During the debt ceiling fight in 2011, Republicans decried President Obama’s debt limit plan for its use of a so-called “gimmick” to reduce spending. The Democrats’ plan and Obama’s budget eliminated $1 trillion reserved for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would not be spent anyway as the two wars were winding down. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and the Republican leadership repeatedly complained that the OCO savings were an imaginary “gimmick.”

But Bob Woodward’s new book, The Price of Politics, reports that Boehner adopted a markedly different tone during negotiations of what became the Budget Control Act behind closed doors, offering the OCO savings to the surprise of the Democratic leaders:

The leaders had essentially reached an agreement, but there was still a crucial question that had not been answered. What happened if the supercommittee couldn’t agree on the second $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction? What would be the trigger or enforcement mechanism to make sure $1.2 trillion was cut from spending?
We could use the $1 trillion in imaginary savings from the Overseas Contingency Operations, Boehner and McConnell said. The wars were ending anyway.
Reid was particularly surprised, he had pushed dozens of times to use this OCO money.
“We can never put that in writing,” Boehner said. “but you have our word.” It can never even be talked about, McConnell and Boehner said, never be repeated outside the room.
Reid and Pelosi agreed. Pelosi was happy to use the imaginary money. It was better than more entitlement cuts.
The deal was done.

After the deal was struck, Boehner gave Woodward a different account of the OCO savings, scoffing, “It’s the same old Washington kick the can down the road. But [Reid] thought when it got down to the end, maybe I’d buy it. But I never did buy it.”

Republicans fault President Obama’s supposed “lack of leadership” for the coming fiscal cliff, but during an interview on CNBC Tuesday afternoon, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) could not say where the GOP was willing to compromise to avoid half a trillion dollars of military cuts or the wave of expiring tax breaks.

Pressed by host Maria Bartiromo, Cantor was unable to detail even one possible area where Republicans were willing to negotiate with Democrats:

BARTIROMO: So what are you willing to give on, Congressman? When you look at what the two sides are basically sticking to their guns, can it really be realistic to say taxes can never go up, that, you know, taxes should stay where they are forever in any environment? What are you willing to give on?

CANTOR: First of all, raising taxes is not the answer. We all know that. This problem is too large to think we can tax our way out of it. What we really need to be focused on is how big do we want the government to be, and begin to assess our priorities so we can manage down the deficit. That’s clearly how it is. Once we get a plan in place where, in fact, we’ve got a solution to the overspending, you know, we can begin to tell people their tax revenues will go to be paying off the deficit. But the problem is, Maria, there’s been an unwillingness to face up to the hard facts that there are obligations that have been assumed by the taxpayers, frankly, and there’s not enough money to satisfy those obligations. That’s what we have to sit down, iron out the differences, and go forward.

Watch it:

During a press conference to commemorate the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) hinted that a deal is unlikely. “I’m not confident at all,” he said of the prospect of forestalling the cliff, adding, “the House has done its job on both the sequester and on the looming tax hikes that’ll cost our economy some 700,000 jobs.” Cantor also tried to connect the terrorist strike to the automatic military cuts included in the Budget Control Act. “The best thing that we can do as a people to honor those individuals is to make sure that it never happens again, and we have looming massive defense cuts that this House has acted to substitute,” he argued.

Republicans have so far refused to give an inch on taxes and have in the past brought the government to the brink of shutdown over the Democrats’ efforts to raise revenues.

The Obama administration’s primary program to tackle the housing crisis and help homeowners who were facing foreclosure, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), fell far short of its goals. But a new report from the Federal Reserve of Chicago, the federal government, and multiple universities blamed the nation’s biggest banks for the program’s shortcomings.

According to the report — from Ohio State University, Columbia Business School, the University of Chicago, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Reserve of Chicago — big banks could have prevented an additional 800,000 foreclosures had they been better equipped to administer the federal modification program, ProPublica reports:

But while evidence of these problems was pervasive, it was always hard to quantify the damage. Just how many more people could have qualified under the administration’s mortgage modification program if the banks had done a better job? In other words, how many people have been pushed toward foreclosure unnecessarily?

A thorough study released last week provides one number, and it’s a big one: about 800,000 homeowners. [...]

Unfortunately for homeowners, most mortgages are handled by banks that haven’t been properly staffed and thus have modified far fewer loans. If these worse-performing banks had simply modified loans at the same pace as their better performing peers, then HAMP would have produced about 800,000 more modifications. Instead of about 1.2 million modifications by the end of this year, HAMP would have resulted in about 2 million.

The report largely blamed poor training and poor staffing at the large banks for the shortcoming. A separate report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development earlier this year found that banks were using underqualified workers to process foreclosure documents, promoting untrained employees to the vice presidential level so they could approve foreclosures. At Wells Fargo, one employee processing foreclosures came to the bank from a previous job at a pizza restaurant.

Though the report does not cite which servicers fell short of expectations, it cites “a few large servicers,” hinting that the nation’s biggest banks were the main culprits, speculation backed up by recent reports that Bank of America has failed to offer any mortgage relief under the terms of the recent foreclosure fraud settlement it and other large banks reached with the federal government and state attorneys general.

The number of Americans at or near the federal poverty level is set to reach an all-time high in 2012, a point Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has used to bolster his election case against President Obama. Poverty has grown as high unemployment persists and wages remain stagnant, driving up income inequality and slowing down the nation’s economic recovery.

Those numbers under a Romney presidency would only get worse, according to Melissa Boteach, the director of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. The plans backed by Romney and running mate Paul Ryan would make cuts to food assistance, poverty programs, and education, leaving millions of Americans at an even higher risk of poverty than they already are, Boteach’s analysis found:

31 million people—predominantly children, seniors, people with disabilities, and the working poor—will lose access to health insurance due to Medicaid cuts

46 million people could see their bare-bones nutrition aid (averaging $1.50 per person per meal) reduced to below what the Department of Agriculture considers minimally adequate OR 8 million to 10 million people could lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program altogether

Approximately 191,000 children could be kicked off Head Start, which helps provide at-risk preschoolers with the educational, health, nutrition, and family support services they need, in the next two years

More than 4 million children in low-income school districts could see their educational services reduced or eliminated in the next two years

The costs of special education for 1.26 million special-needs children would be shifted to states and school districts in the next two years

Safety net programs keep millions of Americans out of poverty each year, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure. But many of those programs, including food stamps and other assistance for low-income Americans could face cuts under the GOP budget plan Ryan authored and Romney supports.

Social Security, another popular program, kept 14 million Americans out of poverty last year, and though Romney and Ryan have promised to preserve it, both have supported privatizing it in the past.

At the same time, Romney has proposed plans that would provide massive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.

According to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest 1 percent of American households had a net worth 288 times as large as the median household wealth of $57,000 in 2010. This constitutes a huge increase from 1962, when the ratio was 125-1:

Since 1983, nearly three-quarters of the growth in total household wealth went to the top 5 percent, while the bottom four-fifths of American households saw their wealth decrease:

This is yet another indication of the explosion of income inequality that has occurred over the last few decades, as more and more of the country’s income and wealth traveled to the richest Americans. This is detrimental to America’s economic success because, as EPI explained, “wealth makes it easier for families to invest in education and training, start a small business, or fund retirement.” Wealth also makes it easier to cope in a financial emergency.

The $100 million that billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson pledged to donate to Mitt Romney will turn out to be a good investment if the Republican nominee wins the presidential election in November, a new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund found. Thanks to Romney’s tax proposals, which call for massive tax cuts for the rich, corporate tax reforms that will encourage the offshoring of profits, and the elimination of certain investment taxes, Adelson could personally save more than $2 billion in taxes, according to CAPAF Director of Fiscal Reform Seth Hanlon.

Romney’s tax plan would help Adelson in the following ways:

• Cut top tax rates, saving Adelson approximately $1.5 million on his annual compensation as chief executive of his casino company.

• Maintain the special low rates on dividends, potentially saving Adelson nearly $120 million on a single year’s worth of dividends, more than enough to recoup his political donations.

• Maintain the special low rates on capital gains, allowing Adelson to make back his political donations in capital gains tax cuts just by selling a fraction of his stock.

• Provide a tax windfall of an estimated $1.2 billion to Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., on untaxed profits from its Asian casinos, as well as a tax exemption for future overseas profits. Adelson’s casinos already enjoy a special foreign tax exemption from the Chinese administrative region of Macau, and Gov. Romney would make those foreign profits exempt from U.S. taxes as well.

• Eliminate the estate tax, potentially providing a staggering $8.9 billion windfall to Adelson’s heirs.

Romney’s corporate tax reforms would also provide Adelson’s casino company approximately $1.2 billion in tax breaks on overseas profits and $565 million from Romney’s proposed shift to a territorial tax system. Adelson’s share of that, the report says, would be upward of $900 million, nine times what he pledged to spend to get Romney to the White House.

While Romney’s tax plan would further enrich billionaires like Adelson, it would have to raise taxes on middle class families by as much as $2,000 if Romney were to keep his plan to maintain current levels of revenue.