Senate Republicans last night successfully filibustered the Buffett Rule, a minimum tax on millionaires that the GOP has falsely claimed would actually hit small business owners and “job creators.” The Buffett Rule, the GOP says, is a gimmick that doesn’t raise enough revenue to merit consideration and is simply a weapon of class warfare, not a means to bring about more equity in America’s tax structure.

A new report from Innovation Ohio and the Center for American Progress, however, shows that the Buffett Rule is far from just a gimmick. According to the report, some of America’s wealthiest zip codes — ritzy communities like Fisher Island, Florida and Wyoming’s Teton Village — collectively pay lower effective tax rates than other lower-income communities, even though they are largely populated by millionaires. In seven of the wealthiest zip codes, the report found, 27 percent of residents earn 94 percent of the income — an average of $2.2 million annually — but their combined effective income and payroll tax rate is just 17.2 percent:

In zip codes with far lower incomes, however, the tax rates are higher. According to the report, 99 percent of all Ohio taxpayers live in zip codes with effective tax rates higher than 17.2 percent. The average Ohio taxpayer earned roughly $49,000 in 2008 but paid an effective tax rate of 21.5 percent, higher than the rate in any of the seven wealthy zip codes examined. Two-thirds of Ohio taxpayers live in zip codes where the average income is less than $50,000, but the tax rate is higher than 17.2 percent.

The data is similar in other states — 99 percent of Pennsylvania taxpayers, for instance, live in zip codes with effective tax rates above 17.2 percent.

The report adds to the evidence that the American tax code has grown incredibly benevolent to the richest Americans. Republicans, however, continue to urge lower- and middle-class Americans to “share some of the responsibility” of reducing the nation’s debt, all while pushing for even larger tax breaks for the wealthy.

As part of his attempt to appear more relateable, presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney sat with a handful of regular, working Americans in Pennsylvania today to discuss their plight in the struggling economy. But the Romney campaign may not have vetted the attendees to make sure they were sufficiently anti-tax before giving them access to the candidate and his picnic table full of lemonade and pretzels.

One woman at the gathering said she was scared about the fate of her public schools, given deep cuts to the state budget (incidentally, the man who pushed those cuts, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, endorsed Romney today). “I don’t like to see cuts made in anything in education,” she said, citing her daughter’s experience. Another man chimed in, noting that “the fat” had already been trimmed and now important education programs were being hit.

He went on to say, “None of us like to pay more taxes, but sometimes that’s necessary.” Another woman added, “It’s a necessary evil.” “Right, right,” a third person said as everyone in the group nodded. Watch it:

Indeed, while Republican lawmakers generally refuse to raise taxes and will look only at the spending side of the equation when making budgeting decisions, most reasonable Americans would probably realize that both revenues (taxes) and spending (government programs) need to be adjusted in order to balance budgets.

Two-thirds of the largest 200 U.S. corporations lobbied on at least one tax bill between 2007 and 2010, and here’s why: the majority of them ended up paying lower taxes in 2010.

The eight major corporations that spent the most on lobbying, for a total $540 million, all saw their tax rates decrease. According to a Sunlight Foundation report, the odds that those companies saw lower rates merely by chance is less than 1 in 100. The odds that six of those corporations paid seven percentage points less is even lower, at only 1 in 100,000.

Instead, the reduction was likely a result of their presence in Washington, lobbying for tax giveaways.

Company	2007-2010 decline	2007 rate	2010 rate	2007- 2009 lobbying (in millions)	Estimated tax reduction (in millions)
Exxon Mobil	-1.1%	41.8%	40.7%	$81.92	-$565.32
Verizon Communications	-7.9%	27.4%	19.4%	$77.58	-$1,005.51
General Electric	-7.6%	15.0%	7.4%	$73.17	-$1,082.70
At&T	-40.4%	34.0%	-6.4%	$70.96	-$7,359.95
Altria	-1.6%	28.9%	27.4%	$63.31	-$160.66
Amgen	-7.1%	20.1%	13.0%	$58.33	-$377.16
Northrop Grumman	-11.4%	32.9%	21.5%	$57.56	-$296.08
Boeing	-7.1%	33.7%	26.5%	$56.99	-$321.5
Median among 200 companies	-0.6%	31.8%	31.6%	$5.48	-$13.08

These companies are notorious for tax dodging, like ExxonMobil, which spent the most on lobbying and paid $565 million less in taxes. AT&T received the greatest return on lobbying, paying $7.3 billion less. Both of these companies spent even more on lobbying in 2011, with Exxon spending up by $300,000 and AT&T’s up $4,834,922. Exxon’s 2011 tax rate decreased from 17.6 to 13 percent in 2011.

The Huffington Post also pointed to a 2011 study finding that the 280 most profitable corporations paid an average 18.5 percent tax rate, benefiting from industry-specific tax breaks, loopholes and offshore tax shelters.

Wall Street banks have pushed to water down and already-weakened version of the Volcker Rule, which bans banks from engaging in risky proprietary trades with taxpayer-backed funds. The banks fought the rule before it became law under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and have kept the fight up since, arguing that the rule would hinder their ability to compete or to lend to businesses.

Roger Vasey, who ran Merrill Lynch’s global debt markets for six years, feels differently. In an editorial published in the Wall Street Journal, Vasey disputed that the Volcker Rule would damage the banks’ ability to make profits and said it was “necessary to correct a mistake that poses a danger to our economy.” That mistake, Vasey wrote, was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented government-insured banks from engaging in the risky practices the Volcker Rule would now limit:

The Volcker Rule—part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law—is necessary to correct a mistake that poses a danger to our economy. [...]

The number and complexity of various financial vehicles has grown over the years, but the principle remains the same. If the potential loss from a bank’s overall position across its securities holdings cannot be projected accurately under various deteriorating market conditions, and effective limits on that position established and monitored accordingly, that position should not exist.

And no financial institution with explicit or implied taxpayer support should be in the proprietary trading business.

Vasey’s experience at Merrill Lynch is a “case in point” that banks can be successful without proprietary trading, he argues. Despite taking “minimal risk,” Merrill Lynch was highly profitable, particularly on the desk Vasey managed. At the time, Merrill operated without government-insured deposits and “avoided taking too much risk” because it feared the exact type of “debt bomb” that caused the financial crisis. But after the repeal of Glass-Steagall, banks that did have government backing were able to take much riskier positions, putting taxpayers at risk when the crisis occurred.

Vasey isn’t the only former Wall Streeter to support the Volcker Rule. Former Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith unwittingly made the case for the rule when he resigned from the firm via an editorial in the New York Times, and former Citigroup CEO John Reed has gone even farther, calling the rule a “critical response” to the prop trading problem but criticizing it for not imposing stiff enough penalties on institutions that violate it.

Today is Equal Pay Day, the day that women completed the extra 3.5 months of work they needed in order to make an equal amount to what men earned in 2011. And while it is fairly common knowledge that women make 77 cents for a man’s dollar in the workplace — which is why we need to work 15.5 months to match a man’s 12 — it’s not as well known that the pay gap is much worse for some women than others. For instance:

Women make less by industry: Women tend to work in lower-paying industries: 68 percent of jobs in education are held by women, as are 78 percent of health and social assistance jobs. But even within those industries where they are the vast majority of employees, women are paid significantly less than their male counterparts. This chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the percentage of men’s income that women make in given sectors. In some of the biggest industries for female employment, men still make significantly more:

Black and Latina women are still struggling much more than their white counterparts: While women make less than men, black and Latina women make significantly less — black women make just 69 cents, and Latinas just 60 for every dollar made by men. At the same time, women of color are more often single mothers and thus the primary earners for their families. This chart from NYU’s Wagner school illustrates (PDF) the wage disparities:

Women with higher education face a larger pay gap: ThinkProgress has learned that women face the largest pay gap on Wall Street, and that even CEOs of lobbying firms get paid less if they’re women. But there’s a greater trend. The more that women pay into their education, the less they get out compared to their male peers. According to an analysis from the Center for American Progress, “The lifetime wage gap for a woman who did not finish high school is $300,000, while the lifetime wage gap for a woman with at least a bachelor’s degree is $723,000.”

Today may be the day we commemorate Equal Pay Day, but many women will have to work additional months just to collect the same pay that men got in 2011. Even if the gap were closed today, women (especially older women) may not have enough months left to make up the wages lost over their lifetimes, which can total hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Today is Tax Day, the day on which federal and state income tax filings are due for all Americans. The complexity of the tax code makes filing taxes a headache for most individuals, who have to root through the various deductions and credits they may be eligible for.

The government spends $1.3 trillion on various tax expenditures each year, enough to fill the entire deficit in President Obama’s latest budget proposal. And while some of the popular tax credits have real benefits for low- and middle-income Americans, the vast majority of the breaks go to the wealthy. In all, tax expenditures provide an extra quarter-million dollars a year for individuals in the top 1 percent of income-earners, according to economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers:

Even as many areas of government spending have been cut to the bone, our tax code remains larded up with expenditures that cost taxpayers $1.3 trillion every year. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the biggest tax expenditures apply to employer-provided health insurance, pension contributions and mortgages.

Popular as such tax breaks may be, they differ from typical government spending in that they give bigger subsidies to wealthier families. [...] Taken together, individual income tax expenditures are the equivalent of sending $686 each year to those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, $3,175 to those in the middle fifth, and $30,714 to those in the upper fifth. The average member of the top 1 percent gets nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year — a statistic that might have proved useful for the folks protesting in Zuccotti Park.

President Obama and Senate Democrats proposed the Buffett Rule, a minimum tax on millionaires, and fought to close other tax breaks that benefit the wealthiest Americans. Meanwhile, the budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and passed by House Republicans would supposedly pay for massive tax breaks for the wealthy by ending unspecified tax expenditures, but the GOP won’t explain which breaks they have in mind.

The GOP spent the last year making the case that the nation’s tax code unfairly benefits the low- and middle-income Americans, pushing the myth that half of Americans don’t pay any taxes. But as Stevens and Wolfers note, the fact that tax expenditures disproportionately benefit the top 1 percent makes it easy to “come to the mistaken conclusion that our tax code is more progressive than it actually is.”

As of today — which is Equal Pay Day 2012 — women make 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. Over the course of a woman’s career, that disparity adds up to more than $430,000 in lost wages for an individual woman. As Center for American Progress economic analyst Matt Separa noted, the pay gap means that women fall behind economically in a number of ways:

Because of this gap women working full time are able to afford less education, housing, transportation, food, and health care for themselves and their families than their male counterparts. As a result women and female-headed households are more likely to be in poverty and less likely to have health insurance. The pay gap translates into a significant economic disadvantage for women and their families, especially when nearly two-thirds (63.9 percent) of women are now either the primary breadwinner or a co-breadwinner, bringing home at least 25 percent of their family’s income.

With the money lost over her lifetime, a woman could feed a family of four for 37 years, pay for seven four-year degrees at a public university, or simply save the money for retirement, boosting her quality of life when she leaves the workforce:

For some women, of course, the pay gap is even worse. According to a report from the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, Latina women face a pay gap of 40 percent.

Senate Republicans last night successfully blocked the Buffett Rule, a proposed tax on millionaires that the GOP says would unfairly hit America’s small businesses and job creators. “It represents a huge tax increase on job creators,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said on MSNBC last week. “About 80 percent of our businesses file their taxes as individuals, so they would get hit by this Buffett Rule. Everybody thinks we’re just going to tax the hedge fund manager and the movie star, what you’re getting is that successful small business.”

But claims like Ryan’s are wrong, according to data from the U.S. Treasury. In fact, the Buffett Rule would hit just 1 percent of America’s small businesses, CNN Money reports:

But federal data show that only 1% of small business owners have enough income to qualify for the Buffett Rule, according to the Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis, which reviewed filings in 2007. The report, which was issued last year, examined 20 million tax returns — and only 273,000 would meet the Buffett Rule threshold.

Economists and tax experts don’t expect the landscape has changed drastically since that study was done. Most small firms are sole proprietorships, one-person operations like Rebel Luxe in Los Angeles.

The Buffett Rule would only hit households with incomes above $1 million that do not already pay a certain tax rate, a situation that is unlikely to apply to small businesses, because the vast majority of small business owners don’t earn $1 million a year and those that do are already taxed at normal income tax rates.

Rather, the rule, which would hit an estimated 217,000 households in 2015, would have a greater effect on individuals whose income is subject to lower capital gains and carried interest taxes, or those who use various loopholes to dramatically lower their tax rate. As the Treasury report shows, small businesses aren’t likely to be in that group, no matter what Republicans (and some Democrats) say.