Ahead of tonight’s debate, Mitt Romney and other Republicans have busted out a new talking point on the national debt and taxes, arguing that a new study from the American Enterprise Institute shows that President Obama’s policies would make it necessary to raise taxes by $2,400 on middle class families in order to service the debt that will be accrued over the next decade. Adding in the debt from the past four years would push that number up to $4,000 a year, according to the report.

The first problem with Romney’s talking point, of course, is that much of the debt accrued over the past four years is due to tax cuts, wars, and a recession that weren’t “Obama’s policies.”

The real problem, though, is that Romney and AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis, who originally pushed the report in a blog post yesterday, have their math wrong on the debt that will be accrued over the next 10 years, as the following two charts from the report illustrate. The first, Table 5, details the amount of each person’s taxes that would go toward debt reduction under current policy — that is, all of the policies, including the full Bush tax cuts, current spending levels, and all war spending. Pethokoukis left this chart out of his post, but it’s the one that debunks his entire theory. Under current policy, each person in the $100,000 to $200,000 bracket Romney cites would pay $3,742.62 out of their taxes to service the debt:

The second chart is the one Pethokoukis used in his post and the one Romney cited to say that Obama would raise taxes on the middle class to service the debt. But look: it shows that under the Obama budget, families in the $100,000 to $200,000 tax bracket would pay $2,452.73 toward servicing the debt:

In short, that means that rather than raise taxes to pay down the debt, the Obama administration’s policies — those contained directly in his budget — would reduce the share of taxes that go toward servicing the debt by $1,289.89 per taxpayer in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. And that fact remains the same under all three scenarios detailed in those charts. The report proves that relative to current policy, the Obama budget substantially reduces the debt. So, no, the report doesn’t show a tax increase; in fact, it shows that Obama’s policies would cause the share of taxes devoted to servicing the debt to go down.

That Romney messed up the math from this report isn’t surprising, given that the math from his tax plan doesn’t begin to add up. An independent analysis by the Tax Policy Center found Romney’s plan would either raise taxes on the middle class or add trillions to the federal debt, since it’s impossible to reconcile both his promise to balance the budget and provide huge tax cuts.

The nation’s five biggest banks signed a settlement in February with the Department of Justice and most of the nation’s state attorneys general that allowed the banks to avoid going to court for their role in the foreclosure fraud scandal. Under the terms of the settlement, the banks agreed to pay $25 billion and end certain abusive practices.

However, a new report from the California Monitor, an office overseeing the settlement, found that the banks continued at least one pernicious practice until the last possible moment:

The Settlement provided banks with an implementation period to change their practices. Banks agreed to make all changes by one of three deadlines: 60 days, 90 days, or 180 days. While some changes, such as implementation of a single point of contact for borrower communication, occurred quickly, the banks have taken the full 180 days (six months) to stop dual tracking. This is permissible under the Settlement.

But this waiting has been painful for homeowners, whose fate is uncertain under the dual track regime. To date, dual tracking has continued. As the graph illustrates, the California Monitor Program has received dozens of requests for help each month from families who have submitted loan modification applications but fear that foreclosure will occur, despite their hard work. In August, 25% of complaints received by the California Monitor stated a dual tracking problem.

“Dual-tracking” is the practice of continuing the foreclosure process even as a homeowner is being evaluated for a mortgage modification. It has caused problems for borrowers with several large banks, and results in borrowers faithfully making payments while awaiting a permanent mortgage modification, but seeing their homes foreclosed upon and sold out from under them anyway.

California outlawed dual-tracking entirely in its recent Homeowner’s Bill of Rights. And as this report from the California Monitor shows, banks aren’t willing to end dual-tracking until the law forces them to do so. (HT: Ben Hallman)

A new study from the Kauffman Foundation found that in 2011, one-fourth of tech start-ups were founded by immigrants. In Silicon Valley, 43.9 percent had at least one immigrant founder. As the authors of the study wrote, “high-skilled immigrants will remain a critical asset for maintaining U.S. competitiveness in the global economy.”

This is nothing new. As ThinkProgress has noted in the past that “immigrants founded almost half of the U.S.’s top 50 start-up companies and are vital management or development employees at roughly 75 percent of the nation’s leading cutting-edge companies.”

However, Forbes notes that — for the first time in decades — these numbers are actually in decline. The change was especially dramatic in Silicon Valley, where “the percent of companies with at least one immigrant founder fell from 52.4 percent to 43.9 percent.” Tougher immigration policies put in place since 9/11 have made it more difficult for high-skilled immigrants to be successful in the United States, and this is causing reverse “brain drain.” That is, highly skilled and US-educated immigrants are going to India and China, where more economic opportunities exist for them.

This is a serious problem because the economic contribution immigrants make is disproportionately large: immigrants started 28 percent of all US business in 2011, but account for just 12.9 percent of the population. In addition, twenty-nine members of the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans are immigrants.

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President Obama will square off in a debate against his Republican opponent Mitt Romney in Denver, Colorado tonight. According to the latest data, Colorado is in the top ten states in the nation for foreclosures, with one out of every 617 housing units receiving a foreclosure notice in the month of August. Housing has remained a consistent drag on the economy over the last several years.

If the candidates are asked about housing policy, and there’s certainly no bet that they will be, neither of them has much of a record at which to point. Romney recently released his housing “plan,” which was nothing but vague assertions and right-wing rhetoric. For foreclosure prevention, all the plan says is “a Romney-Ryan Administration will bring clarity in this area.”

The paper also gives no specifics about Romney’s plan to reform government backed mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, but merely asserts that reform will take place. So far, the clearest sign of what a Romney administration would do on housing comes from his statement that the foreclosure process should “run its course and hit the bottom.”

Romney’s refusal to release any details is a bit surprising considering the Obama administration’s weak record when it comes to housing. The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which was supposed to prevent three to four million foreclosures, has resulted in 825,000 permanent mortgage modifications; one million borrowers, meanwhile, have started the program without successfully navigating it to the end. According to a recent report, recalcitrant banks caused 800,000 more foreclosures under HAMP than they should have.

Obama’s Federal Housing Finance Agency — which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — has steadfastly stood against the two mortgage giants providing principal reductions to homeowners with federally backed mortgages, even though principal reduction is one of the surest ways to keep a borrower in her home. Adding insult to injury, the FHFA is planning to punish homeowners in states that make it harder to foreclose by raising their fees.

This seems to be a ripe topic for discussion, if moderator Jim Lehrer decides to ask about it. Hopefully he does better with the subject than CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

Yesterday, the Huffington Post unearthed video from last year of Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan echoing Mitt Romney’s now-infamous comment about the “47 percent.’ Ryan raised the specter of an America going over the moral tipping point to become a country “of takers, not makers,” then declared that 30 percent of Americans don’t believe in the American dream:

Today, 70 percent of Americans get more benefits from the federal government in dollar value than they pay back in taxes. So you could argue that we’re already past that [moral] tipping point. The good news is survey after survey, poll after poll, still shows that we are a center-right 70-30 country. Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want their welfare state.

Watch it:

It’s not clear what surveys Ryan is referring to. To the extent that he has a case, it appears to be “a loose pastiche of factual misstatements and illogic,” as New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait put it. After all, a poll by the Pew Research Center in July of 2011 found large majorities opposed to benefit cuts for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Another poll by Gallup in January of 2011 found majorities from 52 to 67 percent opposing cuts in education, Social Security, Medicare, anti-poverty programs, and even arts and science funding. And a year before that, a joint poll by The Economist and YouGov asked voters about aid to the poor and unemployment benefits, as well as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security again. Support for cuts in any of these areas didn’t even crack 20 percent.

It’s true that Americans tend to be skeptical of government spending in the abstract, and prefer amorphous “spending cuts” to “tax hikes.” But when asked about concrete programs serving concrete needs their refusal to trim the social safety net is striking. Romney and Ryan’s proposed budgets, meanwhile, would slash Medicaid by a third over the next decade, could substantially increase what seniors pay for their health care, and would decimate welfare programs such as food stamps, unemployment benefits, assistance to needy families, and education.

Mitt Romney yesterday floated a proposal to cap the amount of tax deductions that an individual can take at $17,000, in response to criticisms that his plan would cut taxes for the rich while raising them on the middle class. As ABC News reported:

“As an option you could say everybody’s going to get up to a $17,000 deduction; and you could use your charitable deduction, your home mortgage deduction, or others – your healthcare deduction. And you can fill that bucket, if you will, that $17,000 bucket that way,” he said during a visit with Denver’s FOX31. “And higher income people might have a lower number.”

The idea is not fully fleshed out and leaves a lot of questions unanswered, including whether or not the health care exclusion will be included (which saved the average family about $3,800 in 2006). But while including a cap on deductions would certainly cause Romney’s tax plan to raise more revenue, it still doesn’t make his plan add up.

Romney has laid out three criteria for his tax plan: it will cut income tax rates by 20 percent, not add to the deficit, and not raise taxes on the middle class. However, as an analysis by the Tax Policy Center shows, Romney can’t achieve all of those goals. Without ceding to a smaller rate reduction, Romney must either add to the deficit or raise taxes on the middle class.

Romney’s new idea doesn’t change that basic equation. The Tax Policy Center analysis, after all, assumed that Romney eliminated all tax deductions for the wealthy. Capping deductions at $17,000 obviously preserves $17,000 (or whatever number Romney settles upon) worth of deductions for the rich, meaning he will either have to expand the deficit or raise taxes elsewhere to make his tax plan reality.

“It goes back to the same problem that we’ve raised,” TPC’s Howard Gleckman told Talking Points Memo. “He’s promised all these things and he can’t do them all.

As Citizens for Tax Justice noted, “there is simply no way to Romney could fill in the details of his tax plan in a way that will not result in huge tax cuts for the very rich.” A cap on deductions may be a good idea in the abstract, but it doesn’t make Romney’s plan add up.

In the last four quarters, the six largest Wall Street banks have made $63 billion, the most they’ve made since 2006. Despite having pushed the nation to the brink of economic collapse, and after receiving billions of taxpayer dollars, the banks are back to where they were when the housing bubble inflating.

However, according to Bloomberg News, a return to sky-high profits isn’t enough for the banking industry, which reacted to the numbers by whining about regulation and “a backlash against bankers“:

Those billions of dollars in profits aren’t enough, according to interviews with more than a dozen bank executives and analysts. The lowest leverage in a decade, return on equity at a third of 2006 levels, higher capital requirements, shares trading below book value, declining bonuses, job cuts, the European sovereign-debt crisis and a backlash against bankers have damped the joys of profit, they said.

Thes six banks — Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — “will have combined profits of $9.9 billion in the third quarter, $17.4 billion in the last three months of the year and $75.8 billion in 2013″ according to estimates. “When the banks say, ‘We’re doing very well but not getting a return on our capital,’ it’s completely incomprehensible, and it’s angering to the average American,” said Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who now teaches at the University of Maryland’s law school.

The banks’ return to massive profitability also refutes the argument that the Dodd-Frank financial reform law will cripple the ability of financial services companies to make money. According to a recent study, the nation’s banks went right back to making risky loans after receiving their taxpayer-funded bailout.