In today’s Progress Report, I take a look at the legacy of the Bush tax cuts, the first of which was enacted 10 years ago tomorrow:

10 years ago tomorrow, the first of the Bush tax cuts was enacted. That 2001 tax cut was followed up by a second tax cut in 2003, passed after Vice-President Dick Cheney reportedly asserted that “deficits don’t matter.” The tax cuts were sold as necessary economic stimulus that would boost job creation and a moribund economy. “Tax relief will create new jobs, tax relief will generate new wealth, and tax relief will open new opportunities,” Bush said on April 16, 2001 as he was pushing for the passage of the first tax cut. Two years later he said, “These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans…By speeding up the income tax cuts, we will speed up economic recovery and the pace of job creation.”

Bush called the 2001 tax cut, “a victory for fairness and a vote for economic growth.” Then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) said that the cuts were necessary to “spur the economy on.” And up through 2008, Bush was still convinced that his tax cuts had been good for the economy. “I think when people take a look back at this moment in our economic history, they’ll recognize tax cuts work. They have made a difference,” Bush said. However, the record of the Bush tax cuts is undeniable: their enactment coincided with the weakest economic expansion of the post-war period, blowing up the national deficit and debt, while not bringing any of the promised gains.

Read the whole thing here.

Our guest blogger is Julie Morgan, a Policy Analyst with the Postsecondary Education Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week, the Department of Education released a rule called “gainful employment” that requires career education programs to account for their students’ outcomes upon graduation. The final regulation was significantly different from the draft rule proposed last July, a response to the intense lobbying effort on behalf of for-profit colleges whose soaring profits were put in jeopardy by the strong draft rule.

The basic premise behind the rule remained the same: it conditions access to federal financial aid on a programs’ student loan repayment rate and its graduates’ debt-to-income ratio. The most significant changes in the final rule are in the timeline of its enforcement and the method of calculating the debt burden and repayment rate metrics. Here is a run-down of the most significant differences between the rule proposed in July 2010 and the final regulation:

It’s clear that the new rule gives colleges much more time to come into compliance and makes it easier to meet the individual metrics. In short, it’s weaker. So besides wondering how special interest groups that represents a tiny group of colleges could come to control a debate that should have been about low-income students and the taxpayers who help them go to college, the question that comes to mind is: What we should do now? Read more

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Just Jobs Network Conference in Cairo, Egypt.

On May 27, tens of thousands of protestors once again took to Egypt’s Tahrir Square for what was billed as a “Second Day of Rage”: protests aimed at criticizing the slow pace of reform in the country and the lack of clarity regarding the fate of former President Hosni Mubarak. (A few days before the protest, the military announced it would try Mubarak.)

Even though it is no longer ruled by Mubarak, Egypt still has several huge problems, not the least of which is its moribund economy. Youth unemployment in the country is running at 30 percent, and the official overall unemployment rate is 11.9 percent (and there’s good reason to believe that number is too low). The growth outlook is poor and there’s little clue as to where the country’s economic policies will go under whatever government comes in next.

Independent labor movements, though, are trying to set things off in a new direction. Under the Mubarak regime, independent trade unions were outlawed, and the only legal unions were overseen by the state. But that has now changed. ThinkProgress spoke with Kamal Abbas, general coordinator of the independent and now legal Egyptian Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services (CTUWS), who said that the independent labor movement is still getting its feet under it, and European and American unions can help the nascent independent Egyptian movement wield its new-found set of rights:

We can’t really say that there’s a role for [independent labor] quite yet, because the unions are still in the process of formation…Independent unions are going to create the basis for the negotiation between the businessmen and the workers. The two sides of the productive process. […] Unions in Europe and the United states [can play] two roles [in helping Egyptian independent unions.] Helping them in establishing their unions here. Training union workers about the management of the unions, empowering them, training them in negotiations.

Watch it:

As Sabina Dewan, the Director of Globalization and International Employment at the Center for American Progress, wrote, there are several ways the international community can help the burgeoning Egyptian labor movement:

The international community must ensure that the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining are written into law as Egypt establishes a new constitution and government…The international community must help equip the newly formed independent federation with the tools and training it needs to represent and coordinate newly formed trade unions to secure a unified labor movement that protects and promotes the rights of workers through public policy and with employers.

Finally, any support that the international community provides the Egyptian labor movement must include an effort to strengthen the representation of women, and the active role that women play in the labor movement as Egypt undergoes democratic reform. Empowering Egyptian women in the labor force and in politics is crucial to the country’s economic modernization.

Last week, the CTUWS called upon the current Egyptian Prime Minister to issue a law solidifying the legality of independent labor.

2012 Republican hopeful Mitt Romney is banking on his economic credentials as a former businessman to bolster his presidential prospects. “I believe it’s time for someone who’s had a job do the job of getting jobs for the American people,” Romney said over the weekend.

However, Romney’s supposed business acumen doesn’t come through when it comes to discussing the federal budget. Romney has decided, like so many other conservatives from both sides of the aisle, to hang his hat on a federal spending cap in order to balance the budget. As he said in his announcement speech last week:

I will cap federal spending at 20 percent or less of the GDP and finally, finally balance the budget.

But Romney the businessman should know that attempting to balance the budget without paying attention to both sides of the federal ledger — spending and revenue — doesn’t work. After all, when he was working on business, would he have tried to budget without taking into account how much money his business was bringing in?

Romney’s proposal is similar to the CAP act proposed by Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO), which would cap federal expenditures at 20.6 percent of GDP. As I pointed out here, even if a cap were strictly adhered to, the deficit could still be huge, depending on how much revenue the government brings in. After all, capping spending at 20 percent of GDP wouldn’t come close to balancing the budget if revenue were consistently 16 percent of GDP.

Calling for a spending cap also makes it so Romney doesn’t have to name any actual cuts that he would make to the budget. But a cap of the sort Romney desires would likely force the government into approving hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts in Social Security and Medicare. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, such a cap would also make recessions worse, by forcing the government to cut during a downturn, reinforcing the downward spiral.

By ignoring revenue — which is at a 60 year low — Romney is proving that he doesn’t really care about the deficit. He just cares about getting government spending down to an arbitrary level, whether or not doing so is good for the economy, prevents the government from making important investments, or results in a balanced budget.

Former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), who in 2006 was trounced by Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), is officially launching his presidential campaign today. Santorum has been making the rounds in Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire in preparation for his bid, laying out a radical right-wing platform.

Santorum appeared this morning on ABC’s Good Morning America, before making his official announcement speech. When asked what makes him a viable candidate, considering the way his last campaign ended, Santorum replied that it is his principled conservatism, including his stalwart support of President Bush’s push to privatize Social Security:

What people are looking for is someone who has stood by their principles in good times and in bad. In 2006, I think by everybody’s estimation, was a pretty bad time for a Republican, and particularly for a conservative in states like Pennsylvania. And I stood up and I didn’t back away. I didn’t back down on trying to reform the Social Security system. President Bush, you know, went out after the 2004 election, said ‘we’ve gotta do something because Social Security’s unsustainable.’ In an election year, I went out on the floor of the United States Senate with Jim DeMint and started arguing for reforming Social Security. Not even Paul Ryan in his budget now, in the face of trillions of dollars of deficits currently, had the temerity to step forward and say we have to do Social Security.

Watch it:

When Santorum continually says “reform” Social Security, he means privatize. After all, in a 2005 op-ed, he wrote:

Personal retirement accounts provide individuals—not the government—with control and ownership. And they hold the promise of a greater return for future generations than what they are promised by today’s Social Security system. If we act now, we can establish personal retirement accounts and lessen the need for painful alternatives down the road.

“We have the opportunity to take a system that we know — we know — is going to need either benefit cuts or tax increases to remain solvent and at least give the opportunity to have little to no tax increases and little to no benefit cuts to solve the problem. That, to me, is the great hope that personal accounts, you know — come with personal accounts,” Santorum has also said. In addition, he has endorsed raising the retirement age to 70.

Santorum endorsed personal accounts in August 2010 during an appearance on Fox Business, even though the 2008 financial crisis showed what a folly those sort of accounts would be. But Santorum is not cowed, using his first interview on his official launch day to remind everyone that this is a policy that he wholeheartedly supports.

Richard Shelby thinks this Nobel laureate is unqualified to set monetary policy.

Last year, Federal Reserve Board nominee Peter Diamond won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nevertheless, Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL) has held up Diamond’s nomination because he deemed the Nobel laureate too unqualified to help set economic policy. Yesterday, after it became clear that the Republican caucus would back Shelby and prevent his confirmation, Diamond published an op-ed announcing that he would withdraw his nomination — and taking a shot at the economically challenged Republicans who blocked his confirmation:

[W]e should all worry about how distorted the confirmation process has become, and how little understanding of monetary policy there is among some of those responsible for its Congressional oversight. We need to preserve the independence of the Fed from efforts to politicize monetary policy and to limit the Fed’s ability to regulate financial firms.

Concern about the (seemingly low) current risk of future inflation should not erase concern about the large costs of continuing high unemployment. Concern about the distant risk of a genuine inability to handle our national debt should not erase concern about the risk to the economy from too much short-run fiscal tightening. [...]

Skilled analytical thinking should not be drowned out by mistaken, ideologically driven views that more is always better or less is always better. I had hoped to bring some of my own expertise and experience to the Fed. Now I hope someone else can.

Diamond is correct to worry about an oversight process where key players possess neither the knowledge to do their job nor the humility to get out of the way of people who do. Shelby’s absurd claim that a man who was recently recognized as one of the world’s leading economists is unqualified to sit on the Fed does nothing more than reveal Shelby’s lack of seriousness. And, on the House side, monetary policy oversight is even worse. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who chairs the subcommittee overseeing monetary policy, has claimed that paper money is “nothing short of counterfeiting,” and has even called the U.S. dollar unconstitutional.

Nor is this disease limited to monetary policy oversight. Republicans clearly know nothing about the Constitution. Leading Republicans have called everything from child labor laws to the ban on whites only lunch counters to the minimum wage to Pell Grants and federal student loans to Social Security and Medicare unconstitutional. And yet these same Republicans have demanded a sweeping veto power over President Obama’s judicial nominees. As a result, the Senate confirmed fewer judges in Obama’s first two years than in the same period in any new presidency in American history.

This is a recipe for disaster. If Senate Republicans want to actually take the time to learn something about the matters they oversee, than they have a duty to bring their expertise to bear in judging nominations. So long as they insist upon valuing ideology over knowledge, however, they should keep their ignorant hands away from things that they clearly do not understand.