Joseph Williams moved more than 30 times as a child, living in homeless shelters, church basements, and the homes of family friends. Now Williams, a junior safety on the University of Virginia football team, is taking up a cause supporting the contract workers who are barely making enough to get by.

Williams is one of 18 Virginia students participating in a hunger strike — now more than a week long — to protest the poor wages paid to many of the university’s contracted service employees. The strike, organized by the school’s Living Wage Campaign, began on February 17 with the goal of getting a living wage for underpaid employees. “I know first-hand what the economic struggle is like for many of these underpaid workers,” Williams wrote in an essay explaining his participation:

In failing to implement a living wage for its lowest paid employees, the University of Virginia has also failed to uphold the moral standards to which it holds its students. We are engaging in this hunger strike to call attention to the administration’s moral hypocrisy and to finally produce results in the form of a Living Wage. Although I am exhausted, hungry, dry-mouthed, and emotionally taxed, I believe it is my responsibility as a member of the University community, and even more as a member of the human race, to stand up and speak for those whose voices have been silenced and whose livelihoods are marginalized by the policies of the current University administration.

Williams decried the pay disparity between “hundreds of contract workers who may make as little as $7.25/hour” and the university’s top administrators. According to the essay, six of the state’s 10 highest-paid employees are administrators at Virginia. Williams also told the story of one employee who, despite working 40 hours a week, couldn’t afford to pay rent or utility bills.

“We have taken every conventional route towards this goal, garnered wide student, faculty and community support – yet our pleas have been consistently ignored and workers are still paid unjust wages,” Williams wrote. Perhaps the hunger strike and the national notoriety it has received is changing that, though. According to local news reports, University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan plans to meet with the strikers today.

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today to lay out his economic plan, reiterating his desire to cut the corporate tax rate in order to “restore America’s competitiveness.” During an interview on CNBC, billionaire investor Warren Buffett, in response to Santorum’s piece, noted that is is actually “a myth” that America’s corporate taxes are high. “Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness,” Buffett explained, even bringing a chart to prove his point:

The interesting thing about the corporate rate is that corporate profits, as a percentage of GDP last year were the highest or just about the highest in the last 50 years. They were ten and a fraction percent of GDP. That’s higher than we’ve seen in 50 years. The corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP were 1.2 percent, $180 billion. That’s just about the lowest we’ve seen. So our corporate tax rate last year, effectively, in terms of taxes paid for the United States, was around 12 percent, which is well below those existing in most of the industrialized countries around the world. So it is a myth that American corporations are paying 35 percent or anything like it…Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness.

Watch it:

Buffett is absolutely right to note that while corporate profits are at a record high, corporate taxes are at a nearly half-century low. When looking at the rate that corporations actually pay (as opposed to the statutory rate that only exists on paper), the U.S. has the second-lowest corporate tax rate in the developed world, and raises far less than other nations in corporate tax revenue.

During the interview, Buffett also responded to Gov. Chris Christie’s pronouncement that Buffett should just “write a check and shut up,” instead of calling for higher taxes on the rich. “It’s sort of a touching response to a $1.2 trillion deficit isn’t it? That somehow the American people will just all send in checks and that’ll take care of it,” Buffett said.

Last week, 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney released a tax plan that, in addition to giving the richest 0.1 percent of Americans a $240,000 tax cut, would blow a $10.7 trillion hole in the deficit. Romney insists that his tax cuts would be paid for by limiting deductions for the rich, but many analysts have pointed out that his numbers simply can’t add up.

Today on ABC’s This Week, former Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-MI) noted that Romney’s tax plan would exacerbate income inequality while causing the deficit to explode. Former Gov. John Engler (R-MI) responded by dismissing the numbers, saying that “voters aren’t analysts”:

GRANHOLM: Every analysts who’s looked at, for example, Mitt Romney’s tax plan, says it exacerbates income disparities. Even the deficit, between $2 trillion and $6 trillion he adds to the deficit.

ENGLER: Voters aren’t analysts. Voters are emotional, and it’s about leadership. And they know what they’ve got. If they like that, they can vote to keep it.

Watch it:

Romney’s tax plan would cost four times as much as the Bush tax cuts, reducing revenue to a paltry 15 percent of GDP, a level far below that which was raised the last time that the federal budget was balanced. And Romney can’t even keep straight what his plan does to the taxes of the richest Americans, saying on the same day that he would raise them and cut them.

MESA, Arizona — Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) refused to give President Obama any credit Wednesday for recent economic and business improvements in the country, arguing instead that “anyone who’s paying attention knows that this president has done irreparable harm to the economy.”

ThinkProgress spoke with Franks to get his thoughts on the recent stock market gains and what they say about Republican critiques that President Obama is supposedly “anti-business.” (The Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 13,000 at points earlier this week after a low of 6,626 in March 2009.) The five-term Arizona congressman dismissed the notion that Obama’s policies could have aided the economic recovery. There’s “no question” that the economy is improving in spite of President Obama, Franks said. “It’s a strong country, but Mr. Obama seems to be doing everything he can to hold it back.”

KEYES: A lot of other folks might say that under [President Obama's] watch the stock market has gone up over 5,000 points. What do you think?

FRANKS: Anyone who’s paying attention knows that this president has done irreparable harm to the economy, at least in the short run. [...]

KEYES: So it sounds like [the economy's] improved in spite of President Obama?

FRANKS: No question about it. No question about it. It’s a strong country, but Mr. Obama seems to be doing everything he can to hold it back.

Watch it:

The stock market is not a good indicator of an ecnomy’s health, but even a cursory look other figures shows just how spurious the claim is that Obama has been “anti-business.” As ThinkProgress’ Pat Garofalo noted, “in 2011, corporate profits hit their highest level since 1950.” Unfortunately, these record corporate gains have not trickled down into workers’ pockets; workers’ wages and purchasing power has been largely stagnant, even as their bosses do better than they have in 60 years.

It goes without saying that Franks is no fan of President Obama’s. Last year, he told ThinkProgress in an interview that even he supported impeaching Obama over the White House’s opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Still, Franks is not the only GOPer reluctant to give even a shred of credit to Obama. From the economic recovery to the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi, Republicans have done all they can to ensure they can continue criticizing the president, regardless of the facts.

Angry at the Wall Street banks that were at the center of the financial meltdown, Americans have spent the last six months moving their money to credit unions and community banks in unprecedented numbers. More than 650,000 people moved to credit unions in one month last year, and 5.6 million Americans switched banks in the last three months.

Religious organizations have been at the forefront of movements to get consumers to move their money. The New Bottom Line, a coalition of faith groups, pledged to move $1 billion this year, and before Thanksgiving, churches moved $55 million away from Wall Street banks with pledges to remove as much as $100 million more. This week, churches in San Francisco announced they were moving another $10 million, Faith in Public Life reports:

This week, a group of clergy in San Francisco added another $10 million to that total with an Ash Wednesday press conference calling on Wells Fargo to put an immediate freeze on its foreclosures and repent for their misconduct.

Watch a news report about the group’s efforts:

Wells Fargo issued a statement on the protest, saying, “We make every effort to avoid foreclosure.” The bank’s practices, however, tell a different story. Last July, it foreclosed on a family after telling it to skip payments in order to get a loan modification. It was found to have engaged in discriminatory lending practices, investigated for illegal foreclosures on military veterans, and fined for its subprime lending practices.

According to consulting firms, the nation’s 10 biggest banks could lose $185 million in customer deposits because of customer defections.

In what one state Democrat has called “Robin Hood in reverse,” Kansas’ tax committee this week approved a bill that would cut taxes on the wealthiest Kansans to the tune of $1,500, while raising taxes on those residents making less that $25,000 per year. About half a million of the state’s poorest residents will see their taxes hiked under the plan:

A Kansas House tax committee passed a bill in which anyone making less than $25,000 a year — roughly half a million of the state’s 2.9 million residents — will pay an average of $72 more in taxes, while those making more than $250,000 — about 21,000 people — will see a $1,500 cut, according to Kansas Department of Revenue estimates cited by the Kansas City Star.

The hike would come from the elimination of tax credits typically benefitting the poor.

This plan was actually amended from an earlier one proposed by Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) that would have been even worse for low-income Kansans, raising their taxes by hundreds of dollars while cutting them by more than $16,000 for a millionaire. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Kansas’ tax system is already regressive, with the poorest 20 percent of Kansans paying more than 9 percent of their income in taxes, while the richest 1 percent pay less than 6 percent of their income.

Former Reagan economic adviser and supply-side guru Art Laffer has been consulting with Kansas lawmakers about the state’s tax overhaul. In fact, Laffer has been peddling bogus research in several states in an attempt to get them to make regressive tax cuts. And considering that Laffer openly brags about Reagan raising taxes on low-income Americans, perhaps its not surprising that Kansas’ plan does what it does.

Last week, on the three-year anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e. the stimulus), the GOP went well out of its way to portray the plan as “an abject failure” that not only “failed to create the jobs that Americans were promised,” but also “made things worse.” But plenty of recent independent analyses have debunked that myth, including a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

According to CBO, between 300,000 and 2 million people who were employed in December owed their jobs to the stimulus. The Recovery Act’s impact on jobs peaked in 2010′s third quarter, when an estimated 3.6 million people were employed in jobs that were either saved or created by the Recovery Act. CBO also found that the stimulus:

– Raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.2 percent and 1.5 percent.

– Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.2 percentage points and 1.1 percentage points.

– Increased the number of people employed by between 0.3 million and 2.0 million.

– Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 0.4 million to 2.6 million. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

The CBO also projects that in the first quarter of 2012, compared to what might have happened without ARRA intervention, CBO estimates the ARRA will raise the GDP by between 0.1 percent and 0.8 percent and will increase the number of people employed by between 0.2 million and 1.1. million.

– Fatima Najiy

The broad corporate tax reform plan released by the Obama administration this week included a provision for a minimum tax on corporate profits earned overseas, a rule aimed at preventing corporations from taking advantage of offshore tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. The U.S. loses billions of dollars a year in tax revenue because of corporations parking money in low- or no-tax countries.

Closing a loophole that could cost the U.S. $90 billion this year, however, isn’t popular among Republicans like Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. While Obama’s plan represents “a step forward,” it still double-taxes corporations who have to pay taxes both in the U.S. and in the country where foreign profits were earned, Camp claimed. Camp instead wants the U.S. to switch to a “territorial” tax system, in which companies wouldn’t pay any taxes on profits earned overseas, as he told NPR this morning:

CAMP: They don’t really address the territorial reforms that I think are so essential to make our companies competitive. [...] We tax them here and we tax them there. … This double taxation traps money overseas, and we think there’s about a trillion dollars that could be brought back to the U.S. and invested here — private money — that would really help get our economy going again. That’s a piece they didn’t include. … I hope we can develop into something that will do a better job making sure American companies that make profits overseas can bring those back and invest them in jobs for Americans.

Under current law, companies can defer taxation on profits earned overseas until they return the money to the U.S. Under the territorial system Camp wants, however, companies would never pay U.S. taxes on overseas profits. As Citizens for Tax Justice explained, this would obviously increase the incentive to shift profits overseas and to hide money in tax havens. “We should be able to agree that our tax system should not favor investment and job creation offshore over investment and job creation in the U.S,” CTJ noted. “Our current system does exactly that, and a territorial system could actually increase this bias in the tax code.”

The minimum tax on overseas profits, in contrast, would help shut down the tax havens that shield companies from American taxes and end one of the nation’s biggest tax expenditures. As the Center for American Progress’ Seth Hanlon has noted, corporate tax dodging through tax havens increases the tax burden on individuals and domestic businesses, worsens the country’s fiscal situation, and actually spurs overseas job creation. A minimum tax, in contrast, would combat this abuse without harming American economic competitiveness.

Back in December 2008, laid off workers at Republic Windows and Doors — a factory in Chicago — occupied their workplace to demand back vacation and severance pay, and to protest the fact that they were given just three days notice of impending job cuts. Eventually, the bank’s lender, Bank of America, relented, giving the workers what they were owed. At the time, then President-elect Obama offered his support to the protesting workers, saying, “the workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned, I think they’re absolutely right.”

More than three years later, the same factory has had to be occupied again. Now owned by California-based Serious Energy, the factory was going to be closed until workers locked themselves inside. Now, Serious has vowed to keep the factory open for 90 days, giving workers time to either find a new buyer or purchase the business themselves:

Workers at a window factory on Goose Island ended a sit-in early Friday morning after the company agreed to keep the plant open for 90 days, union leaders said.

California-based Serious Energy will work with the workers to find a new ownership.

“We are committed to finding a new buyer for the plant or if we can, buy the place ourselves and run it. Either way, we are hopeful,” Armando Robles, president of UE Local 1110, said in a statement.

“We can run this company,” said Juan Cortez, a worker at the factory for 23 years. “We got smart people [to] manage the money. We can find customers. We know how to run the company.”

The protesting workers were joined by members of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But such moves by workers are becoming increasingly rare. Work stoppages last year were the second lowest on record, according to data from the Labor Department.

Mitt Romney this week unveiled a new tax plan that includes a 20 percent reduction in all marginal income tax rates. Previously, Romney had said that he’s not concerned about the very rich and is “proposing no tax cuts for the rich.” But during this week’s GOP primary debate, he reneged on that position, saying, “number one, I said that we’re going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20 percent, including the top 1 percent.”

Romney’s new tax cut may reduce all tax rates by the same amount, but it gives most of its benefits to the already wealthy. The Tax Policy Center had modeled a 20 percent reduction in all income tax rates, and as this table shows, nearly half the benefit of such a cut would go to the richest 5 percent of Americans, with more than 25 percent of the benefit going to the richest 1 percent, compared with current policy.

Under the plan, someone in the richest 1 percent of Americans would receive a $60,000 tax cut, while someone in the richest 0.1 percent — those making $1.7 million or more — would receive a $264,000 tax cut.

This analysis actually understates how much of the benefit would go to the wealthy under Romney’s plan, because the TPC included in its model a 20 percent reduction in the Alternative Minimum Tax, whereas Romney would abolish the AMT completely. Meanwhile, Romney’s cuts would cost $10.7 trillion over ten years, four times the cost of the Bush tax cuts.

Romney insists that his tax cut will be deficit neutral, because of unspecified deductions and credits that he is going to eliminate. But as Prof. James Kwak noted, the math for Romney simply doesn’t add up. So all he’s doing is promising a massive tax cut for the rich now, with some hand-waving about how he’d pay for it later.

ThinkProgress noted last year that multi-millionaire movie star Tom Cruise manipulated a tax break meant to help struggling farmers in order to pay just $400 of property taxes on his $18 million Colorado estate. Cruise was able to pay so little because he allowed some sheep to graze on the estate, thus qualifying the land as agricultural and making it eligible for a big tax break.

According to the Miami Herald, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) has done much the same thing, letting cows graze on a plot of land that he owns, which dramatically lowered his tax bill:

Thanks to a half-dozen cows that graze Nelson’s 55 acres on the Indian River, he saved $43,000 in property taxes last year…The land has a full market value of $2.7 million, but the county tax collector uses the agricultural value of $210,000. That reduced Nelson’s tax bill in 2011 to $3,696. [...]

Nelson’s property may never have draw attention but over the years he has put some of it up for sale, netting at least $1.4 million. Three of the five lots were not classified as agriculture, according to records he provided to the Times. Two others were agriculture, as is a sixth lot he currently has for sale at about $540,000. On those, he has gotten the benefit of low taxes before selling at market value.

“I pay all the taxes owed on the pasture land,” Nelson said, defending the tax break. “This pasture has been in my family since 1924 and it’s been a cow pasture since 1950.” But this doesn’t change the fact that the state lost much needed revenue on tax breaks that were meant to aid family farmers, but instead went to land that is decidedly not a farm.

As Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out, there’s an easy fix for this problem, as states could just “replace current agricultural land valuation systems with an agricultural circuit breaker that makes property tax relief available only to real family farms.” “This would not only ensure that Senators and movie stars do not abuse the system, it would also better target those farmers most in need of property tax relief — the farmers for whom the tax loopholes were presumably written in the first place,” CTJ noted.

It’s no secret that the nation’s biggest banks have been trying to kill off the Volcker rule, the regulation named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker that is meant to rein in the banks’ riskiest trading. The banks, with the help of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), watered the rule down before it even became law, and have been heavily lobbying to make it even weaker ever since.

And according to Bloomberg News, the banks even ginned up foreign outrage against the rule, by first pushing regulators to include stricter restrictions on trading by foreign firms, and then getting foreign governments to oppose the rule because of those restrictions:

U.S. banks pushed regulators to widen proposed restrictions on trading and hedge-fund ownership by foreign firms, then encouraged governments around the world to complain about the rule’s reach.

The two-pronged lobbying strategy resulted in foreign officials joining U.S. lenders to push back against the Volcker rule, named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker and incorporated in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

“The criticism of foreign governments on behalf of their banks is helping U.S. banks fight the rule,” said Anat Admati, a professor of finance at Stanford University. “It also muddies the water, shifting the debate away from the main issue, which is reducing the risks banks impose on the economy.”

So the banks pushed for the rule to affect foreign firms more than it had, and then pushed foreign governments complain about the effect the rule would have on their banks. It’s a brilliant strategy to turn the focus away from the banks own malfeasance and to generate an ally where there hadn’t previously been one.

As ProPublica’s Jesse Eisenger noted, when it comes to the Volcker rule, “bank lobbyists with complicit regulators and legislators took a simple concept and bloated it into a 530-page monstrosity of hopeless complexity and vagueness.” And there’s no denying the need for a rule to prevent the sort of trading that the Volcker rule is supposed to prevent. As Donald van Deventer wrote in American Banker, “I can name at least four institutions that effectively ‘went under’ and required taxpayer support because of proprietary trading gone bad: Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Royal Bank of Scotland.”

The Volcker rule will undeniably hurt profits at the nation’s biggest banks. But that’s a feature of the rule, not a bug. As Reuters’ Felix Salmon put it, “These institutions should get smaller. These institutions should be less profitable. There’s no reason to believe that when that happens, the economy as a whole will suffer.” But in order to preserve their ability to gamble their way into oblivion the banks are doing everything that they can, including manipulating foreign governments into pressing for a less secure American financial system.

Some GOP lawmakers in Michigan have been spending their time recently explaining why the man that they’ve backed for President — former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — is all wrong about the federal rescue of the auto industry. “There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government,” said Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), who has endorsed Romney.

Meanwhile, several of Romney’s other endorsers have had to explain their disagreements with him on foreign policy, with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has campaigned with Romney, saying that Romney is wrong about whether the U.S. should be negotiating with the Taliban.

Adding one more issue to the list, as the Las Vegas Sun’s Jon Ralston reported, Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV) — who has also endorsed Romney — explained at a town hall this week why Romney is wrong on housing policy:

Mitt Romney and I don’t agree on every issue and certainly housing is one of them. When you look at what is going on here in Southern Nevada, you can’t say you got to let the housing market hit bottom. We have been bouncing along the bottom for years. And the fact is we have to do everything possible to, one, keep people in their homes and, two, get people who are out of their homes back into their homes.

Previously, Heck has said that Romney has a “plan to put Nevada on a path to prosperity once again.” Romney, of course, said that his solution to Nevada’s housing crisis would be to “let it run its course and hit the bottom,” with the government doing nothing to help keep people in their homes. (He later flip-flopped on the issue, calling for the government to step in and force banks to implement mortgage modifications.)

Romney’s initial position on Nevada’s housing crisis earned a rebuke from several of Nevada’s Republican lawmakers, including Gov. Brian Sandoval (R-NV), who said that Romney doesn’t “fully understand” foreclosure prevention.

As a whole, the Republican presidential field is clueless on housing. But one has to wonder how Romney is picking up so many endorsements from people who don’t agree with him on the most pressing issues in their respective states.