City councils in the nation’s two largest cities have approved laws aimed at forcing banks to invest more in their local communities. The Los Angeles city council unanimously passed its “responsible banking” ordinance yesterday afternoon; the New York’s city council passed its own shortly after by a vote of 44-4.

The laws were supported and pushed by activists from the 99 Percent Movement and religious groups who have led campaigns to move money from the nation’s largest banks. The ordinances give preference for city contracts to banks that make the most substantial investments in the local community through small business loans, home loans, foreclosure prevention, and other programs, according to the PICO National Network, a coalition of religious organizations that pushed for the Los Angeles ordinance:

The New York City ordinance would require banks to provide information on reinvestment activities, including foreclosure and loan modification information, that would be used to evaluate the banks that want to hold city deposits. The Los Angeles ordinance will gather data on banks’ participation in foreclosure prevention and home loan principal reduction programs, as well as other community reinvestment information.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is likely to veto his city’s ordinance, another poke at 99 Percent Movement activists who have butted heads with him over the last eight months. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is expected to sign his city’s version into law.

Cleveland became the first major city to adopt a responsible banking ordinance in 1991, and they have spread quickly since the 99 Percent Movement ignited last fall. Pittsburgh and San Diego recently passed similar ordinances, and city councils in Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco are all considering laws now.

The donor doing the most to finance Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) campaign against a recall hasn’t put the same effort into financing Wisconsin’s state government, according to income tax data obtained by a non-profit organization based in the state.

Diane Hendricks is a billionaire who donated $500,000 — the largest donation ever made in a Wisconsin governor’s race — to Walker this year, but the company she owns paid absolutely nothing in taxes from 2005 to 2008, the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future reports:

ABC Supply may be a huge money-maker for Hendricks, but the Wisconsin corporate income tax returns she files claim the company makes not a penny in taxable profit.

ABC Supply paid exactly $0.00 in state corporate income tax in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, according to the state Department of Revenue. Tax data for more recent years were not available when the information was requested from the department.

Hendricks gained notoriety earlier this month when Walker was caught on film admitting to her that he was planning a “divide and conquer” strategy with the state’s public sector unions. That strategy, which led to Walker’s signature union-busting legislation and massive protests outside the state capitol, is why Walker is now facing a recall.

Walker pitched the legislation as necessary for balancing the state’s budget, which was facing a $137 million budget deficit in 2011. According to IWF, businesses dodge $113 million in Wisconsin state taxes each year.

“It’s not known which loopholes ABC Supply used to avoid income taxes,” the IWF report said, but Hendricks has long been an advocate of lower taxes. In a 2010 editorial, she wrote, “Taxing job creators is a sure way to stop the engine of economic growth.”

Mitt Romney yesterday traveled to Iowa, where he decried the “prairie fire of debt” that President Obama has supposedly allowed to engulf the nation. But Romney neglected to mention that his own economic plan would add $10.7 trillion to the debt, reducing federal revenue to just 15 percent of GDP.

As the Associated Press reported today, “Romney’s tax and spending plans don’t support his vow to dampen the debt fire.” But don’t tell that to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who said to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that Romney’s tax plan won’t blow up the deficit:

SCARBOROUGH: So you talk about Mitt Romney talking about how he’s going to be responsible. You look at Mitt Romney’s plans, though, you add them all up, the deficit goes up as much under Mitt Romney as it does under Barack Obama. You know, if you look at their plans, there’s not a big difference.

RYAN: Oh, there’s a huge difference. Are you kidding me?

SCARBOROUGH: At the end of the day Paul, how much is the national debt going to be reduced under Mitt Romney’s tax plans and spending plans?

RYAN: So, under Mitt Romney’s tax plan, he’s keeping revenues where they historically have been, which they actually rise from where they are now, just like our budget does.

Watch it:

But Romney has simply asserted that his tax plan will be deficit neutral, because he will limit tax deductions for the richest Americans, without laying out any way to actually achieve that end. He’s even admitted that this rather relevant part of his plan is missing.

And he hasn’t laid out the spending plans that would supposedly cut the deficit either. As the AP put it, “the closest [Romney] has come to laying out a specific spending plan has been in his endorsement of the budget blueprint passed this year by House Republicans, which also fails to produce his promised deficit reductions.”

Even if Romney actually followed through on his pledge to limits deductions for the rich, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for the next five years to keep his tax plan from adding to the deficit. The best five-year period of growth since World War II was from 1961 to 1966, when the economy grew at 5.8 percent per year, meaning Romney would have to see the greatest growth of the post-war period simply to keep his tax plan out of the red.

Of course, this is just par for the course for Ryan, who pulled the same trick with the House Republican budget, pledging to close tax loopholes and limit deductions, but refusing to give any specifics.

Disappointed that official government data showed his state was the worst in the nation for job creation over the last 12 months, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) decided to release his own numbers today. But even if Walker’s new calculations have merit, he’s nowhere close to the pace necessary to create the 250,000 new jobs he promised in his first four years in office.

Walker had no problem touting the official Bureau of Labor Statistics’ job report last year when it showed that Wisconsin was adding jobs. Now, he has decided to cite a different report that still shows relatively weak job growth, the Wasau Daily Herald reports:

But even these latest figures indicate he is far from achieving that goal. The data compiled by the state Department of Workforce Development show a net gain of 23,300 public and private jobs during 2011, up from the previously reported 33,900 drop. The difference lies in how the numbers were generated.

The new numbers come from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, produced for inclusion in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ national report to be issued on June 28 — more than three weeks after the recall. Those figures are based on actual job counts reported by 160,000 Wisconsin employers as required by law as part of their tax and unemployment insurance reports.

Last month, BLS found that Wisconsin had the “largest over-the-year percentage decrease in employment,” losing nearly 1 percent of its jobs from April 2011 to April 2012. Wisconsin was one of only four states to lose jobs over that period.

That hampered Walker’s message — targeted at voters who will choose whether to retain him as their governor in three weeks — that his union-busting, corporate tax-cutting, budget-slashing policies have helped the state’s economy rebound. So instead, Walker decided to use numbers that, according to Wisconsin’s own Department of Workforce Development, are “estimations based on surveys and do not represent a census of jobs, per se.”

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney used a speech in Iowa yesterday to blame President Obama for a “prairie fire of debt” that is supposedly spreading across the nation. Romney continued the assault today, giving a speech in Florida in front of a giant clock featuring a running total of the nation’s debt.

As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, Romney’s attack ignores that his own economic plan would add more than $10 trillion to the national debt. It also ignores Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts, which had the nation’s highest per capita debt total when he left office in 2007.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (compiled by Connecticut’s chief analyst in 2009), Massachusetts had $10,504 in per capita bond debt in 2007, the highest total in the nation. No other state had more than $10,000 in per capita debt, and only one had more than $8,000. Massachusetts ranked second, behind only Alaska, in per capita debt as a percent of personal income, with debt making up more than 21 percent of each resident’s income.

State bond debt isn’t altogether a bad thing — it finances infrastructure projects and other programs that benefit state residents. But Romney’s accumulation of it while governor is an element of his Massachusetts story that he regularly omits.

Romney has painted the national debt as a moral crisis that “threatens what it means to be an American.” And yet, Romney’s past and his plans for the future prove that he isn’t actually willing to address it.

Former President George W. Bush jumped back into presidential politics this week, endorsing presumptive 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. He also, according to the New York Times, plans to release a book in two months that will lay out his advice on boosting economic growth:

Gingerly, the 43rd president is beginning to add his voice back into the national dialogue. A month ago, he spoke publicly in favor of one of his defining domestic legacies, the tax cuts that still divide the country. Two months from now, he plans to publish a book outlining strategies for economic growth. And on Tuesday, he made a rare return to Washington to promote freedom overseas.

That Bush believes the country needs his thoughts on how to create economic growth is laughable. After all, under his watch, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” As the Economic Policy Institute found, “between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.”

As this chart shows, the only economic indicator on which Bush exceeded the average is corporate profits:

As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted, “the competition for slowest growth is not even close, either. Growth from 2001 to 2007 averaged 2.39 percent a year (and growth from 2001 through the third quarter of 2010 averaged 1.66 percent). The decade with the second-worst showing for growth was 1971 to 1980 — the dreaded 1970s — but it still had 3.21 percent average growth.” Bush also presided over the formulation of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

And its not just under Bush that the nation saw lackluster economic growth. Over the last 50 years, in fact, two-thirds of the private sector jobs created in the country have come under Democratic administrations.

JP Morgan’s $2 billion derivatives trading debacle has forced House Republicans to, at least temporarily, delay their efforts to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee yesterday pushed back votes on a series of bills that would weaken the derivatives portion of Dodd-Frank.

Those bills had already been cleared by the House Financial Services Committee, which has been making a concerted effort to chip away at Dodd-Frank. And overall, according to a report from Public Citizen, nine bills are pending in Congress that would weaken Dodd-Frank’s title on derivatives:

Since the passage of Dodd-Frank, industry has engaged in a concerted effort to weaken it. At least nine bills are pending in Congress that would water down its derivatives reforms. Three additional bills would saddle federal agencies with additional burdens to fulfill requirements to issue concerning financial services, including those involving derivatives.

Among other things, these bills would eliminate a requirement for federally insured banks to spin off their derivatives operations; reduce disclosure requirements for certain derivatives trades; provide a broad exemption from Dodd-Frank’s provisions for swaps involving foreign affiliates of U.S. companies; and exempt purportedly small players, even those with up to $200 billion in the notional value of their derivatives exposure.

These proposals threaten to create large oversight-free zones that could allow risky behaviors to flourish.

All but one of those nine bills is sponsored by a Republican, with Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) the lone Democrat.

In addition to attempting to gut derivatives regulation, House Republicans have also refused to give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is charged with enforcing those regulations, the funds needed to do its job. As CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton wrote this week, the CFTC “is shy over $100 million of what is needed and what was requested in the President’s budget. And, the CFTC is a front-line regulator charged with overseeing the exact type of trading that caused the economic collapse and dealt the body blow to JPM.”