Last month, McClatchy reported that the Obama administration’s oil speculation task force had met just a “handful” of times, doing basically nothing to stop the rampant speculation that is helping push up gas prices. And evidently that is not the only task force having a hard time getting off the ground.

According to Mike Gecan and Arnie Graf of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, part of the nation’s largest network of multi-faith community organizations, President Obama’s mortgage fraud task force — which was announced during this year’s State of the Union and is headed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneidermann (D-NY) — still has “no office, no phones, no staff, and no executive director”:

On March 9 — 45 days after the speech and 30 days after the announcement — we met with Schneiderman in New York City and asked him for an update. He had just returned from Washington, where he had been personally looking for office space. As of that date, he had no office, no phones, no staff and no executive director. None of the 55 staff members promised by Holder had materialized. On April 2, we bumped into Schneiderman on a train leaving Washington for New York and learned that the situation was the same.

Tuesday, calls to the Justice Department’s switchboard requesting to be connected with the working group produced the answer, “I really don’t know where to send you.” After being transferred to the attorney general’s office and asking for a phone number for the working group, the answer was, “I’m not aware of one.”

Last week, Reuters reported that “the task force has identified” office space and is planning a move there shortly:

The task force includes the Justice Department, the SEC, the FBI and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, among others. It is charged with investigating the pooling and sale of home loans that contributed to the financial crisis.

While the group faced some skepticism, considering the crisis began nearly five years ago, there are signs it is serious about bringing cases.

The co-chairs meet formally every week and talk almost every day to coordinate on “a range of investigations,” a Justice Department official said, on condition of anonymity.

About 50 staff members are working on the effort, and the task force has identified separate office space in Washington and will move some personnel there, the official said.

The Justice Department last month posted a one-year position of full-time coordinator for the working group who could help manage discovery and coordinate investigations, according to the job posting.

A recent report showed that mortgage foreclosure scams have spiked 60 percent in 2012, while the nation’s biggest banks continue to sit upon a slew of fraudulent mortgage documents. A recent investigation of foreclosures in San Francisco found that nearly all of them had legal problems or suspicious documents, prompting the city council to suggest a foreclosure moratorium.

When presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney unveiled his new tax plan in February, he insisted the plan would be deficit neutral even though it provides a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. By ending tax deductions and closing loopholes for wealthy Americans, Romney said, he would make up for the drain on federal revenues such a massive cut would produce.

Until last week, Romney hadn’t revealed any of the loopholes he planned to close. But at a Sunday fundraiser in Florida, reporters overheard Romney name three deductions he might end — the deduction for mortgage interest on vacation homes and deductions for both state and local taxes. Ending those deductions would raise about $40 billion, meaning Romney has a long way to go to make his plan deficit neutral, as the New York Times David Leonhardt reports:

Yet $40 billion still pales compared with the size of future deficits or, for that matter, the additional tax cuts that Mr. Romney has proposed. Those cuts would cost the government more than $400 billion a year relative to current policy, according to the Tax Policy Center. Relative to current law – which includes a series of tax increases that take effect on Jan. 1 – the Romney tax cuts would cost close to $900 billion a year.

To put it another way, if Mr. Romney eliminated the deductions he mentioned, he would need to come up with at least 10 times as much loophole-closing — and maybe 20 or 30 times as much — to keep his tax plan from adding to the deficit.

The Romney plan may, in fact, have to find even more revenue than Leonhardt and the Tax Policy Center estimate to end up deficit neutral. The TPC analysis assumes a reduction in the Alternative Minimum Tax but Romney’s plan abolishes it completely. His plan would ultimately cost $10.7 trillion over the next decade, four times the cost of the budget-busting Bush tax cuts, making for a “mathematical disaster” that doesn’t come close to adding up.

Thus far, it’s clear that Romney has a plan to give the wealthy another massive tax cut. What he doesn’t have, however, is a plan to pay for it.

House Republicans this week plan to vote on a bill proposed that Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) that is supposedly aimed at “small businesses,” but in reality would cut taxes for millionaires. Due to its non-existent targeting to actual small businesses, the cut would benefit hedge fund managers, wealthy lawyers, professional sports teams, and Oprah’s production company.

Despite all this, Cantor is still “puzzled” that President Obama would threaten to veto the bill, which he did yesterday. On CNBC this morning, Cantor accused Obama of not caring about small businesses due to his opposition to the tax giveaway:

Well, listen, the President’s now issued a veto threat against the bill, which is kind of puzzling, because the President has continued to say he’s for small business, he’s for the middle class, and yet he’s now denying any help to small businesses, who frankly could use a 20 percent tax cut.

Watch it:

Cantor’s tax boondoggle would cost $46 billion and gives millionaires an average tax cut of $45,000. Meanwhile, for actual small businesses that can’t afford a platoon of accountants and lawyers, the tax cut will add another layer of complexity to the tax code. The IRS says that the tax cut would increase tax compliance costs and require businesses to perform additional analyses.

President Obama officially designated Tuesday as Equal Pay Day, marking the day American women had finally worked the three-and-a-half extra months it takes for them to earn the same as men do in a calendar year. American women make just 77 percent as much as their male counterparts, costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars over their working lives.

In 2009, Obama signed legislation aimed at closing the pay gap that exists between men and women, and Equal Pay Day represented a push for further efforts to address the problem. But the inequities facing female workers apparently don’t exist in the eyes of New Hampshire GOP spokesman Tory Mazzola, who said efforts to close the pay gap were actually about giving a “hand-out to trial lawyers,” WBIN TV reports:

MAZZOLA: Instead of being about fair pay, it’s really about a hand-out to trial lawyers because it expands the areas that people can sue their employers unnecessarily.

Watch a news report:

Still, the GOP hasn’t exactly been sympathetic to the equal pay cause. It fought to prevent passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Act in 2009 and blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act in 2010. The campaign of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has struggled to indicate that it is even aware of the problem, and the candidate himself has yet to say exactly where he stands on either piece of legislation.

After years of saying that tax cuts never needed to be offset by spending cuts, Republicans changed their tune last fall and demanded that the extension of the payroll tax cut had to be offset by budget reductions elsewhere. It was a new position for the GOP, and it lasted as long as it took for them to propose their next tax cut for millionaires.

Despite calls from some conservative members of the party, GOP leadership won’t demand spending cuts to offset the “small business” tax cut that is being proposed by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), Politico reports:

Several Republican leadership aides say they have no plans to offset the tax cut, which a centerpiece of their agenda during these next two weeks in session.

The payroll tax cut, which Republicans did everything to block until it became politically impossible to continue, primarily benefited working class Americans and has real economic benefits. Cantor’s tax cut, on the other hand, is supposedly targeted at small businesses, but will largely aid millionaires like Oprah Winfrey and the owners of professional sports franchises. According to the Center for American Progress’ Seth Hanlon, the bill gives millionaires an average tax cut of $45,000.

Cantor’s bill is hardly the only Republican-sponsored legislation that is no longer subject to the orthodoxy the party claimed was so important just six months ago. The House GOP’s budget provides $3 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and though its author, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), claims his plan will maintain current revenue levels, the budget would actually make the nation’s debt worse.

Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-OH), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, defended the House Republican budget at a tax policy summit yesterday — as well as the broader idea that taxes on the wealthy need to be cut while taxes on lower-income Americans should be raised. When asked by ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes to square the GOP’s explicit desire to cut taxes for the rich with the fact that it’s budget would raise taxes on low-income working Americans, Tiberi responded by saying that to do otherwise would be to “beat up on people who are trying to be successful.” He then made the case for raising taxes on the poor by lamenting that they don’t have any “skin in the game”:

TIBERI: I think the federal government has an obligation to make sure that we deal with people who have difficulties. But at the same time, the tax code shouldn’t be used as a tool to just bring revenue in and beat up people who are trying to be successful…So I think we’ve got to lower the tax rates, both for corporations and for American individuals. And let them try to grow our economy and grow jobs so people like you and me can have an opportunity to work.

KEYES: But you’re only talking about lowering tax rates on individuals in the upper income areas. You’re talking about raising taxes…

TIBERI: Well, it’s hard to lower taxes on people who don’t pay taxes. As you know, you have the Earned Income Tax Credit, so you have folks who are actually getting a check and not paying income tax…If you don’t have skin in the game, even if it’s ten bucks a quarter, I think it changes the debate on what the role of the federal government is and what the role of state government is.

Watch it:

The budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), defended by Tiberi, and passed by the House Republicans, would cut taxes for millionaires by an average of $187,000 in 2014 alone, even if tax expenditures are eliminated to offset the revenue loss. Meanwhile, it would allow tax cuts on low-income Americans, passed in response to the economic collapse, to expire. Families making $30,000 or less would see their after-tax income fall, in some cases by as much as 2 percent, while those making over $1 million would see it rise by 12.5 percent.

Furthermore more than two-thirds of Americans who don’t pay income taxes still have “skin in the game” due to payroll taxes. Payroll tax receipts contributed $865 billion in revenue in 2010 — almost equal to the $899 billion contributed by income taxes. Adding up both payroll and income taxes, less than one quarter of Americans owe none of either, and the vast majority of them are poor, in school, or elderly and retired.

Apple and several other major tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, have been pushing for what’s known as a tax repatriation holiday, which would allow them to bring money they have stashed overseas back to the U.S. at a much lower rate than the standard 35 percent. As we have noted over and over, a repatriation holiday enacted in 2004 just provided a windfall to corporations and did not achieve any of its policy aims. And corporations, of course, proceeded to stash even more money overseas in the hopes that Congress would adopt another holiday somewhere down the line.

And as a new report from the Greenlining Institute found, tech companies are already doing quite well when it comes to lowering their tax bills. In fact, the top 30 tech companies in the Fortune 500 paid an effective tax rate of 16 percent, after making $181 billion in profits last year. Apple, despite its billions in profits, is paying lower taxes than middle class families:

The tax rate paid by these companies has plunged – from 23.6 percent in 2009 to 19.9 percent in 2010 and 16 percent in 2011. The hypothetical top corporate tax rate of 35 percent is almost entirely a fiction.

The tax rate paid by Apple, the world’s most valuable company with a stock valuation that passed $500 billion in March 2012, has dropped even more dramatically. With profits soaring past $34 billion last year, the company’s tax rate fell from 24.8 percent in 2009 to 14.7 percent in 2010 and 9.8 percent in 2011. Apple’s tax rate over the last three years was less than that of middle-income Americans with average household incomes of $64,500 per year; its 2011 tax rate was lower than that of American households making an average of $42,500 per year.

Tech companies use a variety of activities, including shifting profits offshore to low- or no-tax jurisdictions to make their tax bills dramatically drop. And a Politico review of financial documents found that the companies pushing hardest for a repatriation holiday have moved hundreds of billions of dollars overseas, counting on Congress to provide them with yet another misguided tax break.