Today, President Barack Obama issued an ultimatum to the American auto industry, “laying out strict standards that the carmakers must meet to get more government aid.”

This comes one day after General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner resigned at the White House’s request. As the Washington Post reported, “the administration effectively rejected as untenable the business plans that GM and Chrysler had submitted to restructure their companies,”a failure for which Wagoner was the casualty.

Wagoner’s ouster does bring up an interesting question, though: why is the administration okay with dismissing the head of an auto company, while going to great lengths not to get involved with personnel decisions at federally bailed-out financial institutions (aside from AIG)? As Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) put it, “when will the Wall Street CEOs receiving [bailout] funds summon the honor to resign? Will this White House ever bother to raise the issue? I doubt it.”

There does seem to be a bit of a double standard when it comes to the respective rescues of the financial system and the auto industry, even beyond management decisions. Ali Frick at ThinkProgress noted that during the AIG bonus debacle, AIG’s contracts were considered sacrosanct, while United Auto Workers has repeatedly agreed to “make major concessions in its contracts,” in an attempt to make the auto companies viable.

So what’s the difference? Tim Fernholz posited that “it’s not a problem of political clout that allows bankers to be more insulated from political pressure, it’s a problem of knowledge“:

Though the auto industry has a lot of problems that will be difficult to solve, those problems are easier to understand and chart, because at the end of the day, manufacturing is a comprehensible industry. Meanwhile, the banks aren’t making anything but bets, and they’re making insanely complicated bets that are not clearly understood.

Fernholz added that he believes that “the administration is much more likely to make bolder moves” once the banks’ stress tests are complete. And maybe this will be true, if the stress tests confirm that the banks are in far worse shape than previously thought.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the government has expected the auto companies to profoundly change the way in which they do business, while not asking for the same level of change from the financial giants. Even within AIG, executives called the Credit Risk Committee, who “oversaw some of the company’s biggest bets,” are still plying their trade.

So as Paul Kedrosky put it, if you want to make catastrophic mistakes and keep your job, “you need to do it in a place where your errors nearly take down global capitalism.” Otherwise, “keep your resume up-to-date.”

Last week, we noted that NPR let Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) trash the spending in the Obama administration’s proposed budget, without having to answer for the deficit effects of his own proposal to slash taxes for the wealthy and corporations. In an appearance on C-Span yesterday, Ryan did not get off so easily, and his meandering answer about small businesses and the stimulus made it abundantly clear that he has no idea what his tax cuts would mean for the deficit:

Q: What is it going to mean for the deficit? You made a lot of hay about deficit spending with the Democrats’ budget. It seems like a tax cut is only going to add to that deficit.

RYAN: We think we need to make up that difference on spending. We think we need to grow out the economy with pro-growth tax policy…Look, we have a massive deficit right now, you can’t balance the budget tomorrow because it’s out of control, but we need to show the economy and the American people that we have a plan and a glide path to get our fiscal house in order and to grow our economy by helping entrepreneurs and small business people, not by raising their taxes, but by lowering their taxes.

Watch it:

Kudos to Politico’s Patrick O’Connor for asking Ryan this question, even if Ryan artfully dodged the answer. Fortunately, Citizens for Tax Justice ran the numbers on Ryan’s income tax proposals. Here’s what they found:

- Over a fourth of taxpayers, mostly low-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the President’s plan.

- The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $100,000 less, on average, under the House GOP plan than they would under the President’s plan.

- The income tax proposals in the House GOP plan…would cost over $300 billion more than the Obama income tax cuts in 2011 alone.

That’s $300 billion more annually, without factoring in the cost of cutting the corporate tax and eliminating the capitals gains tax, both of which Ryan also proposed. As Lee Fang pointed out on ThinkProgress, Ryan conceded that his budget would increase the deficit “a lot.” It might behoove him to figure out how much of that comes from his radical, regressive tax plan.

According to Congress Daily, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) said that he is willing to “drop a cram-down provision from a House-passed banking bill if the language threatened to keep the Senate from passing the overall bill”:

If we can’t get the votes for that, and I am hopeful we can — I am semiconfident we can — then what I’ll do is take that off [the bill] and do the other banking provisions.

Reid’s move “seemed to acknowledge assertions by Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and others that the cram-down bill cannot pass due to opposition from Republicans and some Democratic moderates.” It also acknowledges that Reid is willing to pass a bankruptcy bill that has nothing to do with bankruptcy.

Of course, the Republican opposition has come in the form of a steady stream of misinformation, fueled by the Mortgage Bankers Association’s talking points. As Congress Daily noted, “eliminating or watering down the cram-down provision would be a win for the banking industry.”

Our guest blogger is Lisa Gilbert, a Democracy Advocate with U.S. PIRG.

President Obama and congressional leaders responded quickly to the latest AIG scandal. But here’s the problem: the financial hijinks of AIG, mortgage bankers, and others had already triggered our economic woes. Part of the reason better regulations were not put in place years ago is that AIG and others in the financial sector have contributed $1.3 billion dollars to congressional candidates since 2000. To make sure this can never happen again we need a clean system of campaign financing, one where politicians listen to regular people.

How do we make this a reality? The bipartisan bicameral Fair Elections Now Act, which will be introduced tomorrow in the Senate Press Gallery by Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Reps. John Larson (D-CT),Walter Jones (R-NC), Jim Cooper (D-TN), and Todd Platts (R-PA).

Under this bill, a candidate must demonstrate a broad base of community support by collecting a set number of small dollar donations from their constituencies at home. Once qualified, candidates receive a grant to help kick off their campaigns, and receive matching funds at a 4:1 rate for small dollar donations between $5 and $100.

Our nation’s current campaign system forces elected officials onto a never-ending fundraising treadmill — the day after they take office, politicians must turn an eye towards raising enough money for their reelection. This climate often leads to legislators spending more time talking to influential big donors and deep-pocketed interest groups, than focused on the vital issues of the day.

In a recent bipartisan poll by the Tarrence Group and Lake Research, nearly four in five voters thought that large contributions and their influence would prevent Congress from tackling big hot button issues like the mortgage melt down, our out of control health care costs, and the fragile national economy. Voters in six states this past November also expressed their strong support for state candidates who used Fair Elections-style systems. In both Connecticut and Maine, more than 80 percent of the seats in their incoming legislatures will be held by those who ran using Fair Elections programs.

Every major demographic group solidly favors the Fair Elections proposal. This includes remarkable support across party lines and virtually no difference by region. Nationwide people understand that in order to actually usher in the change administration that President Obama promised, we need to change the “business as usual,” mentality in Washington, and help politicians get off the treadmill and “on” tackling the real issues of the day.