Yesterday, the Obama administration completed its budget release, “with fresh details on a plan to scale back tax advantages for businesses operating overseas.” The administration wants to prevent corporations from claiming tax deductions on overseas investments until they pay U.S. taxes on their profits, and change a rule known as “check the box,” which has amounted to a loophole allowing companies to easily shift income into low tax countries.

We’ve noted before that the business lobby is gearing up to challenge these proposals. And today in Politico, the Business Roundtable laid out how serious it really is about preventing these reforms:

“We’re going to spend whatever it takes,” said Brigitte Schmidt Gwyn, senior director of congressional relations for the Business Roundtable, which represents CEOs of the nation’s largest companies.

The Business Roundtable alone spent more than $13 million lobbying Congress last year, and has already spent $1.2 million this year.

The business lobby’s main claim is that the tax changes will cause widespread job losses, a charge that is overblown. The real concern is that the corporate tax status quo is completely off kilter, as corporations can take advantage of myriad loopholes to simply avoid taxation. As Matthew Yglesias noted, “check the box” was meant to simplify classification of corporate subsidiaries, but it unintentionally created a huge tax loophole:

[A]s soon as it was noted, an effort was put in place to change it. But a ferocious lobbying battle opened up…The availability of this loophole is a significant incentive for companies to invest in their overseas subsidiaries and take advantage of the tax shell game. It’s a loophole that nobody ever intended to create, and that should be done away with forthwith.

These corporations aren’t doing anything illegal, but they are gaming the system to their advantage. So this debate shouldn’t be about whether the corporate tax rate is too high or too low, but about the responsibility that corporations have to pay the rate that’s on the books. The Obama administration is proposing common sense reforms so that corporations can no longer dramatically lower their tax rate by taking advantage of loopholes. And the business lobby has made it clear that it’s willing to go to great lengths to keep these loopholes open.

It’s no secret that the Obama administration is planning an overhaul of the way in which the financial services industry is regulated. House Financial Services committee chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) has said that the reform package will hopefully be in place by the end of the year and that “we plan to start voting on this by the end of June.”

Much of the discussion about regulatory reform has focused on what to do with the big banks and how to end too-big-to-fail. But Professor Elizabeth Warren — a bankruptcy expert and Chair of the TARP’s Congressional Oversight Panel — said that efforts at regulatory reform can’t be aimed solely at the banking behemoths, because that won’t provide adequate protection for families. In an interview yesterday with The Wonk Room, Warren explained that reform also needs to occur at the consumer level for products like mortgages:

We need to think at the product level. All these lousy mortgages got sold, one family at a time. These were crummy mortgages, like selling plastic spoons that have carcinogens in them or toys that put out little children’s eyes. We sold them one product in a time.

If we had had just basic safety standards in place from the beginning, then we never would have fed these into the front end of the financial system, where they then would have been bundled up and then sliced into tranches and rated and rebundled and sold and rated again…And so the most important thing I can say is that it is not enough to regulate banks simply from the point of view of the Fed or the OCC…We have to look at those products.

Watch it:

Once upon a time, state governments actually tried to regulate mortgage originations at the ground level, but the Bush administration exempted national banks from state regulations, effectively blunting the states’ regulatory push.