According to a new analysis by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the payday lending industry has been going gangbusters with its spending in Washington over the last few years. In addition to spending nearly $5 million lobbying last year — up from less than $1 million in 2005 — payday lenders are on pace to make more in campaign donations to federal candidates than they ever have before:

CREW’s research shows the payday loan industry is on course to donate more than ever to federal candidates this election cycle. Payday lenders’ political action committees (PACs), trade associations, and employees have contributed at least $1.32 million so far, according to campaign contributions tracked by Political Moneyline. That is already almost equal to the $1.5 million payday lenders contributed over the course of the entire 2010 election cycle. So how, exactly, are payday lenders expecting to collect interest on this investment?

As we’ve noted several times, the payday lending industry makes billions by fleecing low-income Americans. About 120 million payday loans are made annually in the U.S., with an average interest rate of 455 percent. The Center for Responsible Lending has found 76 percent of payday loan volume ($3.5 billion in annual fees) is due to “churning,” which is repeat borrowing by customers who paid off their loan, but because of the interest, require another loan before their next paycheck.

Payday lenders, many of which are financed by the nation’s biggest banks, have upped their lobbying and campaign donations in response to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has made predatory payday lending one of the areas that it hopes to more rigorously regulate.

And it’s telling that the three lawmakers collecting the most donations are Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), vice chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, and Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), chair of the House Financial Services Committee, all of whom vociferously oppose the CFPB. Yesterday, the House Financial Services Committee voted to gut the budget of the CFPB, showing that these donations could be a fantastic investment.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) last week attempted to use his Catholic faith to justify the House GOP’s budget cuts to programs that aide the poor, earning an admonishment from faith leaders across America. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops jumped in this week, criticizing the budget’s cuts to food stamps, tax credits for immigrant families, and other safety net programs as “unjustified and wrong.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), who, like Ryan, is Catholic, brushed off the criticism yesterday. Ryan responded today, saying the GOP’s plan was to remove the poor’s dependency on the government to help take them “from welfare to work”:

MacCallum: The Catholic Bishops conference has also come out and said they don’t like what the plan entails for food stamps and also a child credit for illegal immigrants. What do you think about that?

RYAN: [...] These aren’t all the Catholic bishops, and we just respectfully disagree. We think quadrupling this area has not succeeded to get people out of poverty. One in six people, Martha, are in poverty today. Poverty is at the highest rate it’s been at in a generation under the president’s failed policies. What we’re trying to do here is take people from welfare to work, just like we succeeded in doing when we reformed cash welfare in 1996. We want to take those ideas and reform these other welfare programs so we don’t keep people on welfare but take people from welfare to work.

Watch it:

Ryan painted the dispute with the Bishops as a respectful disagreement, but as ThinkProgress noted last week, his budget ignores the Church’s social teaching when it comes to helping the poor.

He also ignored the facts regarding the nation’s social safety net. Rather than reinforcing poverty, social safety net programs have helped keep millions of Americans out of poverty. And while Ryan touts the GOP-led 1996 welfare reform effort as a success, it created a program that has failed to help the neediest Americans. “[M]uch as overlooked critics of the restrictions once warned, a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared,” the New York Times wrote of the reformed welfare program earlier this month.

His argument that the safety net is on an unsustainable path of growth is also wrong. Many of the programs were expanded after the Great Recession as the unemployment rate rose and more Americans were in need; as the economy has recovered, those programs are now shrinking.

When Republicans first took back the House of Representatives in 2010, the new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), said that he feels Washington’s role is to “serve the banks.” And his committee certainly followed through on that directive yesterday, voting to repeal a key provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that is aimed at preventing a repeat of the ad-hoc bank bailouts that occurred in 2008:

The House Financial Services Committee voted along party lines to repeal the section of the law that allows the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp to liquidate large, failing financial institutions seized by the government.

This authority was included in the law in an attempt to avoid the type of market chaos and government bailouts that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 by giving the government a mechanism for better controlling the breakup of a financial giant.

As I explained here, this provision corrected a key flaw in the nation’s regulatory structure by giving the government the power to seize and wind down a failing financial firm, recouping any losses to the taxpayer by selling off the failed firm’s assets. In 2008, due to not having this power, the government was left in the unenviable position of either bailing out banks or potentially allowing the financial system to implode.

House Republicans justified repealing the provision by claiming that it would reduce deficits by $22 billion over the next ten years. This was based on a rather bizarre score from the Congressional Budget Office, which said the provisions “costs” $22 billion because, in the event that the government needs to unwind a failing firm, it might not recoup all of the money spent unwinding it within a ten-year budget window; therefore, CBO said, the provision “costs” money (though no money is actually being spent). As financial analyst Brian Gardner said, “it’s tough to understand where the $22 billion comes from — it’s a wild assumption since there are currently no cash flows involved with this part of Dodd-Frank.”

Financial Services Committee Republicans also voted to gut the budget of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to eliminate a key foreclosure prevention program (that, admittedly, has been underwhelming). If their goal is to “serve the banks,” they could barely have done more to accomplish that yesterday, short of just giving them more free government money.

According to the latest edition of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch report, the gap between CEO pay and worker pay expanded last year. In 2011, CEOs in the Fortune 500 made an average of $12 million, about 380 times what the average worker makes:

The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay between CEOs of the S&P 500 Index companies and U.S. workers widened to 380 times in 2011 from 343 times in 2010. Back in 1980, the average large company CEO only received 42 times the average worker’s pay.

This explosion in pay certainly isn’t justified by corporate performance. In fact, “while the average CEO pay increased 13.9 percent at S&P 500 Index companies in 2011, the S&P 500 Index ended the year at the same level as it started.” Just this week, shareholders at Citigroup voted to reject CEO Vikram Pandit’s pay package (in a non-binding vote), saying that he was collecting millions while the company floundered.

Meanwhile, workers saw their pay increase by just 2.8 percent last year. Already, most of the gains of the nascent economic recovery have been going to the richest Americans (just as they have for recent economic expansions). In 2010, the richest 1 percent captured 93 percent of the nation’s income gains.

The AFL-CIO is calling for regulators to implement a rule included in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that requires companies to disclose their CEO-to-worker pay ratio. “Astronomical CEO pay is based on the false idea that the success of a corporation is due to one CEO genius. In reality, all employees create value, and CEO pay levels should be more in line with the rest of their company’s employee pay structure. CEOs should be paid as a member of a team, not as a superstar,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) revived one of the GOP’s favorite talking points this morning, telling attendees at a Politico-sponsored breakfast event that it was imperative that Congress address the “problem” that “more than 45 percent” of Americans aren’t paying income taxes.

The GOP has repeatedly made the claim that the poorest Americans need more “skin in the game.” Today, response to a question by ABC’s Jon Karl, Cantor made it clear that Republicans are interested in raising taxes on the poor while lowering tax rates for everyone else as part of any comprehensive tax reform plan:

CANTOR: We also know that over 45 percent of the people in this country don’t pay income taxes at all, and we have to question whether that’s fair. And should we broaden the base in a way that we can lower the rates for everybody that pays taxes. [...]

KARL: Just wondering, what do you do about that? Are you saying we need to have a tax increase on the 45 percent who right now pay no federal income tax?

CANTOR: I’m saying that, just in a macro way of looking at it, you’ve got to discuss that issue. … How do you deal with a shrinking pie and number of people and entities that support the operations of government, and how do you go about continuing to milk them more, if that’s what some want to do, but preserve their ability to provide the growth engine? … I’ve never believed that you go raise taxes on those that have been successful that are paying in, taking away from them, so that you just hand out and give to someone else.

Watch Cantor’s full answer here:

ThinkProgress has repeatedly explained why many Americans don’t pay income taxes — most either don’t make enough money or are college students or seniors with no yearly incomes. And those Americans are subject to various other forms of taxation, including the federal payroll tax.

The richest Americans, meanwhile, have seen their tax rates fall even as their incomes skyrocketed, contributing to rising inequality and exploding federal deficits. As Cantor made plain today, though, none of that matters. In addition to making the poor and middle class shoulder the burden of draconian budget cuts, Republicans want to raise their taxes too.

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

The House GOP has scheduled a vote for later today on a $46 billion tax giveaway. H.R. 9, sponsored by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), would give a massive, deficit-financed windfall to hedge fund managers, sports team owners, celebrities and other wealthy people. It would increase tax compliance burdens on small businesses and actually incentivize businesses to put off making investments and new hires until 2013 or later. (For our full analysis, click here.) The White House has issued a veto threat.

In arguing that his bill would create jobs, Cantor is now touting an analysis by Gary Robbins of Fiscal Associates. Robbins, a leading purveyor of supply-side economics for decades, appears to be the only economist that Cantor could find to help sell his bill. Robbins was last heard from using recycled supply-side arguments to sing the praises of Herman Cain’s tremendously ill-conceived “9-9-9” tax plan as a paid consultant to the Cain campaign.

So if anyone is likely to conclude that Cantor’s tax cut is a good way to create jobs, it’s Robbins. But even his analysis finds that Cantor’s bill is a dud.

Robbins predicts that Cantor’s tax cut — a one-year, 20 percent deduction for businesses that qualify — would add $42.6 billion to the federal budget deficit. (That’s a little less than Congress’s official estimate of $46 billion because Robbins’ revenue estimates are based on his own assumptions about economic growth.) Robbins also estimates that such a one-year tax cut would create 39,000 jobs. So according to the analysis that Cantor is touting on his own website, H.R. 9 would increase the federal deficit by $1.1 million for every job created.

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Millions of Americans have been slammed by the decline in housing prices and the foreclosure crisis that followed the 2008 financial collapse, but a new report from First Focus and the Brookings Institution shows that there is one group of victims that has largely been ignored. According to the report, more than 8.3 million children are directly affected by the ongoing crisis, as single-family homes and rental properties continue to enter foreclosure.

Children have been “the invisible victims” of the crisis, but 2.3 million have already been directly affected by foreclosure. An estimated six million are in high-risk foreclosure situations, as the chart below shows:

Between 12 and 19 percent of children are in at-risk situations in California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, and more than half a million children have gone through foreclosure in California alone. In six other states — Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, and Rhode Island — between 8 and 10 percent of children are at-risk. But even these estimates are “conservative,” the report says, as it examined mortgage data from 2004-2008 and is based on loan status as of February 2011. The actual numbers could be much higher.

The number of children living in poverty, exacerbated by the effects of the Great Recession, reached 15.7 million in 2011, and the number of homeless children has risen 33 percent in the last three years. The foreclosure crisis has contributed to that, placing children at a higher risk of entering poverty, and as the U.S. Census noted, “Children who live in poverty…are more likely than their peers to have cognitive and behavioral difficulties, to complete fewer years of education, and, as they grow up, to experience more years of unemployment.”