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.

After nearly a decade of steep declines, American manufacturing jobs have begun to rebound since the beginning of the Obama administration, as the slide that occurred under President George W. Bush and during the Great Recession has largely been reversed.

Manufacturing slumped in the first year of the Obama administration as the nation dealt with the effects of the recession, but since then, manufacturing has posted job gains in all but three months since February 2010, as Bloomberg Government reports:

The BGOV Barometer shows U.S. factory positions have grown since early 2010, arresting a slide that began toward the end of the 1990s. It’s the best showing since the era of Bill Clinton, the only president in the last 30 years to leave office with more factory jobs than when he began.

“The gain in manufacturing jobs is certainly helpful, it is one way to show we’re moving forward,” said Terry Madonna, a political science professor and director of the Franklin & Marshall College poll in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “President Obama has to create a psychology all over the country that things are getting better. This is a piece explaining that idea.”

Obama took over at a time when manufacturing was at one of its lowest historical points, and the decline continued through the early part of his term thanks to the recession. The rebound, however, began with manufacturing production, which turned around in the wake of the stimulus package passed in the opening months of Obama’s term, and jobs began to follow. The automobile industry has also shown sustained job growth, making manufacturing one of the most positive sectors in the nation’s economic recovery.

Mitt Romney is worth double the sum of the last eight presidents’ wealth, but he has paid one of the lowest tax rates. According to Joseph Thorndike at Tax Analysts, only President Richard Nixon paid a lower tax rate, at 6.1 percent, in the last 40 years.

The chart below compares Romney’s relatively low tax rate to recent presidents including Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, who each paid above 20 percent:

Since much of Romney’s income comes from investments, the low 15 percent capital gains tax rate saved him $1.2 million in taxes in the last year. Romney’s tax return dump on Friday confirmed that his 14.1 percent tax rate is lower than than many middle class Americans’ tax rates.

The precedent for presidential candidates to release their tax returns began after Nixon drew fire for paying a mere 0.3 percent tax rate from 1970 to 1972. Nixon’s tax avoidance became a point for controversy in his administration, since Nixon took “extremely aggressive efforts at keeping it low,” particularly, a charitable deduction for donating his vice presidential papers.

Romney’s returns show he didn’t claim $1.8 million in charitable deductions last year; doing so would have dropped his rate to 9 percent. Meanwhile, both Romney’s proposed tax plan and the one proposed by his vice presidential nominee would allow him to pay even less in taxes.

A nonprofit group that supports fair housing has filed a lawsuit claiming that Bank of America, the nation’s second largest mortgage servicer, has failed to maintain and market foreclosed homes in African American and Latino neighborhoods the same way it does in white neighborhoods.

The National Fair Housing Alliance filed the complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development after examining Bank of America-owned properties in eight American cities and finding “significant racial disparities” in how the properties were maintained and marketed to potential buyers, Reuters reports:

The group reviewed 373 properties owned, managed or serviced by Bank of America in eight U.S. cities as part of its ongoing examination of how U.S. lenders maintain bank-owned properties. Investigators evaluated properties for problems such as broken windows, overgrown lawns, trash accumulation and a lack of “for sale” signs.

“We have found significant racial disparities,” Shanna Smith, chief executive officer of the National Fair Housing Alliance in a conference call with reporters.

NFHA filed similar complaints against Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage servicer, and U.S. Bancorp earlier this year after it released a report detailing the disparities between white and black and Latino neighborhoods. The report looked at bank-owned homes in nine cities and found that properties in black and Latino neighborhoods were more likely to be left in disrepair than homes in white neighborhoods, driving down home prices, increasing vagrancy and crime rates, and making it harder to sell homes in those neighborhoods.

Discrimination was widespread throughout the mortgage and foreclosure process leading up to and after the housing crisis. Black and Latino borroweres were twice as likely to have been affected by the crisis because banks that used predatory practices against borrowers were even more predatory toward minorities. Pushing qualified lenders into subprime loans cost minorities as much as $100,000 in additional interest payments.

A firm run by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney invested in a Chinese company just a week after it touted the low wages it paid its employees, stringent working conditions, and the low tax liability it faced compared to American companies in a document to investors.

Romney has gotten tough on the Chinese government on the campaign trail, but in 1998, Brookside Inc., a subsidiary of Bain Capital, invested in Global-Tech Appliances days after it sent investors a document detailing the low wages it paid its workers and the low tax liability it faced, the Boston Globe reports:

It used “inexpensive labor,” Global-Tech Appliances wrote in a prospectus meant to attract investors on April 8, 1998. Its location in China meant “an overall effective tax rate that may be less than that of US corporations.” It said its current operations would not be subject to “material US taxes because it should not be considered to have significant income effectively connected with a trade or business in the US.” [...]

Nine days after the document was released – on April 17, 1998 — an affiliate of Bain Capital called Brookside Capital Partners Fund acquired about 6 percent of Global Tech, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents that were first reported by Mother Jones magazine.

A leaked video from a Romney fundraiser showed the candidate giving an account of a trip to China to visit a factory in which Bain considered investing. Romney talked of the long hours worked by teenage girls who lived in dormitories on the premises and earned low wages. Spokespersons for both the Romney campaign and Bain Capital declined to comment for the Globe’s story.

Mother Jones reported in July that Global-Tech also depended heavily on the outsourcing of American jobs to China. Romney has blasted that practice on the campaign trail, but as the chief executive at Bain, he routinely oversaw the outsourcing of jobs to China and other low-wage countries. Investment documents released in August also detailed an investment into a company that is outsourcing jobs to China and forcing American workers to train their replacements.