This post first appeared on Think Progress.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post provided some more details about the ongoing foreclosure fraud scandal, noting that “virtually everyone involved – loan servicers, law firms, document processing companies and others – made more money as they evicted more borrowers from their homes, creating a system that was vulnerable to error and difficult for homeowners to challenge.” A bevy of Democratic lawmakers have called for examinations of the banks’ potentially fraudulent activities, while the Attorneys General of all fifty states have pledged a coordinated investigation.

Republicans, however, have been largely silent on the issue. And according to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who is slated to take over the House Committee on Government and Oversight should the Republicans gain a majority, the GOP is not really interested in the banks’ malpractice. Instead, Issa wants to “launch aggressive inquiries” into whether the government helped poor people buy houses they couldn’t afford:

The conservative Republican from California, who would become chairman of the powerful House oversight and government reform committee, said hearings would focus on whether the federal government should be involved at all in sponsoring home loans for the poor.

Such hearings would evidently “centre on the roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” which Republicans have blamed for the financial collapse of 2008, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As the Wonk Room explains, Issa’s pronouncement is part of an ongoing conservative effort to scapegoat homeowners and government for Wall Street’s malfeasance.

While the GOP likes to blame homeowners for the country’s economic woes, in the last decade, as the Center for American Progress has documented, banks were still systematically charging minorities higher costs for loans and pushing them into expensive subprime mortgages, making government policies to ensure fair access to credit a necessary step. It says a lot about the Republican mindset that banks evicting homeowners who aren’t in foreclosure doesn’t merit an investigation, but a low-income family receiving a mortgage in a traditionally under-served community does.

This post first appeared on Think Progress.

Now that disgraced former health care executive Rick Scott has officially won his Republican gubernatorial primary in Florida, he is turning his attention to his general election campaign against the Democratic nominee, Florida CFO Alex Sink. And part of that campaign is evidently leaving no doubt as to where he stands regarding the Bush tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire at the end of the year — Scott very clearly wants them all extended, even for the richest two percent of Americans, per his campaign spokesperson:

Floridians want an answer: Will Alex Sink stand with Obama and let the Bush tax cuts expire, thereby increasing Floridians’ taxes, or will she stand with taxpayers and demand Obama work to extend the Bush tax cuts?

Scott has also touted his opposition to the Bush tax cuts on both national and local television. Watch it:

Of course, as governor, Scott wouldn’t have any say over whether or not the Bush tax cuts get extended. He could certainly advise Florida’s congressional delegation, but at the end of the day, federal tax policy is not within the purview of the nation’s governors. As The Wonk Room points out, Florida has one of the country’s most regressive state tax systems, and Scott’s economic plan would only make it worse.

This post originally appeared on Think Progress.

Since he was on the campaign trail, President Obama has proposed renewing the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts for the lower- and middle-class, while allowing them to expire on schedule at the end of the year for the richest two percent of Americans. Republicans, however, have begun to obfuscate the issue by saying that the end of the year will bring history’s largest tax increase, deliberately leaving out that Democrats have proposed extending most of the cuts.

READ FULL POST

This is cross-posted from Think Progress.

With the legislative calendar starting to dwindle, lawmakers are paying more and more attention to the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of the year. Republicans across the board are advocating for the extension of all the cuts, and have explicitly said that extending the cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans (which would cost $678 billion) does not have to be paid for.

President Obama has called for letting the cuts for the very richest expire, allowing the rates to reset to where they were under the Clinton administration. In an interview with Bloomberg News’ Judy Woodruff, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan went a step further, calling for all of the tax cuts to expire, essentially sending the tax code back to 2001: READ FULL POST

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, 15 million Americans have lost their jobs. Almost half of them have been out of work for six months or more, and there are currently nearly five workers actively seeking work for every available job, compared to just 1.5 workers per opening before the recession.

In fact, so many jobs were lost during the recession that even if we added 218,000 private-sector jobs each month from now on, which is the highest monthly payroll increase seen in the private sector so far this year, it would still take almost five years to get to normal.

Despite these miserable statistics, the Senate has been unable to extend job benefits because of a Republican filibuster, which was joined by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE). On three separate occasions, Democrats tried to break the filibuster but were unsuccessful. Last night, they came within one vote, as Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Susan Collins (R-ME) finally signed on, but still the extension failed to pass.

Though no senator voting to continue the filibuster should be allowed to escape culpability, many senators voting to sustain it are from states that have been hit particularly hard by the unemployment crisis and have a particular responsibility to get relief to those who, through no fault of their own, are now out of work. Here are the 17 senators from states with double-digit unemployment who are willing to leave their constituents without a safety net:

1.3 million people have lost their benefits this month alone, and this is actually an historic step on the part of the Senate, as “never before has Congress cut off benefits when unemployment was so high.” In fact, “the highest unemployment rate at which these extensions were allowed to expire was 7.2 percent, following the 1983 recession — substantially lower than our current rate of 9.7 percent.” But perhaps Republicans in the Senate agree with Sharron Angle that unemployed people are simply “spoiled” and “afraid to get a job”?