Former Reagan and Bush economist Bruce Bartlett

One of congressional Republicans’ favorite explanations for sluggish job growth is supposed “regulatory uncertainty” being caused by the Obama administration. “It’s really pretty straight-forward,” Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has said. “We need to reduce the regulatory burden and the regulatory uncertainty that’s coming out of Washington.” “By pursuing a steady repeal of job-destroying regulations, we can help lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over small and large employers alike, empowering them to hire more workers,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA).

However, Bruce Bartlett — a conservative economist who worked for both the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations, as well as for former Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) — wrote today that this theory is just “a canard invented by Republicans“:

For some years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has had a program that tracks mass layoffs. In 2007, the program was expanded, and businesses were asked their reasons for laying off workers. Among the reasons offered was “government regulations/intervention.” There is only partial data for 2007, but we have data since then through the second quarter of this year.

The table below presents the bureau’s data. As one can see, the number of layoffs nationwide caused by government regulation is minuscule and shows no evidence of getting worse during the Obama administration. Lack of demand for business products and services is vastly more important. [...]

In my opinion, regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.

As the Economic Policy Institute found, “a simple review of investment and employment trends — what businesses are actually doing — reveals that employers are not behaving according to the narrative described in the uncertainty story: Employment and investment trends are what one would expect (or better) given the trends in the overall growth of the economy.” As Bloomberg News put it in an editorial, “the charge of ‘creating uncertainty’ is a way to blame Obama for the U.S.’s economic trials without having to explain the connection.”

The GOP is almost certainly not going to stop using the “regulatory uncertainty” talking point. But, as the research shows, the public and media should not take it seriously.

Yesterday, we posted a video of conservative icon Ronald Reagan saying that it’s “crazy” that tax loopholes would allow a millionaire to pay lower taxes than a bus driver, using the same sort of language that President Obama has employed when describing the “Buffett rule” (which would ensure that millionaires can’t pay lower taxes than middle-class families). During a speech today in Texas, Obama used Reagan’s quote to slam Republicans who have been deriding the Buffett rule as “class warfare.” “Last time I checked, Republicans all thought Reagan made some sense,” he said:

Now, when I point this out, some of the Republicans in Congress say, ‘oh you’re engaging in class warfare.’ Let me tell you something. Years ago, one great American had a different view. I’m going to get the quote, just so you know I’m not making this up. A great American said that he thought it was ‘crazy’ that certain tax loopholes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary.

Alright. You know who this guy was? It wasn’t a Democrat. It wasn’t some crazy socialist. It was Ronald Reagan. It was Ronald Reagan. Last time I checked, Republicans all thought Reagan made some sense. So next time you hear one of those Republicans in Congress accusing you of class warfare, you just tell them I’m with Ronald Reagan. I agree with Ronald Reagan that it’s crazy that a bus driver pays a higher tax rate than some millionaire because of a loophole in the tax code. And by the way, I don’t mind being called a warrior for the working class. You guys need someone working for you.

Watch it:

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA)

Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf (R), one of six House Republicans who hasn’t signed Americans for Tax Reform’s no-taxes pledge, took to the House floor today and slammed ATR President Grover Norquist, accusing Norquist of working with “unsavory characters” and pushing a pledge that makes it harder for Congress to achieve meaningful deficit reduction and tax reform.

Wolf said the Taxpayer Protection Pledge created by Norquist and ATR has had the effect of “paralyzing Congress” and making it impossible to even discuss ways to reform the tax code:

WOLF: Everything must be on the table, and I believe how the pledge is interpreted and enforced by Mr. Norquist is a roadblock to realistically reforming our tax code. When Senator Tom Coburn recently fought to eliminate the special interest ethanol tax subsidy, who led the opposition? Mr. Norquist. [...]

Have we really reached the point where one person’s demand for ideological purity is paralyzing Congress to the point that even a discussion of tax reform is viewed as breaking a no-tax pledge?

Watch it:

Wolf isn’t the first Republican to eviscerate Norquist for his strict no-tax pledge. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) had a high-profile spat with Norquist during deficit reduction talks this summer, and multiple House Republicans have distanced themselves from the pledge as well. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) said the pledge “restrains your ability to think creatively” about solutions. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) said he wouldn’t sign the pledge because members of Congress “have to have the flexibility to do the right thing for the American people.” Constituents of representatives who have signed the pledge have challenged them at recent town halls, asking why members of Congress are more loyal to Norquist than to the residents of their districts.

Wolf is, unfortunately, correct that Norquist’s pledge has paralyzed the GOP, as Republicans remain shackled to the no-taxes platform and continue to oppose any measure that would reduce the nation’s deficit by raising tax revenues, whether through tax increases or by ending expensive subsidies. That intransigence is what took the nation to the brink of default in August and caused the first downgrade of the nation’s credit rating in American history.

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain appeared on ABC’s The View today, following his recent resurgence in national polls. Of course, Cain took a few moments to promote his “999″ economic plan, which calls for the corporate income tax and personal income tax to be set at a flat rate of 9 percent, as well as the creation of a 9 percent national sales tax. During the interview, Cain said his plan would not be regressive for low-income Americans:

The first thing you do is you throw out the current tax code which creates too much uncertainty, and this is why I have proposed my “999″ plan. Very quickly, it imposes a 9 percent business flat tax, a 9 percent personal income tax, and a 9 percent national sales tax. It expands the base so that everybody has a lower rate. And it is not regressive on the poor.

Watch it:

Cain seems to believe that, because his plan has a flat rate, it is not regressive. But sales taxes are hugely regressive on the poor. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy explained, “because low-income families spend more of their income on items subject to the sales tax than do wealthier taxpayers, sales taxes inevitably take a larger share of income from low- and middle-income families than they take from the wealthy.” Cain’s imposition of a 9 percent sales tax would hammer low-income Americans much more than the wealthy.

Cain’s elimination of taxes on investment income like capital gains, meanwhile, would hugely benefit the very rich, driving down their taxes. “It would be the biggest tax shift from the wealthy to the middle-class in the history of taxation, ever, anywhere, and it would bankrupt the country,” said Center for American Progress Vice President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger when asked about Cain’s plan. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, said the plan “would disproportionately tax lower and middle income earners.”

Without seeing all of the details, it’s impossible to put an exact price on Cain’s plan. But suffice to say, huge tax cuts for the rich (from 35 percent to 9 percent on income, alongside the elimination of investment taxes) paired with a new national sales tax will undoubtedly turn the tax code into a regressive mess.

Left: Rapper Cam'ron gained infamy for promoting the 'Stop Snitchin' campaign against police informants. Right: Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) sponsored a bill to gut protections for Wall Street whistleblowers.

A few years go, a media firestorm erupted over the urban “Stop Snitchin” campaign promoted by gangs and a few hip hop icons. Stop Snitchin refers to the effort to intimidate informants to prevent them from cooperating with police about gang violence or drug trafficking schemes. Rapper Cam’ron received heavy scrutiny for endorsing the trend during an interview on the issue for CBS’s 60 Minutes.

A new Stop Snitchin campaign to deter would-be informants, in this case against people speaking up against crimes on Wall Street, is quietly taking shape, this time far from the media’s eye.

Financial experts and academics agree that strong whistleblower regulations could have prevented the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and indeed much of the financial crisis if employees at firms engaged in fraudulent activity had spoken up early or had reported complex crimes to the appropriate authorities. Employees at firms at the center for the financial crisis, including troubled lender Countrywide, have cited intimidation and other illicit tactics as the reason few people spoke up as whistleblowers. Since the old whistleblower laws provided for weak legal protections for informants and relatively rare rewards, the Dodd-Frank financial reform law passed last year revamped the system with new rights for informants blowing the whistle on financial crimes.

Bank lobbyists and Fox News, however, have made such protections enemy number one.

Fox News, part of a company known for its legal harassment tactics against whistleblowers, has promoted a smear campaign against financial whistleblower protections for months. In this recent segment, Fox Business reporter Charlie Gasparino, who refers to financial whistleblowers as “rats,” claimed that the new Dodd-Frank whistleblower protections are hurting the big banks:

GASPARINO: If you create all these incentives to sue. Well it seems like we’re increasing litigation at a time against businesses at a time when you know lets face it, all these banks, they’re getting hammered. You just saw that ugly chart of Goldman Sachs. [...] Yes, there’s a sort of slimyness about this. Its not like someone just coming forward, remember they’re getting paid to do this, you know yea those are all the counter arguments. Under Dodd Frank this thing is here to stay until you know they repeal Dodd Frank!

Watch it:

Trade associations for the big banks, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, lobbied aggressively against the new rules, but failed to stop them. Now, bank lobbyists are attempting a rollback.

Freshman Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) sponsored a bill specifically to repeal the whistleblower law. Grimm’s legislation is a wish-list for corrupt banks: it would not only reduce rewards for reporting fraud, but would force whistleblowers to report crimes to their supervisors before notifying authorities. Consumer groups have decried Grimm’s proposal as an “extreme approach that would silence would-be whistleblowers, endanger critical inside informants, undermine investigations, hamstring enforcement at the [Securities and Exchange Commission] and [Commodity Futures Trading Commission], and provide lawbreaking financial firms with an escape hatch from accountability.”

Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH), a lawmaker-turned bank lobbyist-turned lawmaker again, is among the team of four legislators working to whip up support for the legislation. Stivers and Grimm have been showered with contributions from top Wall Street firms, including JP Morgan and Bank of America.

Point of Law, a blog hosted by a think tank run by far right billionaire investors, has promoted attacks on the new whistleblower laws. The Chamber, which counts firms like Fidelity and AIG as major contributing members, has testified in support of Grimm’s bill.

While it is unlikely that Grimm’s measure is passed and signed into law as a stand-alone bill under President Obama, it could be forced through by the Republicans using a budget stand-off or another debt ceiling hostage situation.

Ongoing protests on Wall Street (which have inspired similar efforts around the country) are now in their third week, with no sign of slowing down. One of the issues galvanizing the protesters is the country’s growing income inequality, which is currently the worst its been since the Great Depression.

There are several factors driving this income inequality — including preferential treatment of investment income, weak estate taxes, and stagnant middle-class wages — but one of the problems is that executive pay has jumped by leaps and bounds, far outstripping the income made by workers. CEOs at America’s largest companies now earn 343 times more than the typical worker. In 1970, the average CEO earned 28 times as much as the typical worker. As the Washington Post noted today, this increase occurred at the same time that worker pay was actually falling, in inflation adjusted dollars:

The gap between what workers and top executives make helps explain why income inequality in the United States is reaching levels unseen since the Great Depression.

Since the 1970s, median pay for executives at the nation’s largest companies has more than quadrupled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to researchers. Over the same period, pay for a typical non-supervisory worker has dropped more than 10 percent, according to Bureau of Labor statistics.

And much of the increase was driven by nothing more than companies simply trying to ensure that their CEO’s pay was above the median for their industry, regardless of that CEO’s performance:

Companies have long hid the way they set executive pay, but in late 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission began compelling companies to disclose the specifics of how they use peer groups to determine executive pay.

Since then, researchers have found that about 90 percent of major U.S. companies expressly set their executive pay targets at or above the median of their peer group. This creates just the kinds of circumstances that drive pay upward.

For those keeping score, the median CEO pay in 2010 was $9 million. For “top executives,” the median pay package comes in at about $4.9 million. This cuts across industries, while companies tend to target their pay within their respective industry, but it gives you a sense for the scale of the pay packages these companies are looking at when deciding what to pay their own people.

The nation’s biggest banks could be the poster children for this sort of corporate excess, as their CEOs received huge salaries and bonuses, even as their firms were blowing up themselves (and the global economy) on toxic mortgages. The Post noted that Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozillo “earned more than $180 million as he led the company to the brink of ruin during the five years before the housing bust. At times, his pay had been set at the 90th percentile of peers.” For those looking to address income inequality, it seems that reining in executive pay is a good place to start.

A California farm has issued a recall of 33,000 pounds of lettuce that went to 19 states and Canada after a federal food inspector found samples that were contaminated with listeria, the AP reports:

Listeria rarely shows up in produce, but federal health officials say they’ve gotten better at detecting the germs that cause food poisoning, so they are seeing them in produce more often. [...]

The finding of listeria in romaine lettuce at the Salinas farm was a result of an FDA research program to understand the prevalence of the pathogen in fresh produce, especially in lettuce and leafy greens, [FDA spokeswoman Stephanie] Yao said. [...]

The FDA has isolated listeria in leafy green produce three times so far this year, Yao said.

Listeria is the same bacteria that caused the deadliest food outbreak in a decade last month when at least 16 died who had eaten tainted melons. Fortunately, thanks to the FDA’s food inspectors, the lettuce contamination won’t have the same deadly effect.

But as ThinkProgress has noted, even as these food outbreaks occur, Republican lawmakers are trying to gut food safety laws in the name of spending cuts and less regulation on businesses. In June, House Republicans attempted to kill the first significant upgrade in the nation’s food safety regime in more than 70 years, saying the private food industry sufficiently self-polices. Their plan would have imperiled the jobs of 3,000 food inspectors. Last month, presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for an end to food safety laws that she claimed were stifling job creation. One in six Americans is sickened by food-borne illness each year, and more than 3,000 die.