On ABC News’s This Week this morning, host George Stephanopoulos played an Obama campaign ad where the President says that Romney believes in “even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy.” New Jersey Governor and Romney surrogate Chris Christie (R) responded by falsely accusing President Obama of lying:

CHRISTIE: Stop lying Mr. President.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Lying?

CHRISTIE: Yeah . . . Gov. Romney’s not talking about more tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, what he said is that the wealthy will pay just as much under a Romney administration as they pay today.

Romney may not be “talking” about how his plan reduces taxes on the very rich, but it is simply false to claim that it does not. The Romney income tax plan works in two parts. First, he calls for an “across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates.” In addition, Romney supports eliminating unspecified tax deductions and other loopholes which, he claims, will add as much to the wealthy’s tax burden as his rate reductions will take away. Romney also says his plan will be “revenue neutral,” meaning that the amount of money lost by reducing rates will be identical to the amount gained by closing loopholes.

Unfortunately, this plan is mathematically impossible.

As a report by the Tax Policy Center demonstrated last month, even if Romney were to eliminate every single tax loophole benefiting the wealthy, there simply are not enough of them to keep the richest taxpayers from paying substantially less under Romney’s plan. Indeed, the average taxpayer who earns over $1 million per year would receive a tax cut of over $87,000 under Romney’s plan. So when Christie suggests that “the wealthy will pay just as much under a Romney administration as they pay today,” he is not telling the truth.

Meanwhile, middle class families will bear the cost of these tax cuts for the very rich. According to the same Tax Policy Center report, Romney’s plan will pay for its tax cuts for upper income earners through substantial tax hikes on families earning less than $200,000 a year — many of whom would need to lose common tax benefits such as the mortgage interest tax deduction or the child tax credit in order for Romney’s plan to be revenue neutral. The average family with children earning less than $200,000 a year will see their taxes increase by $2,041 under the Romney tax plan:

So regardless of what Romney may say his Reverse Robin Hood tax plan does on the campaign trail, what it actually does is take money away from middle class Americans and give it to the wealthiest few.

For much of the general election, the Romney campaign has avoided any discussion of specifics, especially when it comes to the tax plan that he and Paul Ryan have put forward. On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace gave Ryan an opportunity to finally talk about the details of his plan to a national audience, how much it will cost and how the Romney administration would pay for it.

Instead, Ryan said he didn’t have time to get into the nuts and bolts of the proposal:

WALLACE: So how much would it cost?

RYAN: It’s revenue neutral…

WALLACE: No no, I’m just talking about cuts. We’ll get to the deductions, but the cut in tax rates.

RYAN: The cut in tax rates is lowering all Americans’ tax rates by 20 percent.

WALLACE: Right, how much does that cost?

RYAN: It’s revenue neutral.
[...]
WALLACE: But I have to point out, you haven’t given me the math.

Ryan: No, but you…well, I don’t have the time. It would take me too long to go through all of the math. But let me say it this way: you can lower tax rates by 20 percent across the board by closing loopholes and still have preferences for the middle class. For things like charitable deductions, for home purchases, for health care. So what we’re saying is, people are going to get lower tax rates.

Watch it:

Ryan has been the Republican vice presidential nominee for nearly three months, and has still not found the time to explain how a Romney administration would fund its tax plan of 20 percent deductions across the board. Perhaps that is because if he did, voters would balk at the cuts that would need to occur in programs like Medicare for the plan to remain revenue neutral.

Ryan’s refusal to talk specifics only lends further credibility to the various studies and reports that have found time to do the math. And as ThinkProgress has reported, those studies from non-partisan organizations show that the Romney/Ryan tax plan would actually result in a huge tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. And the only way to keep it revenue neutral is to balance their plan on the backs of middle class families, who would see a tax increase of more than $2,000.

Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) recently signed into law massively regressive tax cuts that were so huge that many Republicans in the state opposed them. Budget analysts have found that Kansas will have to gut important public services for low-income Kansans and their children in order to pay for the tax cuts.

But Brownback has a plan if Kansas residents start to complain about the impact of those budget cuts — blame Europe:

Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration already has developed talking points to deflect anticipated criticism of the newly enacted massive income tax cuts should Kansas face significant budget problems next year. [...]

The administration is fashioning a narrative that suggests budget cuts may be necessary because the nation’s economy may remain stagnant. Europe’s financial crisis also looms as a potential threat.

“There are forces beyond the state’s control,” Brownback spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag said last week. “There’s still a great deal of uncertainty with the economy.”

Citizens for Tax Justice reacted to the governor’s plan by saying, “looks like the ‘spin room’ in Topeka has been busy lately.” After all, no one (and particularly no one in Europe) forced Brownback to sign a huge tax cut. Brownback justified the move by saying it would boost the Kansas economy, though there is scant evidence to back up that assertion.

Under Brownback’s plan, the richest Kansans will receive tax breaks worth about $20,000, while the poorest residents will actually see their taxes go up due to the elimination of tax credits that aid the poor.

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) has struggled with a well-established woman problem in his Senate campaign, ever since he claimed women could not get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” After he said his opponent, incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), was not “ladylike,” her campaign released a video of Akin suggesting that businesses should be allowed to pay women less than men.

When a man asked him why he voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Akin said he didn’t support the idea that “government should be telling people what you pay and what you don’t pay.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Why do you think it is okay for a woman to be paid less for doing the same work as a man?

AKIN: Well, first of all, the premise of your question is that I’m making that particular distinction. I believe in free enterprise. I don’t think the government should be telling people what you pay and what you don’t pay. I think it’s about freedom. If someone what’s to hire somebody and they agree on a salary, that’s fine, however it wants to work. So, the government sticking its nose into all kinds of things has gotten us into huge trouble.

Watch it:

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first bill President Obama signed into law and eases the burden on women to prove paycheck discrimination. Akin, along with all but three House Republicans, voted against the bill. Republicans blocked another pay equity bill, the Paycheck Fairness Act, earlier this summer; it would create larger penalties for employers who pay women less than men and strengthen protections for women who sue for equal pay.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and its head, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, have stood fast in their support of government programs that benefit the poor as lawmakers in Washington move to cut funding for many of those programs in the name of debt and deficit reduction. In a blog post honoring the feast day of St. Vincent DePaul, “considered by many to be the ‘star’ saint of Christian charity and concern for the poor,” Cardinal Dolan issued a joint statement with Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of the Diocese of Brooklyn that reaffirmed the importance of government programs in fighting poverty and helping low-income Americans.

While “[g]overnment programs provide enormous support to poor Americans,” Dolan and DiMarzio wrote, “it is not enough,” and the constant portrayal of the poor “in a negative way” is hurting efforts to aid the worse off:

However, two things must be said.

1) It is not enough. Even with the generosity of the American people, and the work of groups like the Saint Vincent de Paul Society and so many others, much more needs to be done, and not just by private charity. The government must continue to play its part as well.

2) There are very dark clouds. Too much rhetoric in the country portrays poor people in a very negative way. At the same time, this persistent sluggish economic and slow pace of recovery does two things that hurt the poor: it does not provide sufficient jobs for poor people to earn decent living to support themselves, and it provides less resources for government to do its part for Americans in need.

The comments come at a time when cuts to poverty programs are becoming more prominent in America’s budgetary debates, and when rhetoric is, indeed, portraying the poor “in a very negative way.” A video surfaced recently showing GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney decrying America’s welfare programs and their beneficiaries. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” Romney said.

Dolan also seems to echo the group of Catholic nuns who are crisscrossing the country on the Nuns On A Bus tour, which has highlighted the role government plays in protecting the poorest Americans. The nuns visited nine states this summer and have continued their push in recent weeks, announcing their opposition to Republican-led budget cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, and other assistance programs.

While Dolan and the USCCB have been consistent in their opposition to such budget cuts — the Conference called the cuts “unjustified and wrong” in a letter to Congress earlier this year — Dolan hasn’t always given that appearance. In August, he was introduced at the Republican National Convention by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) as someone who “the preferential option for the poor doesn’t easily translate into a preferential option for big government.” Now, though, Dolan seems to be calling on the government to do even more than it currently does to help the poor.

Several European economies rolled out new austerity packages this week, with Spain and Greece doing so amidst protests from citizens already bearing the burden of severe budget cuts. These new plans continue the continent’s insistence that austerity is the way to fix the Eurozone’s ongoing economic woes.

However, as this chart from Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman shows, the U.S. — which has not engaged in European style austerity — is doing much better than the Eurozone, where austerity has been implemented nearly across the board:

As Krugman wrote today, “More austerity serves no useful purpose; the truly irrational players here are the allegedly serious politicians and officials demanding ever more pain.” New data indicate that the Eurozone is headed into another recession.

Nearly one-in-five American households now have student loan debt, according to a study released by the Pew Research Center. Overall, 19 percent of households carried some amount of student debt in 2010, up from just 15 percent in 2007. Borrowers on average owed more than $26,000, double what they owed in 1995.

Student loan debt has the largest impact on poor and middle class Americans, who devote large chunks of their household incomes to student debt. The poorest fifth, as this chart from CNNMoney shows, have student debt that amounts to roughly a quarter of their household income while the share is much lower for wealthier Americans:

The richest share of households, not surprisingly, is better able to handle the burden. College debt accounted for only 3.3% of their household income. But student loan debt ate up nearly a quarter of the earnings of the poorest fifth, the study found.

Total student loan debt is expected to pass $1 trillion in 2012, and that is impacting young students’ ability to make the same transition into the economy earlier generations made. An earlier report, in fact, found that the growing amount of student debt was playing a role in holding back the nation’s housing recovery.

Our guest blogger is Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

New data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the private-sector added 450,000 more jobs as of March 2012 than previously thought. This means that the economy has crossed the threshold and more jobs have been created than lost during President Obama’s term.

This is a remarkable accomplishment—and one that would not have happened without the Recovery Act and other policies developed by this administration and passed by the 111th Congress in 2009. When President Obama was sworn in, the economy was losing jobs to the unprecedented tune of over 20,000 per day. Between the beginning of 2008 and February 2010 when the tide began to turn, the economy lost nearly 8.8 million jobs—4.3 million on Obama’s watch and almost 4.5 million under President Bush’s.

In February 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law and funds began almost immediately moving their way through the economy and the pace of job losses slowed, turning positive a year later. Since February 2010, including the newly revised data, the economy has added 4.4 million total payroll jobs, an average of 135,00 per month.

Even so, today’s data contained another glaring statistic: the economy has lost more than 700,000 public sector jobs since 2009, holding back the overall recovery. Without those losses, our unemployment rate would be at least a full point lower.

The data released today is part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual benchmark revisions to the establishment data and the magnitude of the revision is consistent with prior years, about plus or minus 0.3 percent. The establishment data includes all employers who pay into the unemployment insurance system, which is virtually every employer. Most firms file monthly reports for their payroll taxes, but some are late, some firms go out of business, some start up. Thus, once a year, the BLS sits down with the final UI payroll tax data to update the data previously released.

As the following chart shows, the economy has now added private sector jobs for 30 consecutive months:

Linda McMahon, the former CEO of the World Wrestling Federation and current Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Connecticut, told a Tea Party gathering earlier this year that she would be open to a change in Social Security that would introduce a “sunset provision,” effectively attaching an expiration date to the social program.

The remarks came during a town hall event in April with local Tea Party groups, but went largely ignored until The Huffington Post flagged the comment yesterday.

At the April Tea Party gathering, McMahon said in response to a question about how to “strengthen” Social Security and Medicare that “we cannot continue doing things the way we are doing with Social Security. We’re just simply going to be bankrupt.”

The candidate later continued, “In other words, I believe in sunset provisions when we pass this kind of legislation, so that you take a look at it 10, 15 years down the road to make sure that it’s still going to fund itself. Social Security will run out of money if we continue to do what we’re doing, if we rob the trust fund, if we think that there’s any money there.”

Sunset provisions, like the one attached to the Bush tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of this year, require congressional action by a determined date or else the legislation it is attached to expires. Attaching one to Social Security would place the long-term future of the program in jeopardy.

McMahon has already run into some difficulty convincing voters that she isn’t out of touch with the needs of middle class families. Thanks to the low tax rates on investments made by her and her husband, McMahon paid a tax rate of just 15 percent her $30.6 million income in 2010, the most recent year for which she has released her returns. Like fellow millionaire Mitt Romney, McMahon is campaigning on a promise to oppose any increase on her own taxes.

According to Bloomberg News, Mitt Romney is taking advantage of a tax loophole to pass off a fortune to his children without paying taxes on it. According to administration figures, this loophole costs the government $1 billion over a ten-year budget window:

In January 1999, a trust set up by Mitt Romney for his children and grandchildren reaped a 1,000 percent return on the sale of shares in Internet advertising firm DoubleClick Inc.

If Romney had given the cash directly, he could have owed a gift tax at a rate as high as 55 percent. He avoided gift and estate taxes by using a type of generation-skipping trust known to tax planners by the nickname: “I Dig It.” [...]

While Romney’s tax avoidance is both legal and common among high-net-worth individuals, it has become increasingly awkward for his candidacy since the disclosure of his remarks at a May fundraiser. He said that the nearly one-half of Americans who pay no income taxes are “dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims.” [...]

The Obama administration estimates that closing the loophole Romney used would bring the federal government almost $1 billion in the coming decade.

One analyst said that $1 billion is a “laughable” under-estimate of the loophole’s effect, as “a single billionaire could pay $500 million more in estate taxes if these trusts are shut down.”

It’s unclear whether Romney would close this particular loophole, since he refuses to divulge details about his tax plan. However, he has been upfront about his desire to eliminate the estate tax, which only affects the richest Americans. That tax cut would save the heirs of the Koch and Adelson fortunes billions of dollars. As ThinkProgress detailed, the lion’s share of tax breaks doled out in the U.S. go to the very rich.

According to new revisions released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy created 386,000 more jobs between March 2011 and March 2012 than shown by previous estimates. As economist Justin Wolfers noted, this means that President Obama is now net positive for job creation over his term in office, even taking into account the massive losses in January 2009:

The BLS benchmark revisions means that there has been a net jobs gain since Jan ’09. Romney can no longer talk about job losses under Obama.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) September 27, 2012

BLS Benchmark revisions mean that over the year to March 2012, the economy was adding 194k jobs per month, not 162k as previously thought.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) September 27, 2012

The Economist’s Greg Ip noted that the revisions mean that Obama’s net job creation number is now 125,000:

Incorporating today’s BLS revision, net payroll growth over Obama’s term would move from -261K to +125K.

— Greg Ip (@greg_ip) September 27, 2012

The new numbers — which are based off of unemployment insurance reports that employers submit to the federal government — show that 453,000 more private sector jobs were created than shown by previous estimates, meaning Obama’s net private sector job creation total is now 868,000. Government jobs, meanwhile, shrank by an additional 67,000.

The era of replacement referees is over after the National Football League and its officials’ union reached an agreement late last night to end the league’s lockout. The deal, which follows months of fighting between the two sides and a lockout that kept officials off the field for all preseason games and the first three weeks of the NFL season, came amidst fan and player outrage about a blown call on Monday Night Football that changed the outcome of a game.

That was hardly the first blown call the replacement officials made, and it was nowhere near the most dangerous. But it got the NFL’s owners back to the negotiating table, and a deal was announced almost two days to the hour after the call was made. Here’s a breakdown of the key issues in the deal:

Pensions: Pensions arose as a main sticking point in the negotiations, as the NFLRA fought to keep its pension while the NFL wanted to switch the officials to a 401(k)-based plan. In the end, the two sides compromised. Current officials will keep their pension plan until after the 2016 season, while new officials will immediately enter into a 401(k) plan. After 2016, pensions for current officials will freeze and they will enter into the 401(k) plan as well.

Compensation: NFL officials will receive compensation increases over the life of the eight-year collective bargaining agreement, with average compensation rising from $149,000 in 2011 to $173,000 in 2013 and $205,000 by the end of the agreement in 2019.

Full-time officials: NFL officials currently work part-time during the 17-week season (and playoffs), but the NFL will now have the option to hire a certain number of full-time officials to work year-round. The major cause of concern for the NFLRA when it came to full-time officials was how it would change compensation, since officials are currently paid out of a collective pool. The league can also hire and train additional officials “for training and development purposes;” those officials could also work games if necessary.

There are still details to be worked out. The lockout was temporarily lifted to allow professional officials to work tonight’s game between Baltimore and Cleveland, but the NFLRA still has to ratify the deal this weekend (it is expected to do so). In the short-term, it appears the officials got what they wanted: their pension is still intact, and they successfully won the public relations battle against the league. But while all of the details have yet to emerge, this seems like a long-term winner for the NFL, as the league got what it wanted with the eventual elimination of the defined-benefit pension.

The outline of the deal makes the entire fiasco involving the replacement officials seem even more unnecessary than it already was, since the NFL’s major points of concern were all addressed: it got its full-time officials, it got its back-up pool of officials, and it got its pension reforms, even if it has to wait a few years for it to be fully eliminated. By the beginning of the season, the NFLRA, according to its public statements, had already offered to bend on each of those issues.

So in the end, the NFL jeopardized player safety, allowed replacement officials to change the outcome of at least one game, took a major public relations hit, and lost the respect of fans, players, and coaches, all to get what it probably could have had before the season even started.

The budget and tax proposals put forth by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would not lead to the economic prosperity and job growth he has claimed, according to a new study released this week. In fact, the Economic Policy Institute found that Romney’s plans would actually lead to a net loss of jobs over the first two years of his administration, and the losses could grow even larger if Romney were to stick to his promise of reaching a balanced budget.

EPI had to make assumptions about Romney’s plan because of its lack of specificity, but according to its analysis, Romney’s plan to lower taxes and cut spending would cause a net loss of 554,000 jobs over the next two years if Romney abandons his plan to pay for the massive tax cuts he has promised. But if he maintains his promise to balance the budget while also providing the huge tax cuts, his plan would “lead to employment losses of 608,000 in 2013 and roughly 1.3 million in 2014″:

The deep spending cuts Romney has promised are the primary reason for the job losses, EPI’s analysis found. If Romney does pay for the tax cuts, as he insists he will, the spending cuts would get even deeper and thus cause the loss of even more jobs. Another independent analysis, meanwhile, found that fully paying for Romney’s tax cuts would require raising taxes on the middle class.

Romney’s call for a Balanced Budget Amendment would cause even more problems. “Government spending cuts of this magnitude would constitute an economic shock even larger than the one inflicted by the bursting of the housing bubble—a shock that led to the worst recession since the Great Depression,” EPI wrote. But because that shock would be so large, EPI concluded that passage of such an amendment is “exceedingly unlikely” and it chose not to include it in the analysis.

In recent years, Republicans have taken to calling uber-wealthy Americans “job creators” to justify holding the government hostage to protect their low tax rates. Less than a week after GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney released his tax returns and revealed his 14.1 percent rate — far lower than any president’s since Richard Nixon — Ryan used a local interview to revive the job creator myth.

Romney saved $1.2 million in taxes thanks to a preference that allows investment income, known as capital gains, to be taxed at a lower rate than wage income. Ryan told Cincinnati’s WLWT that paying such a low rate was justified because low capital gains rates boost job creation:

RYAN: Point number two is this money creates jobs. When people invest in riskier propositions, meaning invest in businesses, they don’t know if they’re going to succeed or not. So you want to have more capital that goes to more businesses, especially small businesses like this one, so more people can go back to work. That creates economic growth. You know what we learned about Mitt Romney in his tax returns? He’s a successful businessman. That’s a good thing.

Watch it:

The problem with Ryan’s logic is that there is little evidence that the capital gains preference increases job creation. As the Center for American Progress’ Seth Hanlon notes, the capital gains rate was higher during sustained periods of economic growth in the 1990s, while the 2003 cut to the capital gains rate was followed by weak investment and growth. After the rate dropped in 1997, growth rates hardly changed.

As this chart from professor Leonard Burman, a former economist at Treasury and the Congressional Budget Office, shows, there is no provable correlation between changes in the capital gains tax rate and economic growth:

That chart, Burman told Congress, “should dispel the notion that capital gains taxes are a very important factor in the health of the economy. Cutting capital gains taxes will not turbocharge the economy and raising them would not usher in a depression.” Other economists came to similar findings. The Tax Policy Center found no correlation between the rate and economic growth over the last 50 years, and the University of Michigan’s Joel Slemrod found that “there is no evidence that links aggregate economic performance to capital gains tax rates.”

When local activist groups challenged Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton to live on a food stamp budget for a week to mark Hunger Awareness Month, he took them up on the offer and found out just how hard it was. Stanton kept a diary on the challenge, which allotted him roughly $29 a week, the same amount 1.1 million Arizonans receive from the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) each week.

By day four, Stanton noted that he was “tired” and “it’s hard to focus” after leaving the house for work without time to scramble eggs or eat a decent breakfast:

OK- ran out the door today with no time to scramble eggs or even make a sandwich. So I’m surviving on an apple and handful of peanuts, and the coffee I took to the office until dinner. I’m tired, and it’s hard to focus. I can’t go buy a sandwich because that would be cheating- even the dollar menu at Taco Bell is cheating. You can’t use SNAP benefits at any restaurants, fast food or otherwise. I’m facing a long, hungry day and an even longer night getting dinner on the table, which requires making EVERYTHING from scratch on this budget. It’s only for a week, so I’ve got a decent attitude. If I were doing this with no end in sight, I probably wouldn’t be so pleasant.

Watch a local news report about Stanton’s challenge, via Huffington Post’s Bonnie Kavoussi:

According to Stanton’s Facebook page, the city he governs ranks 34th-worst among America’s 100 largest metro areas in terms of hunger, and one-in-four Arizona children are food insecure. Across the nation, there are more than 46 million people receiving SNAP benefits.

Despite the challenges presented by poverty and hunger, Republicans have proposed cuts to the programs that help struggling families afford food. The House GOP budget could kick millions out of SNAP and hundreds of thousands of children out of school lunch programs, exacerbating the high rates of food insecurity America’s families are already facing.