Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-NY)

Congressional Republicans have been waging a campaign to undermine the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, with House Republicans cutting the budgets of the regulators charged with implementing the law and Senate Republicans obstructing nominees for key regulatory positions. Even though the country is still struggling to recover from the Great Recession — caused in no small part by Wall Street malfeasance — the GOP has gone to bat for the nation’s biggest banks, objecting to common sense safeguards for the financial system.

But to hear Republicans tell it, they are doing the country a favor by letting the banks go back to business as usual. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), for instance, said a few weeks ago that “the less we fund” financial system regulators, “the better America will be.” And the Associated Press noted today that Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-NY) called the GOP assault on Wall Street reform, “entirely practical” and even “compassionate”:

“What we are doing is rational, it is sensible, it is entirely practical, it is compassionate,” said Rep. Nan Hayworth, R-N.Y., a tea party-backed freshman on that panel. “So we are doing the right thing, and it behooves the Senate and the administration to follow suit.”

U.S. household wealth fell by about $16.4 trillion due to the financial crisis, of which only about half has been recovered. Home equity is so low “that homeowners on average still own only 38.1 percent of their homes, with the rest owed to banks. This is the lowest share on record going back to 1952.”

At the same time, banks have gone back to making sky-high profits. But Republicans are still attempting to undermine Dodd-Frank using every tool at their disposal, and have evidently convinced themselves that allowing Wall Street to run wild is not only in the best interest of the country, but the best way to help American families as well.

Last week, Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) signed into law a plan that limits the ability of New Jersey’s public employees to collectively bargain for health care benefits, and cuts the paychecks of those workers in order to increase their contributions towards their health care and pensions. All of this was done under the guise of a budget crisis.

But at the same time that he’s asking the Garden State’s public employees to sacrifice in order to bring his state’s finances into order, Christie has let the wealthiest New Jersey residents off the hook, vowing to veto a millionaires’ surtax favored by the state’s Democrats. (A recent poll showed that nearly 60 percent of New Jersey residents approve of the surtax.)

But that isn’t the only way in which Christie is favoring the state’s wealthy over the rest of its population. New Jersey allows the governor to exercise a line-item veto over the budget, and last week Christie released his edits of the budget passed by the state legislature. As the Newark Star-Ledger reported, Christie saw fit to nix health care funding for low-income workers, tax credits for the working poor, and money for AIDS relief and mental-health services, while adding in money for school districts in some of “the wealthiest towns in the state“:

[Christie] mowed down a series of Democratic add-ons, including $45 million in tax credits for the working poor, $9 million in health care for the working poor, $8 million for women’s health care, another $8 million in AIDS funding and $9 million in mental-health services.

But the governor added $150 million in school aid for the suburbs, including the wealthiest towns in the state. That is enough to restore all the cuts just listed.

Senate President Stephen Sweeny (D), who is facing considerable blowback after collaborating with Christie on the pension deal, criticized the governor’s set of priorities. “[F]or him to punish people to prove his political point? He’s just a rotten bastard to do what he did,” Sweeny said.

Of course, providing more education funding is a good thing, but there’s no need to do it by raiding programs on which low-income workers depend. As I’ve noted before, adopting the millionaire tax that Christie is so dead set against would enable him to reverse all of the education cuts he’s proposed, with millions of dollars left to spare. In another signal of Christie’s priorities, he has recently been vociferously defending his decision to provide a $400 million bailout to a giant corporate mall complex.

During negotiations regarding raising the nation’s debt limit, congressional Republicans have defended tax loopholes for corporations, claiming that America has a high corporate tax rate that is stifling economic growth and job creation. But the Center for Tax Justice (CTJ) has crunched the most recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Office of Management and Budget, and the Census Bureau, and finds that “the U.S. is already one of the least taxed countries for corporations in the developed world.”

As a share of GDP, the U.S. had the second lowest tax rate, behind only Iceland. This statistic flips on its head the often-repeated Republican charge that America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world (which is only true on paper). In 2009, U.S. corporate taxes had fallen to only 1.3 percent of GDP, from 4 percent in 1965.

Conservatives love to point out that other OECD countries have lowered their corporate tax rates in recent years, but they conveniently ignore that “these countries have also closed corporate tax loopholes while the U.S. has expanded them.” As CAP Director for Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden has noted, the U.S. is actually a very low-tax country across the board.

Recently, conservative commentator Bill Kristol chastised his own party for pretending that lowering the corporate tax rate is a cure-all for America’s economic woes. On Fox News Sunday, he interrupted a panelist who again tried to assert the U.S. is suffering from a high corporate tax rate: “Republicans are making a mistake if they focus on big businesses and corporate tax rates. Corporations have a ton of cash. The corporate tax rate is not killing big business in America.”

The GOP presidential candidates have almost uniformly introduced proposals to radically lower the U.S. corporate tax rate. For instance, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) wants to reduce the corporate tax rate to 15 percent and eliminate all taxes on capital gains, dividends, interest income and inheritance. CTJ put the issue succinctly in a tweet this morning: “Dear US Corporations: You pay 2nd LOWEST tax rate in industrial world, so quit whining or move to Iceland.”

As the August debt ceiling deadline looms and Republicans continue refusing to consider revenue increases, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks excoriated the GOP for its intransigence. Writing yesterday that it “may no longer be a normal party” but rather a movement of “fanatic[s]” with a “sacred fixation” on tax cuts, Brooks slammed the GOP for rejecting a “no-brainer” compromise with Democrats, which would include closing tax loopholes for things like corporate jet ownership:

On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

But Brooks’ plea for sanity was lost on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who responded to the column on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show this morning. Ryan said that if Republicans gave up the loopholes now without securing a deal to lower marginal tax rates overall, they would lose an opportunity to demand new tax cuts in the future:

RYAN: What happens if you do what he’s saying, is then you can’t lower tax rates. So it does affect marginal tax rates. In order to lower marginal tax rates, you have to take away those loopholes so you can lower those tax rates. If you want to do what we call being revenue neutral … If you take a deal like that, you’re necessarily requiring tax rates to be higher for everybody. You need lower tax rates by going after tax loopholes. If you take away the tax loopholes without lowering tax rates, then you deny Congress the ability to lower everybody’s tax rates and you keep people’s tax rates high.

Listen here:

Ryan is arguing that raising taxes on corporate jet owners and others is only acceptable if the money raised is plowed back into new tax cuts, not to paying down the deficit. He is clearly more interested in cutting taxes than dealing with the deficit, and is willing to let these egregious loopholes stay in the tax code until he can best exploit their removal to lower taxes sometime in the future.

Given the conservative preference for cutting taxes on high-income earning “job creators,” its conceivable Ryan would use the new taxes on corporate jet owners to help fund a new tax cut for people who happen to own corporate jets. Ironically, just moments earlier in the interview, Ryan attacked President Obama for wanting to close the loopholes, saying doing so would generate an insignificant about of revenue to pay down the deficit. But when it comes to tax cuts, closing those same loopholes would apparently generate plenty of revenue.

Viacom chief executive Philippe Dauman topped the corporate payrolls last year, bringing in a total of $84.5 million.

Despite reports that the current economic recovery may be the hardest for the average American since World War II, corporate America is looking at strong profits and skyrocketing increases in executive pay.

According to the compensation-research firm, Equilar, the chief executives of the largest U.S. companies saw a median rise of 23 percent in their compensation last year, largely due to the resurgence of cash bonuses. Bonuses today are triple their prerecession levels for the highest-paid CEOs. Coupled with the recovery that many executives have seen in their stock portfolios, much of which was awarded during 2008 and 2009, “some top executives are already making more than they were before the economy soured.”

But as Matt Yglesias notes, the earnings of an industry’s chief executives often do not depend on job performance. This year’s windfall for CEOs has outpaced their median gains in both revenue and shareholders’ returns, as exemplified in the following graphic produced by the New York Times:

As more money finds its way into the bank accounts of the nation’s executives, American workers continue to struggle. The average wages for workers in the private sector rose only 2 percent over the past year. Since 2009, only 1 percent of the national-income growth went to workers’ wages and salaries, while 88 percent went to corporate profits.

And the trend shows no sign of slowing. Another forecast, recently released by Brown Brothers Harriman, reports that the second quarter of this year will see a 13.6-percent increase in the overall earnings of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index when compared to this time last year. Meanwhile, unemployment stagnates above 9 percent, the housing market remains soft, and banks continue to hoard their reserves instead of offering loans.

– Sarah Bufkin

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum continued his long-shot campaign this morning with an appearance on CNN. During the interview, Santorum attempted to criticize the Obama administration’s record on jobs, but inadvertently revealed his complete ignorance regarding the American labor force.

Last Friday, the administration’s Council of Economic Advisers released a report showing the effects of the 2009 Recovery Act, which to date has raised employment by between 2.4 and 3.6 million jobs. Santorum cited the report while trying to attack the administration.

However, he completely bungled it: Santorum said the Obama administration claimed to have created 280 million jobs last December, and is now claiming to have created 240 million jobs, thus proving that the Recovery Act somehow destroyed jobs:

SANTORUM: [Obama] passed a huge stimulus package that now we know, over the past two quarters, has actually cost American jobs, and that’s from the report of his own administration. They claimed in December that, uh, by the end of last year that they created 280 million jobs, and now they’re saying that they created only 240 million jobs. So look, in this, you’re talking about huge increases in spending.

ALI VELSHI: Senator, I’m going to ask you to restate that, I’ve never heard that in my life. Tell me again, what you just said.

SANTORUM: If you look at the report that came out on Friday, the President’s own economic advisers said that the jobs stimulus package actually created fewer jobs over the period of time, since the uh, since the stimulus package went in place than it did when they reported back in December. In other words, there’s 30 million less jobs as a result of the stimulus package.

VELSHI: That’s not a loss of jobs, Senator, that’s a smaller aggregation of jobs. You can’t go on a campaign, a national campaign with this kind of math Senator. It’s just incorrect…I know you’ve got a lot of interviews to do. You might want to check that math.

Watch it:

Velshi is absolutely correct that Santorum needs to check his math, but he missed the huge problem with Santorum’s numbers. The entire American civilian labor force is about 153 million people. There are currently 13.9 million people unemployed. If the Obama administration had created 240 to 280 million jobs, the unemployment crisis would have been solved several times over, and America would have so many jobs that it would need to start employing workers from all over the world just to fill all the available positions.

Santorum was evidently trying to repeat this absurd claim made by the Weekly Standard about the cost per job of the stimulus. (The Associated Press has rightly called the sort of math the Weekly Standard used “highly misleading.”) However, his attack attempt totally backfired, and he gave the administration credit for engineering what would be the single greatest economic feat in American history.