Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that foreclosures in commercial real estate could potentially deliver “a roundhouse punch to the U.S. economy just as it struggles to get up off the mat.” Combined with continuing delinquencies on residential mortgages, these commercial foreclosures could spell real trouble for any burgeoning economic recovery.

For the last few months, members of Congress and various economists have been looking at ways to stem the foreclosure crisis, putting forth a series of legislative solutions. However, when MSNBC needed someone to discuss the situation, it turned to Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader who famously quipped that he’d like to “reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

When MSNBC’s Carlos Watson asked Norquist how he would prevent foreclosures, he launched into a bizarre non-sequiter about Congressional vacations and the stock market, which ultimately culminated in his advocating for corporate and capital gains tax breaks:

WATSON: So you’re saying the constructive thing that Congress could do is go on vacation for two months, number one, and number two is to say that we won’t issue or pass any additional taxes? That’s what you’re saying would be the solution to stem the foreclosure crisis, both on the residential and commercial side?

NORQUIST: Both of those would help. If we could actually get Congress to agree, we should do another repatriation — 2004, 2005, Congress said ‘companies that have money overseas, you can bring it back and not pay a prohibitive 35 percent tax’…We could do that again this year…And what we ought to do also is abolish the capital gains tax.

Watch it:

It’s abundantly clear that Norquist has no idea what’s happening in the mortgage sector, and merely fell back on the conservative tax cut wish-list. The inclusion of tax repatriation is particularly egregious, as not only does it have nothing to do with mortgages, but studies have shown that the 2004 version was simply a tax windfall for corporations. The break allowed corporations to bring back money that they held offshore at a lower tax rate, for the purpose of domestic reinvestment. But the National Bureau of Economic Research found that very little money was actually reinvested:

Now the most detailed analysis of what actually happened — using confidential government data as well as corporate reports — has estimated what happened to the $299 billion companies brought back from foreign subsidiaries. About 92 percent of it went to shareholders, mostly in the form of increased share buybacks and the rest through increased dividends. There is no evidence that companies that took advantage of the tax break…used the money as Congress expected.

In light of this performance, I hope MSNBC will think twice before bringing Norquist on to speak about foreclosures again.

Earlier this month, I noted that the Labor Department is trying to ramp up its effort to combat wage theft without a Wage and House Administrator, whose nomination is stalled in the Senate. Last week, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), ranking Republican on the Senate HELP Committee, asked President Obama to to withdraw his nomination for Patricia Smith to be Department of Labor Solicitor, citing “inconsistent testimony” regarding a program that she launched in New York to monitor wage theft. According to the New York Times, there are currently five Labor Deptartment nominees awaiting Senate confirmation.

Today, the Wonk Room sat down with AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka — who is running unopposed for the AFL-CIO presidency. Trumka said that, in his opinion, those holding up Labor Department nominees are invested in the business-centric stance that came to characterize the Labor Department under the Bush administration:

They’re holding up scores of nominees because they don’t want those positions filled. In some cases, it’s because there are Republican holdovers in them, in some cases they just want the department to be slow and they think if they can hamper the President by keeping his people out and not having a full team on the field, that they come out ahead. [...]

They don’t want anybody in the Labor Department that’s actually going to look out for the interests of workers. They think that it ought to be Commerce Two. So you have the Commerce Department and under [former Labor Secretary] Elaine Chao it was Commerce Two, where they took care of business in both places. And we suffered. Health and safety of workers suffered, the lives of workers were taken needlessly.

Watch it:

As David Madland and Karla Walter wrote, “from air pollution to food safety to children’s toys, one of the hallmarks of President George W. Bush’s administration [was] its failure to enforce laws designed to protect ordinary Americans. This failure is perhaps nowhere more evident than at the Department of Labor, where the Obama administration will have an opportunity and an obligation to correct the Bush administration’s inadequate enforcement of important workplace protections.” But it’s going to be very difficult to fulfill that obligation if the administration can’t get its people in place to do the job.