As ThinkProgress has reported, several American sports franchises are looking for taxpayer dollars in order to finance new stadiums or renovate existing ones. But the example set by Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals should act as a warning to the cities thinking of acceding to those demands.

According to Sports Radio 810 WHB, the Royals ownership has been spending taxpayer money earmarked for stadium renovations on, among other things, employee salaries, cable tv, and telephone bills. Just 9 percent of the money given to the team has actually been used on its stadium.

Adding insult the injury, the owners even paid some of their payroll tax bill with the subsidies meant for stadium improvements, so “the team literally collected taxpayer money to pay their own taxes“:

The Kansas City Royals have requested nearly $17 million of taxpayer money the past five years from the Kauffman Stadium repair and upkeep fund but spent only 9% of the money received on actual repairs and maintenance to the stadium, according to documents obtained by Sports Radio 810 WHB.

The Royals have received at least $12.7 million from taxpayers that was approved by the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority as part of the RMMO provision of the team’s lease with the county and spent it on full and part time employee salaries, security, cable tv, first aid, utilities, telephones and even payroll taxes. By using the money for payroll taxes, the team literally collected taxpayer money to pay their own taxes.

Owners of sports franchises often claim that stadiums are good investments for taxpayers, but the evidence makes the opposite case. As ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron noted, “the stadiums rarely pay for themselves, leaving local economies engulfed in debt while teams come back asking for even newer stadiums before the current facilities are paid off.”

And the Royals aren’t the only Kansas City team using taxpayer dollars to fund general operations. The Kansas City Chiefs of the National Football League have received $9 million for stadium maintenance and repairs, but have used just 6 percent on the stadium, with the rest going towards management and operations.

Making debt and deficit reduction our nation’s top priority while the economy is still recovering from the Great Recession is a “completely misguided” strategy for growth, University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson said Wednesday. Instead of pursuing deficit reduction, policymakers should be taking advantage of historically low borrowing costs to make investments into strategic investments into education, infrastructure, and other areas, Stevenson told ThinkProgress:

STEVENSON: Pursuing deficit reduction given the current economic climate is completely misguided. We need to be thinking about investing in the future of the country. If we borrow today, if we borrow today and we invest that money wisely, it’s going to be cheap to pay it in the future because the economy’s going to grow and we’re all going to be earning more. [...]

We need to be saying that there are costs that come with this. It’s not a free lunch to cut the debt. It’s certainly not a free lunch to cut the debt at a time when we have such high unemployment and we know that there’s the potential for us to be in a situation where these workers are never able to get integrated back into our economy. That has big, permanent, long-lasting effects on our productivity, on our overall economy, and if we could spend money now to prevent that from happening, that money will be well-spent. I think there are programs, and I outlined them when I was talking, the President has proposed getting teachers back into the classroom. Why would be reducing spending on education at a time when we need it more than ever? Why would we be cutting important community service positions like firefighters and policemen at a time where, you know, we need those services and people need those jobs?

Watch it:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner echoed those thoughts in an interview with Bloomberg this week, saying low borrowing costs should spur government investment into the economy. “It’s sensible for us to take advantage of this moment to do things that will make the economy stronger,” Geithner said.

Meanwhile, Republicans have led the deficit reduction push in Congress, where they have proposed massive spending cuts that would draw most of their savings from programs that benefit the middle class.

Stevenson was even more critical of the focus on spending cuts while speaking on a panel at the Center for American Progress’ conference on the middle class and American economy. “This idea that we can cut and cut and cut and have a government that can support a modern economy doesn’t make sense,” she said, adding that government “should spend during recessions. That’s why you do things like the (stimulus). It works.”

In the wake of the tragic shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, CO earlier this month, the nation has been engaged in a dialogue about the best ways to prevent violent crime — including passing stricter gun control legislation, requiring more background checks for firearm purchases, and increasing mental illness reporting. However, one writer at Scientific American suggests that homicides in the U.S. actually stem from a very different kind of source: the nation’s high rates of income inequality.

Eric Michael Johnson cites a study conducted by Harvard’s Ichiro Kawachi that analyzed the homicide rates in each state and the District of Columbia. Kawachi found that as the gap between the rich and the poor rose, the rate of homicide rose along with it:

The results were unambiguous: when income inequality was higher, so was the rate of homicide. Income inequality alone explained 74% of the variance in murder rates and half of the aggravated assaults. However, social capital had an even stronger association and, by itself, accounted for 82% of homicides and 61% of assaults. Other factors such as unemployment, poverty, or number of high school graduates were only weakly associated and alcohol consumption had no connection to violent crime at all. A World Bank sponsored study subsequently confirmed these results on income inequality concluding that, worldwide, homicide and the unequal distribution of resources are inextricably tied.

Income inequality in the U.S. has been rapidly rising since 1979. And an uptick in violent crimes certainly isn’t the only documented negative effect of the widening gulf between the rich and the poor. Studies have already shown that economic disparity has caused a problematic education gap, put an outsized burden on the Social Security program, and stifled the political power of a downtrodden middle class.

The Federal Open Market Committee — the group that decides monetary policy at the Federal Reserve — will conclude its latest round of meetings today. The Fed is under growing pressure to do something to aid the still struggling economy, perhaps even a third round of quantitative easing. A statement released this afternoon will announce the Fed’s intentions going forward.

If the Fed does decide to act, it’s almost a certainty that Republicans will cry foul. Ever since the recession, Republicans have regularly denounced the Fed for taking steps to help the economy, warning that runaway inflation is just around the corner. But these predictions have been repeatedly discredited by the path inflation has actually taken. ThinkProgress has the video report:

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the rate of conventional inflation only briefly touched 4 percent before falling back below 2 percent earlier this year. Core inflation — which removes energy and food prices in order to smooth at noise in the measurement — finally got just above 2 percent in late 2011 and has plateaued since. Indeed, looking back over the last few decades, the country’s inflation rate since the 2008 recession has been at near-historic lows. Certainly far below the 12 to 15 percent inflation the country experienced in the 1970s and 1980s — presumably the memory that’s driving the GOP’s warnings.

Because inflation is fundamentally the result of a growing economy, most any monetary policy that seeks to boost growth out of a depression will require a tolerance for at least temporarily higher inflation levels in order to be effective. But the Fed’s insistence on treating 2 percent inflation as a ceiling rather than one end of a balance between price stability and job growth has left the country mired in high unemployment.

The GOP’s inflation fear-mongering and outright political pressure on the Fed certainly hasn’t done anything to help with that imbalance. Last year some Republicans went as far as introducing legislation requiring the Fed to ignore employment levels entirely and just focus on price stability when deciding monetary policy.

Mitt Romney hopes to convince the public that he is a wizened business leader from his time running Bain Capital, a private equity firm that claims to help struggling businesses restructure and grow more profitable.

And so it’s surprising to see a new Romney campaign ad challenge President Obama for doing something similar: Investing in and restructuring the auto industry in an effort to save hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The commercial features a man telling a story of how GM ended his line of credit and shut down his dealership as part of its effort to rebuild after 2009 and is an attempt by the campaign to misrepresent the bailout as a failure that contributed to substantial job loss. Watch it:

This particular dealership laid off some 30 employees, but on the whole, Obama’s decision to bail out the American auto industry preserved at least 170,000 jobs, and has helped grow private sector jobs. At the time, Romney urged the government to “Let Detroit go bankrupt,” meaning that the dealership owner in Romney’s ad and other dealers and manufacturers around the country would have faced devastating consequences and massive job losses had his view prevailed.

What’s more, Romney has repeatedly argued that small job losses are legitimate and even normal in the context of larger corporate restructuring. For instance, when questioned about why people lost jobs when Bain took over a company, Romney maintained that some jobs had to go in order to save the enterprise:

“There are a number of businesses that we helped start, which collectively, you can just look on their Web sites, added well over 100,000 jobs,” Mr. Romney said, specifically citing Staples, Bright Horizons Children’s Center, the Sports Authority, and Steel Dynamics. “And then the press has also reported on businesses that lost employment and that was a few thousand jobs that were lost. In each case where there was job loss, there was an effort on the part of the management team to try and preserve the business and to have a brighter future.”

He added: “The net of the two is pretty clearly well over 100,000 jobs, and the reality is in the private sector, that there are some businesses that are growing and thriving, and we were fortunate enough to be able to be part of that in a small way, and there’s some businesses that have to be cut back in order to survive and try to make them stronger. And sometimes you’re successful at that and sometimes you’re not.”

Ultimately, Bain Capital was far more interested in turning a profit than saving businesses or preserving jobs — in fact some of the companies it invested in ultimately filed for bankruptcy and laid off thousands of employees. Interestingly, Romney has defended this practice, while criticizing Obama for using government funds to protect hundreds of thousands of jobs.

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney has been promising that he will cut taxes “across the board,” while also instituting tax reform that will not add to the nation’s deficit. But a new report from the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution shows that this is much easier said than done.

In fact, if Romney were to actually implement his plan to reduce tax rates by 20 percent while eliminating tax deductions in order to pay for it, taxpayers with more than $200,000 would certainly see a tax cut. But everyone else — 95 percent of Americans — will see their taxes increase. And this result occurs even assuming that Romney would eliminate tax deductions so as to make the tax as progressive as possible:

To estimate how average household tax burdens among different income groups would change as a result of this shift, we assume that the available tax expenditures are curtailed “from the top down” in order to make the tax plan as progressive as possible…Even after eliminating all available tax expenditures for households earning more than $200,000, this group still faces a net tax break. Americans making over $1 million would see an increase in after-tax income of 4.1 percent (an $87,000 tax cut), those making between $500,000 and $1 million would see an increase of 3.2 percent (a $17,000 tax cut), and those making between $200,000 and $500,000 would see an increase of 0.8 percent (a $1,800 tax cut).

Because taxpayers above $200,000 as a group have received a net tax cut, revenue neutrality requires that taxpayers below $200,000—about 95 percent of the population—experience a tax increase.

Here’s how the plan would affect the average taxpayer in each income group. As the column labeled “revenue neutral” shows, all taxpayers making less than $200,000 would see their taxes go up by hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. In particular, families with children would see their taxes go up by $2,041, on average:

Again, this analysis assumes that deductions are eliminated in a way that would make the tax code as progressive as possible, so its likely that, in practice, Romney’s plan would look even worse. To this point, Romney has refused to specify which deductions he would limit or eliminate.

On several occasions, Romney has denied that his tax plan would provide a big tax break to the wealthy. But as this analysis shows, even giving him all of the benefit of the doubt when it comes to eliminating deductions, the plan is still a massive tax break for the rich.

House Republicans this week plan to vote on a bill that would extend all of the Bush tax cuts, including those on income in excess of $250,000. A new analysis shows that the Republican plan will raise taxes on roughly 24 million people — due to its allowing various credits, including the Child Tax Credit, to expire — while maintaining Bush’s tax cut for two million wealthy Americans.

The Bush tax cuts delivered the weakest job growth of the post-war period, as well as a ballooning federal debt. And according to a new report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the price tag of that weak growth was more than $1 million in tax breaks for the average millionaire over the last nine years:

– If one adds up the average tax cuts that households with incomes between $200,000 and $500,000 received in each of the last nine years, the total exceeds $74,000.

– The sum of the average annual tax cuts delivered to households with incomes between $500,000 and $1 million exceeds $189,000 over the last nine years.

– The sum of the average annual tax cuts delivered to households with incomes over $1 million in each of the last nine years exceeds $1.1 million. The average tax cut these individuals received was more than $110,000 in each of these years.

As the CBPP put it, “these figures illuminate the priorities reflected in the Bush tax cuts at a time when income inequality has already grown markedly and the nation faces unsustainable budget deficits after the economy recovers.” Not only have Republicans decided that continuing these tax cuts is the better part of wisdom, but House Republicans have written legislation to fast-track more tax cuts for the rich.