Since 2000, middle class incomes and wages have essentially been stagnant; that period has been called a “lost decade” for the middle class. Meanwhile, some costs have skyrocketed. According to a new report from the Center for Housing Policy and the Center for Neighborhood Technology, rising costs for housing and transportation have squeezed the middle class over the last 12 years, rising by 44 percent. As the report shows:

– Housing and transportation costs have gone up faster than incomes for American households. Since 2000, combined housing and transportation costs have risen 44 percent in the 25 largest U.S. metros, while household incomes have risen only 25 percent. That means that for every dollar household incomes have gone up, housing and transportation costs have risen about $1.75, cutting into wealth, savings and even budgets for essentials.

– Moderate-income households spend a disproportionate share of income for housing and transportation. For households earning 50 to 100 percent of the median income of their metropolitan area, nearly three-fifths (59 percent) of income goes to housing and transportation costs. For these households, the growing “costs of place” are particularly burdensome, leaving little for necessary expenses such as food, education and health care.

This chart compares the rising cost of housing and transportation to income, in non-inflation adjusted dollars:

Another recent study found that the U.S. transportation system does a miserable job connecting workers to jobs. Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to cut the few mass transit investments that the U.S. is making.

LOUISVILLE — There is no better time than now to invest in America’s crumbling infrastructure, Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth (D) told ThinkProgress in an interview this week. With the nation facing high unemployment and in need of a massive upgrade to its roads, bridges, and other infrastructure projects, the government should take advantage of historically low borrowing costs to put people back to work, Yarmuth said:

YARMUTH: These are surefire job creators, it’s work that has to be done. This is not elective surgery, this is life-saving surgery, as far as the infrastructure is concerned. And we’ve never been able to borrow money cheaper. As a matter of fact, people are giving us money for 10 years now. It is the absolute right time to do it, and I think the payback over time would be substantial.

Watch it:

Yarmuth’s home district experienced a major infrastructure crisis in 2011, when a bridge between Indiana and Kentucky was closed because of structural deficiencies. That isn’t a rare problem: across the country, bridges and roads are failing in increasing numbers.

Republicans, however, have consistently opposed infrastructure investments that would fix those problems, even as roads and bridges in their own districts and states crumble.

As Yarmuth notes, the United States has never been able to borrow money cheaper. Real interest rates on government bonds are now lower than the rate of inflation, meaning the government would have to pay back less than it borrowed to fix the problems. And as he also noted, the problems are not optional: roads, bridges, sewer systems, and other infrastructure needs must be addressed at some point.

Republicans, meanwhile, repeatedly blocked the American Jobs Act when it was proposed last year, complete with its investments in infrastructure. They pushed for reductions in the amount of infrastructure spending contained in the 2009 stimulus law, and they want to lower the cost of highway bills that would pay for new and existing improvement projects. In the name of fiscal responsibility, Republicans have prohibited necessary spending on the nation’s infrastructure, even though the projects will only grow more expensive in the future.

Since he came into office, Republicans have consistently attacked President Obama for supposedly being anti-business. As ThinkProgress noted last week, the data shows that this charge is nonsense.

In fact, as the financial website Motley Fool noted today, President Obama is far and away the best president for corporate profits since 1900:

Even if corporate profits under Obama are compared to the 2008 peak — in order to erase the effect of the financial crisis — “average annual corporate profit growth under President Obama is 6.8%,” or nearly three times as large as it was under President Reagan. Both Presidents Bush actually oversaw corporate profit declines during their terms. Meanwhile, real GDP growth per capita is far higher under Obama than it was under either Bush administration.

Mitt Romney will deliver what’s being billed as his “closing argument” in Ames, Iowa today, focusing his speech on the economy. Here are six important things to know before Romney takes the stage.

1) ROMNEY’S BOGUS 12 MILLION JOBS: Romney consistently promises that his policies will create 12 million jobs over his first term. But that’s the number of jobs economists predict the economy will create regardless of who is president. Also, Romney’s math falls apart upon scrutiny. For instance, he claims that his tax plan will create seven million jobs, but uses as evidence a study showing that those jobs will be created over a ten-year budget window, not a four-year presidential term.

2) ROMNEY’S BUDGET WILL KILL JOBS: According to the Economic Policy Institute, Romney’s budget plan will kill more than half a million jobs in the next two years, even if he abandons his plan to pay for his massive cut in tax rates. If he does pay for his tax cuts (which would require raising taxes on the middle class), his plan will cause the loss of nearly two million jobs over the next two years.

3) OBAMA’S JOBS RECORD: Despite the Romney campaign’s dour talking points, the Obama administration is net positive for job growth. The economy has created 1.3 million jobs this year, more than in five of the eight years under the Bush administration. Since February 2010, when the economy hit bottom, 4.4 million jobs have been created.

4) ROMNEY’S TAX CUT FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS DOESN’T HELP THE MIDDLE CLASS: In addition to his income tax plan, which is “severely impossible” according to math, Romney wants to eliminate investment taxes for the middle class. The only problem: the vast majority of middle-class taxpayers don’t have any investment income to exempt from taxation.

5) ROMNEY’S ‘INCONSEQUENTIAL’ EDUCATION POLICIES: Romney likes to tout his education record in Massachusetts as proof that his education policies can boost the economy. However, education experts say that Romney’s K-12 policies were “inconsequential.” His signature college scholarship program, meanwhile, “backfired,” as it largely helped students who were going to go to college anyway.

6) ROMNEY’S $1 TRILLION CORPORATE TAX CUT: Romney talks a lot about his plan to cut income taxes (without detailing how we would pay for it). Less mentioned is his plan to cut corporate taxes by $1 trillion, which the campaign isn’t even bothering to pretend to pay for, even as corporate profits are at all-time highs. Romney’s switch to a “territorial” corporate tax system would also make it easier to outsource jobs.

Mitt Romney, attempting to bolster his case to Ohio voters, misinterpreted a story and passed on an outright lie at a rally in the swing state yesterday. Reacting to a Bloomberg News story about auto manufacturer Chrysler’s plans to open a plant in China, Romney said at a rally in Defiance, Ohio that the company was “thinking of moving all production to China,” and that he would prevent such action by fighting for “every good job in America”:

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said at a rally in Defiance, Ohio, home to a General Motors powertrain plant. “I will fight for every good job in America. I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair America will win.”

The Bloomberg News story, however, doesn’t say that Chrysler plans to move “all production to China.” Instead, it says that Fiat, which now owns Chrysler, is planning to open Chinese factories where it will make one of its most popular lines, Jeep, for Chinese consumers. Chrysler isn’t planning to shift production away from the United States. Instead, it will add factories in China to keep up with the nation’s growing demand for automobiles:

Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Manley referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.

“That he would take an article that just described a global expansion and not a shift in jobs and use it to try to get Ohio votes, or to scare people into voting for him, is just another example of why you can’t trust this man,” former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said on a conference call today.

Romney has often struggled with facts about the auto industry. Though he now claims the auto bailout was his idea, his plan to let the private sector finance the bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors was “reckless” and “pure fantasy,” according to auto industry insiders. By some estimates, it could have cost more than 1 million American jobs.

Republican appointees at Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage giant, resisted mortgage programs aimed at helping homeowners and alleviating the nationwide housing crisis because they feared the programs were an effort at “backdoor economic stimulus,” according to sources who spoke to ProPublica.

After the Obama administration instituted the Home Affordable Refinancing Program (HARP) to help homeowners refinance their mortgages at lower interest rates, Freddie Mac placed heavy restrictions on the program out of fear that it would hurt the company’s bottom line and its ability to repay taxpayers. But two Republican appointees and one executive also held back the program, ProPublica’s Jesse Eisenger reports, because they thought it would help the economy under a Democratic president:

In closed door meetings, two Republican-leaning board members and at least one executive resisted a mass refi policy for an additional reason, according to the interviews: They regarded it as a backdoor economic stimulus. [...]

Robert Glauber, who left Freddie’s board in March, contended in board meetings that aspects of the refinancing program were “designed to be a stimulus” for the economy, said John Koskinen, who served as Freddie Mac’s chairman from 2008 to 2011, during which time he also served briefly as its interim chief executive.

Glauber, director Linda Bammann and head of risk management Paige Wisdom resisted mass refis. One executive viewed their objections as colored by partisan unwillingness to help the economy recover, something that would benefit President Obama.

Glauber, a George H.W. Bush appointee who previously worked on Wall Street, and a former chief executive disputed the idea that opposition to the program was partisan in nature.

Whether the program would have been stimulative in nature is unquestionable. In fact, helping homeowners and reducing the drag of a slumping housing market was precisely the point of HARP and other mortgage programs. Columbia University housing economist Christopher Meyer told ProPublica that more aggressive programs by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the other government mortgage giant, could have saved homeowners $75 billion in interest payments and prevented an untold number of foreclosures. Instead, Freddie Mac has only recently loosened the tight restrictions it placed on the refinancing program.