies after they pledged to add jobs…The critics pointed out that even when the promised jobs have not materialized, the Christie administration has merely reduced, not withdrawn, the subsidies. And they say that the administration is mortgaging the state’s future by forgiving so much tax revenue for the next 10 to 15 years.

One program Christie has run doled out $900 million in tax credits. The companies receiving that largesse “have promised to add 2,364 jobs, or $387,537 in tax credits per job, over the next decade.” In one instance, Campbell Soup was given $42 million to create jobs in Camden. When the company proceeded to cut 100 jobs, Christie merely slapped it on the wrist, reducing its tax credit to $34 million, with the stipulation that the company add five jobs per year over a decade after it regains its previous employment total. For those keeping score, that’s $34 million for 50 jobs.

As the Economic Policy Institute and the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center found, “a growing body of research suggests that state and local tax cuts and incentives cannot create jobs in a cost-effective manner.” Citizens for Tax Justice calls corporate tax incentives and business exemptions “deeply flawed as policy.”

Online retailer Amazon has received a lot of well-deserved flak in the U.S. facilitating tax dodging by its customers by refusing to collect sales tax, under the theory that it only has to collect sales tax in states where it has a physical presence. This, of course, lets Amazon undercut traditional retailers. Several states have passed laws (in the face of intense Amazon lobbying) requiring online sales to be taxed the same as sales at brick and mortar stores.

But Amazon has reportedly been doing some tax dodging of its own in the United Kingdom, managing to make £7.6 billion in sales over the last three years without paying any corporate income tax:

Regulatory filings by parent company Amazon.com with the US securities and exchange commission (SEC) show the tax inquiry into the UK operation, which sells nearly one in four books sold in Britain, focuses on a period when ownership of the British business was transferred to a Luxembourg company.

The SEC filings, highlighted by Bookseller magazine, show that in the past three years, Amazon has generated sales of more than £7.6bn in the UK without attracting any corporation tax on the profits from those sales.

Amazon was able to pull this bit of tax trickery by registering all of its corporate profits in Luxembourg, a notorious corporate tax haven, calling its UK business simply a delivery service.

Of course, Amazon is hardly alone in shifting money around to different countries to dodge taxes. Google, for instance, drove its U.S. tax rate all the way down to 2.4 percent by accounting for its profits in Ireland and islands in the Caribbean. 30 major corporations in the U.S. made $160 billion over the last three years, but paid no taxes thanks to a variety of loopholes and tax evasion.

Foreclosed homes in predominately white neighborhoods are more likely to be maintained by the banks that own them than homes in predominately African-American and Latino communities, according to a report released by the National Fair Housing Alliance. Failure to keep up foreclosed homes can drive down home prices, lead to higher crime and vagrancy rates, and make it harder for the homes to be sold, and those conditions are much more likely in minority neighborhoods in the nine cities the NFHA investigated, the Washington Post reports:

They found that properties in predominately black and Latino neighborhoods were far more likely than those in predominately white areas to be left in disrepair, with maintenance problems such as broken or boarded-up windows, unkempt yards, water damage and unsecured entrances. In addition, foreclosed properties in minority neighborhoods were routinely less likely to have for-sale signs than those in white communities.

“The inferior way in which banks maintain and market their REO properties in communities of color actually changes the character of and serves to degrade the quality of life in these neighborhoods,” said the report by NFHA, a consortium of groups from across the country dedicated to eliminating housing discrimination.

The report is the latest sign of discrimination on the part of big banks when it comes to America’s housing market. Earlier reports found that blacks and Latinos were twice as likely to have been affected by the housing crisis, largely because an industry that has become infamous for its predatory lending practices was even more predatory when dealing with black and Latino borrowers. Banks and lenders often pushed minority borrowers into subprime loans even when they qualified for prime loans, adding as much as $100,000 in interest payments over the life of the loan.

The NFHA did not name the banks that owned the properties it investigated, but it does plan to file administrative complaints with the Department of Housing and Urban Development soon.

Republicans have been trying to pin the blame for the recent rise in oil prices on President Obama, relying on the false claim that if Obama just allowed more drilling for oil on U.S. lands, prices would magically decline. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has “instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger” as they push for more drilling.

Many experts, though, have pointed out that its not for a lack of drilling that oil prices are increasing, but rampant speculation in oil markets. Michael Greenberger, a former regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) who oversaw the futures markets, told McClatchy that the increase is due to “excessive speculation” on the part of Wall Street:

“It is similar to the gambling Wall Street did on whether or not people would pay their subprime (below-market rate) mortgages in the mortgage meltdown,” said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a former federal regulator of financial markets. “Now they are betting on the upward direction of the price of oil” … “It is excessive speculation, which is a fancy word for saying that gamblers wearing Wall Street suits have taken these markets over,” he said.

Back in February, oil prices cracked $100 per barrel despite the lowest demand since 1997.

The Obama administration has said that it will crack down on excessive oil speculation, but it’s oil speculation task force has hardly done anything at all. The CFTC, meanwhile, has been slow to implement new rules designed to rein in speculators that were a part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Democrats have been pushing the agency to begin that enforcement.

In order to justify calling for further tax cuts for the rich, conservatives love to point out that about 40 percent of federal income taxes are paid by the richest one percent of taxpayers. And they often mistakenly claim that the richest one percent is responsible for paying 40 percent of all taxes.

This particular statistic completely misses two important points. First, state and local taxes tend to hit poorer households harder than they do the rich. More importantly, the rich are paying such a large share of federal income taxes because they make such a disproportionately large share of the income.

In fact, as a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice notes, “the share of total taxes paid by the richest one percent (21.6 percent) is almost identical to that group’s share of total income (21.0 percent).”

When all taxes are taken into account, America’s tax system “is just barely progressive.” As Michael Linden and Sarah Ayres have put it, “the rich pay more because they have more, period. What is truly unfair is that some in the 1 percent can use special rates, loopholes, and tax benefits to reduce their tax bill so much that they end up paying a lower share of their income in taxes than average working families.” But Republicans still insist on pushing for new tax cuts for the rich and the institution of a tax code that’s even less progressive.