Our guest blogger is Michael Ettlinger, Vice President for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” an ongoing joke is that the patriarch of the family solves any problem by spraying Windex on it. The equivalent among the “tax cuts are the answer to everything” crowd is cutting the tax rate on capital gains.

The latest idea from Newt Gingrich – which he pitched on Fox News last night – is to cut the capital gains tax rate to zero. He argues that cutting the capital gains tax will cause private capital to flood into Wall Street and rescue the capital markets, which will do so much good for the economy that revenue will go up. Gingrich’s proposal is echoed by the conservative Club for Growth, which today advocated suspending the capital gains tax, saying that such an action “would bring as much as a trillion dollars of capital sitting on the sidelines back into the market.”

There are, to say the least, flaws in this argument:

1. Capital Gains Cuts Mostly Benefit The Wealthy: If you care about who benefits from tax cuts, and don’t think it should mainly be the rich, and in particular if right now you’re not so crazy about cutting taxes on the people on Wall Street who are responsible for getting the country into the huge financial mess it’s in, this probably isn’t your favorite tax change. The benefits of capital gains tax cuts overwhelmingly go to those who own capital assets outside of retirement and other tax-protected accounts. By definition it is the rich who own most capital assets.

2. Tax Cuts Don’t Pay For Themselves Or Produce Growth: The idea is brought to you by the same crowd that has been promising that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves since the late 1970s. Instead, these policies have produced trillions of dollars of government debt. And, for all that debt, what they haven’t produced is particularly strong economic growth. In particular, they haven’t produced the investment growth bragged about.

3. The Incentive Will Be To Change Income To Capital Gains: You may have heard about the break that hedge fund managers get. There’s an attempt to legislatively stop that, but its underlying cause is that capital gains are already taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. So people who can change, on paper, the characterization of their income from wages, dividends, interest, etc. to capital gains do so. Thus, these people don’t just get a tax cut on their capital gains income, they get a tax cut on much more of their income than that. That’s what accountants are for. If you think it’s bad now – with a capital gains rate at a little less than half the rate of ordinary income – imagine if the rate were 0%. Read more

Congress and the Bush administration are currently debating various forms of the $700 billion bailout aimed at stemming the financial crisis. One point of disagreement is whether the bailout will include benefits for troubled homeowners, or whether it will be a “clean bill,” focused solely on rescuing Wall St. financial institutions.

Emphasizing the trouble that homeowners are in, an analysis of Census Bureau data released today shows that 38% of homeowners with a mortgage – 19 million people – are spending 30% or more of their income on housing costs, which is the level of spending at which the government considers the homeowner “to be financially burdened.” 7.5 million people “are spending half of their income or more on housing costs.”

Despite this, the New York Times reported today that housing experts have warned “that the [bailout] plan might do little to help troubled borrowers stay in their houses”:

Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, has put top priority on bailing out financial institutions by buying up soured mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, so banks and other lenders can clean up their balance sheets and get back to normal lending.

But Democrats are insisting that the Treasury Department also help restructure many of those loans, by lowering the interest rate or the loan amount, to make the mortgages affordable and reduce the number of people who lose their homes through foreclosure.

“We are literally spending hundreds of billions of dollars on subsidies for financial institutions,” said Christopher Mayer, a professor of real estate finance and vice dean at the Columbia School of Business. “This won’t do anything to help the housing market.”

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) has proposed an alternative to the Paulson plan, which would give “bankruptcy judges the power to lower mortgages for distressed homeowners.” However, bank lobbyists are rallying to defeat Dodd’s bill. “We are vigorously opposing that,” said Steve Verdier, a lobbyist for the Independent Community Bankers Association (ICBA). “If that happens, then the mortgage rates for other consumers are going to go up.”

David Abromowitz and Andrew Jakabovics of the Center for American Progress have suggested that the Treasury have direct power to restructure mortgages. They wrote that “without provisions expressly aimed at helping these borrowers restructure their mortgages with the assistance of the federal government or through judicial modification, this grand plan to buy ‘toxic’ assets from the financial institutions that engineered this market meltdown will not help the U.S. housing market recover.”

Millions of Americans are paying enough to be considered “financially burdened” by government standards, yet the bailout, for now, does precious little to help any of them.