Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) introduced a plan today that would axe the state’s corporate and personal income taxes, replacing them instead with an increase in the sales tax. Jindal had promised the total elimination of income taxes during his State of the State address in January, and despite studies showing that it such a change would directly benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, he has followed through on the plan.

Jindal said his tax reform would be revenue neutral, and the sales tax would be increased to 5.88 percent. Louisianans would still pay their local sales taxes as well, meaning some residents would face double-digit sales tax rates after Jindal’s reform, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:

The planned increase in the sales tax would raise the current rate by about 47 percent and would come on top of local sales taxes. Residents in New Orleans, for example, would pay a combined rate of about 11 percent under the plan.

Louisiana already has one of the highest combined average state and local sales tax rate in the country and the increase would put the state at the top of that list, according to information from The Tax Foundation.

The poorest Louisianans already pay more of their income in taxes than the richest, according to a study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that shows the bottom 20 percent of the state’s residents pay 10.6 percent of their income in taxes compared to just 4.6 percent for the top 1 percent of residents. Jindal’s plan would only skew the tax code further against the poor and middle class, since it would grant tax cuts to the rich while raising taxes on 80 percent of the state’s residents, according to ITEP.

Jindal said today that he would offset the increases some residents would face by providing rebates, but when ITEP conducted its preliminary study of his plan in January, it found that “any low income tax relief will likely be insufficient to offset the impact of the large sales tax hike necessary to make this tax swap revenue neutral.” Jindal isn’t the only Republican governor pushing such a plan. Republican governors in Nebraska and Kansas and the state legislature in North Carolina are also considering replacing income taxes with increased sales taxes.

Over at Investors.com, Jed Graham ran the numbers on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) new budget for the House GOP, and found that by 2023, it would drive all government spending that isn’t either Social Security or interest on the debt to its lowest level since 1948. On every other occasion in the last 60 years that this category of spending dipped that low, unemployment was never over 4.5 percent — it’s currently at 7.7 percent.

Graham found, “the entirety of federal spending outside of Social Security and interest on the debt (16.4 percent of GDP in 2012) would shrink to 11.2 percent of GDP” by 2023, “a level not seen since 1948.” In fact, the situation is even worse, since in 1948 this spending did not yet include “ObamaCare, Medicare, Medicaid, NASA, the interstate highway system” or a host of other needed programs now in operation:

In fact, if Medicare is discounted as well as Social Security and interest payments, spending shrinks to 7.9 percent in 2023, the lowest levels for that slice since 1938.

This is tiresome and grossly irresponsible, but hardly surprising. Ryan’s previous budget would’ve shoved non-defense discretionary spending — which includes most of the government’s investments in economic growth, veterans’ health care, food safety, drug safety, consumer product safety, federal law enforcement, and more — to 2.1 percent of GDP. Since 1962, the first year for which we have comprehensive data, non-defense discretionary spending has never dropped below 3.2 percent of spending.

Nonetheless, Ryan’s latest budget once again aims for the 2.1 percent mark by 2023, leading Michael Linden at the Center for American Progress to dismiss it as fantasy. “[I]t’s is far easier to ‘cut’ the nebulous category called ‘nondefense discretionary’ than it is to cut actual programs, benefits, and protections that the public knows and likes,” Linden writes. “But in fact, for these kinds of cuts to actually come to pass, Congress — now and in the future — will have to get specific. And if they decide that they can’t, in reality, reduce these things to levels unheard of in generations, then Rep. Ryan’s claim to a balanced budget falls apart.”

Sure enough, American voters only support cutting spending when it’s vaguely referred to as “spending.” Name specific programs, and public support for cutting them utterly collapses.

Argentina’s Jose Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, became the new head of the Catholic Church yesterday, assuming the papacy that was vacated by Pope Benedict XVI at the end of February. As a cardinal in Argentina, Bergoglio eschewed excess, living in poverty and often visiting the nation’s slums and other impoverished areas. Francis took his name from St. Francis of Assisi, the most famous Catholic advocate for the poor, and as pope, he will have the chance to continue the Church’s legacy of fighting growing rates of income inequality and defending the poor.

Though Bergoglio took strides to distance himself from liberation theology, which advocates for the reform of capitalist economics in a way that benefits the disadvantaged, while serving in Argentina, he has in the past railed against economic inequality and the lack of focus given to the poor by the world’s economic elites. He has called “extreme poverty and and unjust economic structures that create great inequities” a violation of basic human rights, and he has chastised the wealthy for not “taking into account the poor.” In 2007, he went even farther, decrying the economic inequality that exists around the world:

“We live, apparently, in the most unequal part of the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least. The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers.”

Recent popes have made similar declarations. In 2011, with streets around the world filled with protests of economic inequality and austerity that was inflicting even more pain on the poor, Benedict called for more economic equality and sweeping reforms of the global financial system in a way that would lead to the “achievement of a universal common good.” Benedict also called for greater wealth distribution to eliminate world hunger and for the greater protection of labor unions to help workers around the world.

Catholic social teaching, in fact, is rich with doctrine about the importance of defending and helping the poor. Still, the Catholic Church has been criticized for not taking sufficient action on those issues. Benedict, after all, formally censured the largest group of American nuns, who focus primarily on advocating for the poor through health care reform and poverty programs, because he said they were not focusing enough on social issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Francis has a chance to change that, whether by re-upping his anti-austerity messages in Europe, where spending cuts have driven up unemployment and decimated poverty programs, by leading opposition to increased income inequality in the United States, where cuts to poverty programs have helped exacerbate the effects of the recession, or by pushing for reforms to economic and health programs to benefit the poorest citizens of Central and South America, Africa, and Asia.

Most of us know cookies are tracking our online behavior for advertising purposes, but a company specializing in retail analytics called Euclid, Inc. is moving that concept into real world shopping experiences — and Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) has some questions about their practices.

Euclid’s newest product Euclid Zero, launched in January, uses open WiFi access points to track shopper behavior across stores: It does this by collecting the MAC address of smart phones as they passively connect to open networks while people shop, anonymizing the data, putting it into a giant database that then recognizes the device when it goes near any other Euclid customer’s network and then gives the data to the retailers essentially in the form of a human Google Analytics browser.

Euclid doesn’t disclose who their clients are online (although they claim “Top 100 retailers in numerous categories, including specialty apparel, department stores, auto parts and home improvement” as clients), and the only notice consumers get is a vague sign hidden somewhere in the physical store, meaning consumer data is collected largely without their knowledge or consent. And while the MAC data is relatively anonymous, it’s also a unique ID — and the only way to opt out is giving Euclid your MAC address, thus identifying yourself.

Euclid raised $17 million in venture funds earlier this year and have information on over 50 million mobile devices right now. Considering that there are 114 million people in the U.S. using smart phones, that’s a pretty large segment of the consumer audience — large enough to garner interest from at least one senator: In a statement yesterday, Franken expressed concerned about the privacy implications of the system:

“It’s one thing to track someone’s shopping habits through a loyalty card or credit card purchase; folks understand that their information may be collected. It’s another thing entirely to track consumers’ movements without their permission as they shop, especially when someone doesn’t buy anything or even enter a store. People have a fundamental right to privacy, and I think neglecting to ask consumers for their permission to track them violates that right.”

The statement was released in conjunction with a letter Franken sent to Euclid’s CEO inquiring about their business practices. The letter includes a laundry list of important questions ranging from law enforcement access to data (with or without warrants?) and how data is being secured in the cloud down to if users are being tracked without even entering stores and how demographic data is being inferred based on smart phone data that provides a good summary of the most pressing privacy concerns — read the full thing here.

If you’re a black woman looking for to refinance your home, the forces of discrimination are working against you. If you’re a white man, you’ll probably have an easier go of it.

According to a new study from the Woodstock Institute, banks discriminate on the basis of both gender and race when they make decisions about which loans they’ll approve. That goes for both mortgage applications and refinancing loans, and it’s worst for African American women:

Female-headed joint applications are much less likely to be originated than are male-headed joint applications. Controlling for the loan-to-income ratio, female-headed joint applications overall were 24 percent less likely to have purchase mortgages originated, and 39 percent less likely to have refinance mortgages originated, than were male-headed joint applications. The disparities were maintained across all racial categories. The largest disparity is for African American female-headed joint applications for purchase, which were 34 percent less likely to be originated than were African American male-headed joint applications, and refinance applications, which were 44 percent less likely to be originated.

Latino and Asian women, too, struggle to get trust from the banks, as this chart illustrates:

The blatant discrimination from banks exposed in this study isn’t the first of its kind. Indeed, the industry has a long and sordid history of discrimination. Last year, one mortgage company forked over $3.5 million after an investigation found it had been overpricing loans to non-white borrowers. Similarly, Bank of America paid out the Department of Housing and Urban Development after it denied a home mortgage to a lesbian couple.

(HT: Next New Deal)

During the 2012 presidential election, Republican nominee Mitt Romney assailed a policy from the Obama administration that would have granted states waivers to improve their welfare programs under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program. Even though the waivers were requested by a host of Republican governors, including Romney himself, Romney alleged that the policy was an attempt to “gut welfare reform.”

Those claims were blatantly untrue, but that didn’t stop Romney and Republicans in Congress from repeating the claims throughout the election. Now, those false claims have reached the legislative level, as House Republicans included a provision to bar the administration from issuing waivers in a bill that reauthorized funding for TANF Wednesday. In a statement on the legislation, the White House noted that not a single governor had requested a waiver under the program, in part because of the GOP’s false claims:

Ultimately, no States formally applied for State waivers, deterred in part by inaccurate claims about what the policy involves; therefore, the limiting provision would have no practical effect on any pending application. The Administration is disappointed that the bill includes this unnecessary bar to innovative welfare-to-work strategies.

At the time of election, two Republican governors supported the waiver program the Obama administration had outlined. The House GOP legislation, meanwhile, aims to prevent waivers that would do away with the 1996 welfare reform law’s work requirements, which the administration policy would not do. It would simply give states more flexibility in determining how to meet those requirements.

Welfare reform has largely failed over its 16 years of existence despite Republican claims to the contrary. It has not gotten benefits to children who need them the most, and it fell especially short during and after the Great Recession.

As Congressional Republicans again rally around Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget and its goal of eliminating the deficit in ten years, many are using an old talking point. They claim that the federal government should model itself on the families and businesses and stop spending more money than it takes in. But a ThinkProgress examination of recent personal financial disclosure filings reveals that many of the same lawmakers who are urging the nation to balance its books are themselves in debt and have taken out personal and/or business loans.

Government is nothing like a business and cannot be run as one — its aim is to protect its citizens, not to turn a profit. Businesses and individuals often borrow in the short term to make investments for the long term — mortgages, lines of credits, and other sorts of loans are facts of life for millions of Americans and businesses of all sizes. Start-up businesses rarely break even for the first several years and few people can afford to buy their first home outright or pay for their kids to go to college out of pocket.

Still, many politicians who advocate for cuts to vital programs and a dangerous Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution use the argument that government needs to live with in its means because everyone else does — but have debt of their own. These hypocrites include:

• House Budget Committee Member Tom Rice (R-SC): Wrote: “At a time when hardworking American families are living off of a budget, the federal government should be no different. My colleagues and I believe it is time for America to change course and get back on a path of prosperity. This begins with a balanced budget plan.” Reported five mortgages totaling over $4 million.
• House Budget Committee Member Diane Black (R-TN): Wrote: “The state of Tennessee balances its budget, American families and businesses balance their budgets and so should the federal government,” and “Balancing the budget is not extreme; it is what American families across this country do on a regular basis.” Reported four mortgages on three properties, totaling more than $3 million.
• House Budget Committee Member Roger Williams (R-TX): Said Wednesday: “We have to have a balanced budget. I have to balance my budget. Everybody in America has to balance their family’s budget or their business’ budget, not every ten years, not even every single year, but every single day.” Reported more than $2.5 million in business debts.
• House Budget Committee Member Scott Rigell (R-VA): Boasted that he voted for a balanced budget amendment because: “I know that American families do what they have to do to live within their means; and so too should the government.” Reported $1.5 million in lines of credit, a $500,000-plus mortgage, and over $10,000 in credit card debt.

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The Congressional Progressive Caucus introduced a budget this week that it says would bring total deficit reduction to $4.4 trillion through defense cuts, new revenues, and economic growth that would result from measures to boost the economy and education. It includes a substantial amount of revenue through the closure of tax loopholes and new taxes on risky financial trading while also preserving Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security from cuts.

Under the budget, defense spending would return to 2006 levels, investment income would be taxed as wage income, and tax rates would rise on millionaires and billionaires. The highlights of the budget include:

A financial transactions tax: Such a tax, as introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), would raise $352 billion in revenue over the next decade while also reducing risky high-speed trading among Wall Street banks. Eleven European countries have announced that they would adopt such a tax, and it has been supported by consumer groups and financial and business leaders.

Stimulus measures: In an effort to boost the economic recovery, the Progressive budget would fund infrastructure investments and provide aid to states to allow for the rehiring of police officers, teachers, and firefighters. It also includes funding for job training initiatives, extended unemployment insurance (which has been cut at the state level), a tax credit for working families, and money to rebuild schools, which are facing a half-trillion deficit in construction and improvement needs.

Closure of corporate tax loopholes: According to the budget, it would raise more than $200 billion in revenue from the closure of tax loopholes and elimination of tax breaks, including those for gas and oil companies, one that benefits wealthy Wall Street traders, and one that gives corporations a break for moving jobs overseas.

The budget also includes a carbon tax to increase funding for alternative energy methods and a public option to lower the cost of health care. It would also give the government the power to negotiate drug prices to generate more in health care savings.