The non-partisan Tax Policy Center released an analysis this month showing that, in order for to Mitt Romney to achieve all of the goals he had laid out in his tax plan, he would have to raise taxes on everyone making less than $200,000, including a $2,000 annual tax increase on middle class families. Romney, after first trying to paint the organization as ideologically opposed to him (despite one of the study’s authors being a former official in the George H.W. Bush administration), then took to attacking the study itself.

“There’s an old expression in the computer world: garbage in, garbage out,” Romney said. “They made garbage assumptions and they reached a garbage conclusion.”

The Romney camp complained that TPC “did not sufficiently account for the potential benefits of Mr. Romney’s separate proposals to lower the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent, reduce other business taxes and cut domestic spending deeply.” However, TPC re-ran the numbers to include these provisions, and found that they make Romney’s plan even worse for the middle class and low-income Americans:

Governor Romney’s tax advisors told TPC that the (then, as now, unspecified) cuts in corporate tax preferences were not meant to finance the initial rate cut to 25 percent but instead would pay for a subsequent revenue-neutral set of proposals that would reduce corporate rates further and enact a territorial system.

In our analysis, we assumed that Romney’s plan to reduce the rate to 25 percent could be achieved through some unspecified corporate base broadening, and therefore that the revenue and distributional consequences of this rate cut could be ignored in the remainder of our analysis. If, instead, we had included the reduction in the corporate tax rate (which would reduce revenues by $96 billion in 2015 in the absence of base-broadening), the result would have been an even larger tax cut on high-income individuals, requiring even larger cuts to tax expenditures, and correspondingly larger increases in taxes on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers.

TPC also noted that the spending cuts Romney has in mind would likely hit middle class families the hardest. So between Romney’s plan and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s budget, the GOP ticket has a pair of proposals that would raise taxes on the middle class in order to cut them for the rich.

A group of House Democrats are seeking to increase the minimum wage to $9.80 per hour in order to help shrink the ever-increasing gap between the wealthiest Americans and struggling workers. This modest increase to the current $7.25 per hour would help catch the wage up to the rate of inflation, since the buying power of the 1968 minimum wage is the equivalent of about $10.55 an hour today.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds that, while raising the minimum wage to the proposed $9.80 level would have a significant impact on about 28 million low-income workers, it would especially benefit women. As the report puts it, the fact that “women comprise 54.5 percent of workers who would be affected by a potential minimum-wage increase makes it a women’s issue”:

The impact on women varies by state, ranging from the highest percentage of affected women in Mississippi — where 64.4 percent of the low-wage workers who would benefit from a minimum wage hike are female — to 49.3 percent in both California and Nevada. However, California and Nevada are the only states where women do not make up the majority of the low-income workers who would be positively affected by a higher wage.

Despite the fact that millions of women would see their lives improve with an increased minimum wage, conservatives oppose initiatives to raise it, using tired arguments that it will kill jobs and hurt small businesses. In fact, studies show that a higher minimum wage does not impede job growth, especially because the nation’s biggest and most profitable corporations are the biggest employers of minimum wage employees.

Occupy Wall Street protests last year drew significant attention to America’s income inequality, which has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few decades. But the U.S. is hardly the only nation grappling with extreme inequality. As the Wall Street Journal noted today, China’s richest 1 percent hold 70 percent of their nation’s private wealth:

Just under 1% of households globally control nearly 40% of the world’s private financial wealth, according to the Boston Consulting Group. In China, where nearly half the population is still rural, just under 1% of households control more than 70% of the nation’s private financial wealth, BCG estimated in 2008. Surveys of public opinion regularly place corruption and income inequality at the top of Chinese concerns.

According to the CIA’s World Factbook, China is the 27th most unequal country. The U.S. ranks 42nd. And the problem may be even worse in China than official statistics show, as Businessweek reported:

The incomes of better-off families are understated, says Wang Xiaolu, an economist at the independent National Economic Research Institute in Beijing.

Undisclosed income, which Wang says could add up to $1.4 trillion annually, ranges from kickbacks to businesses or government to perks such as subsidized housing offered by state-run companies. If so, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population earned 65 times that of poorest 10 percent—not the 23 times shown by government data.

In the U.S., the richest 1 percent hold 34.5 percent of total wealth, while the bottom half of Americans hold just 1.1 percent.

Our guest blogger is Harsha Nahata, an intern at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan has gained an undeserved reputation as a “fiscal hawk,” touting his “Path to Prosperity” budget as a responsible plan to rein in what he describes as a “path to debt and decline.” But Ryan’s votes in Congress show that he is as guilty as anyone of running up the nation’s debt.

A Center for American Progress Action Fund analysis shows that Ryan voted to add a grand total of $6.8 trillion to the federal debt during his time in Congress, voting for at least 65 bills that either reduced revenue or increased spending.

From 2001 to 2008, Congress passed legislation that increased the national deficit by a total of $4 trillion — the number grows to $6 trillion if you add in the how much those policies have cost through 2011. Ryan voted for 90 percent of these deficit increasing bills.

What did Ryan vote to spend on? Here is a break-down of his votes:

– Beginning with the Bush tax cuts, since 2001 Ryan has voted to add $2.5 trillion worth of tax cuts to the deficit.

– In the last 11 years, Paul Ryan voted for every bill that called for an increase in defense spending. In total, this has added $1.9 trillion to the deficit.

– Paul Ryan also voted to increase non-defense discretionary spending — the very thing he is pushing to cut now. He voted to spend $270 billion on Medicare Part D (all of which was unpaid for). He also added $80 billion to the deficit by voting for an agriculture bill in 2002, and he added another $20 billion in 2003 when he voted for changes to military retirement. Lastly, he voted for increased borrowing authority for flood insurance, adding yet another $17 billion to the deficit.

Plus, Ryan’s plan won’t really balance the budget — at least not for the foreseeable future. The Tax Policy Center calculates that under Ryan’s budget plan, the federal government would only raise revenue totaling 15.8 percent of GDP. This would still make the deficit 4 percent of GDP by 2022.

Mitt Romney has made no secret of his desire to do away with the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, signed in 2010 as a response to the 2008 financial crisis. Romney’s economic plan calls for the full repeal of Dodd-Frank, which Romney says he will replace with…something.

But even if Romney couldn’t get a full repeal through Congress, his other proposals could gum up some important implementation of Dodd-Frank, as American Banker noted today:

The proposals, taken together, would make it far harder for regulatory agencies to enact new regulations. The impact would be especially large with regard to the 2010 financial reform law, much of which has yet to take effect. Under Romney’s plan, agencies would be required to eliminate existing regulations whenever they implement new ones. Congress would also have a much easier time blocking regulations that are proposed by the agencies.

Even if the courts eventually struck down Romney’s proposals — the policies would likely spark legal challenges — they could force delays at agencies such as the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The two proposals American Banker identified are: a call by Romney for new regulations to go through a process in which their cost is offset by the elimination of other regulations; and his support for a measure requiring all regulations with an economic impact of more than $100 million to be individually approved by Congress.

Experts note that requiring offsets for new regulations — essentially putting in a cap on regulation — ignores the benefits that new regulations could bring. “The benefit side of the ledger seems to be ignored both for the proposed regulation and for the old regulation that you’d need to get rid of,” said Texas Tech University law professor Richard Murphy.

Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan, meanwhile, has advanced a budget that doesn’t repeal Dodd-Frank, but does gut some of its key provisions. One in particular would remove the government’s new ability to unwind failing financial firms rather than resorting to the ad hoc bailouts of 2008.

Romney claimed this week that “no one is talking about deregulating Wall Street.” That’s turning out to be less and less true.