Echoing the demands of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) is proposing to tax the trading of stocks, bonds, and derivatives. DeFazio, along with his Senate co-sponsor Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), has proposed the tax several times in the past. But this time around, the idea is getting a boost of momentum from the popularity of a similar measure in Europe, as well as renewed national media focus on Wall Street profiteering as a result of the 99 Percent Movement:

Declaring Wall Street a “gambling casino,” DeFazio said the new tax would “both raise needed revenue for the Treasury and rein in speculation on Wall Street.”

Already, the business community is mounting a counteroffensive. With the congressional supercommittee looking to trim at least $1.2 trillion in projected debt over 10 years, the tax could look tantalizing, despite public opposition from many Republicans and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. [...]

The tax could help shrink the deficit — its previous iteration was estimated to add $150 billion a year to federal coffers — and spare Social Security, Medicare and other programs from jarring cuts.

Even representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce admit that this proposal is going to receive serious consideration this session, as congressional Democrats look to trim the deficit in a way that doesn’t overburden the middle and lower classes that are already stretched to the breaking point. “In reality, a proposal like this is going to be on the table in some regard,” said Tom Quaadman, executive director for financial reporting policy and investor opportunity at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

France and Germany have embraced taxing financial trades, and proponents say it’s only a matter of time before the common-sense solution is finally adopted in the U.S. While American bankers are predicting dire consequences if the tax goes into effect, Dean Baker, a co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that’s nonsense. “The reality is all you’re doing is raising transaction costs back to where they were 15 or 20 years ago,” he says, noting that the tax has not prevented countries like the United Kingdom from developing vibrant economies.

Top economists and analysts like Reuters’ Felix Salmon have long advocated for a transaction tax as an important moderating influence on Wall Street excess. As Pat Garofolo has explained, “It will help temper trading for trading’s sake and excessive speculation, particularly in the form of high-frequency trading, which only major Wall Street players have the infrastructure to engage in and which will become far more expensive.”

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York City.

While at the Occupy Wall Street protests, ThinkProgress spoke to Ken Zinn, a staffer with the National Nurses Union — the nation’s largest nurses union, with nearly 160,000 members. Zinn’s group is pushing for a financial transactions tax (FTT), which would enact a small tax on financial trading that could generate hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

Zinn says his group was motivated to join the protests and demand the tax because their patients all over the country are hurting, and it’s “time that Wall Street gave back to this country”:

ZINN: We’ve been calling for a tax on Wall Street for several months now because our nurses are seeing on the job, each and every day in hospitals across the country patients who are suffering, patients who are in great need because they’re without a job and having to make a decision whether or not to buy food or pay for medicine, buy food or pay their rent. [...] We’re here because it’s time that Wall Street gave back to this country. And it’s a small tax that we’re proposing on the buying and selling of stocks and bonds and derivatives that would bring in, by our estimation, $350 billion every year into the economy.

Watch ThinkProgress’s interview with Zinn:

While the United States continues to watch the profits of bailed out banks soar, the European Union is expected to move forward on a push for a global financial transactions tax.

Running on the motto “Let’s get to work,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) heralded himself as the jobs candidate during his gubernatorial campaign. Both in a debate and on his campaign bus, Scott declared that his seven-step plan would create 700,000 jobs, in addition to jobs that Florida added from normal growth. When a reporter asked whether the 700,000 jobs would be on top of the projected growth over the next five years, Scott agreed, “It’s on top of that. If you do these things we’re going to grow 700,000 more jobs.” During a debate in 2010, Scott also declared that his “plan is seven steps to 700,000 jobs, and that plan is on top of what normal growth would be.”

Scott, however, has spent his first nine months in office sprinting away from that promise. This summer, when a reporter reminded Scott of his pledge to create 700,000 jobs on top of economic growth, Scott played astonishingly dumb. “No, that’s not true,” he said. When pushed, he added, “I don’t know who said that, so I have no idea.” Last week, the Sun Sentinal editorial board asked Scott point blank, “Your pledge was for 700,000 in addition to normal growth, wasn’t it?” “No,” he replied. “700,000.”

The St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald tracked his sprint backwards. Watch it:

Politifact rated Scott’s walk-back a “full flop” on it’s “Flip-O-Meter.”

Of course, it’s not entirely surprising that Scott is desperately attempting to “change his arithmetic on how many jobs the state must create to meet his No. 1 campaign pledge.” In his first nine months in office, Scott killed a high-speed rail project that would have generated more than 71,000 jobs. He bragged about laying off 15,000 government workers. And he has signaled that he’ll reject billions in funding from President Obama’s new jobs plan that would create more than 60,000 jobs.

Florida is currently facing a 10.7 unemployment rate. Scott’s spokesman still insists that (somehow) Scott’s position hasn’t changed, but Nova Southeastern University professor Robert Jarvis offered a more frank take on Scott’s walk-back: “He’s a politician. You make changes on the fly.”

Since this analysis was done, Cain has released more details of his plan. See an updated analysis here.

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain — who has seen a recent surge in the polls — has been trumpeting the supposed benefits of his “999″ economic plan, which would implement a 9 percent flat-tax on personal income and corporate income, along with a 9 percent national sales tax, while scrapping the rest of the tax code (including all of the deductions and all of the taxes on investment income such as capital gains).

Cain claims that his plan would not be “regressive on the poor,” but economists disagree due to the imposition of a national sales tax that would wallop the poor significantly harder than the rich. Cain also claims the plan will be revenue-neutral, in that it would raise as much revenue as the current tax code. I had Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden run the numbers on Cain’s plan, and it turns out that it wouldn’t be deficit-neutral — not even close (all calculations are based on 2007 tax data, the last year before the Great Recession):

– For the income tax portion: In 2007, total Adjusted Gross Income on all income tax returns was $8.7 trillion. Since Cain’s plan would exempt investment income, but would have no other deductions, that brings taxable income down to $7.4 trillion. A flat 9 percent tax would therefore have yielded about $665 billion in income tax revenue.

– For the corporate tax portion: In 2007, there was a total of $1.3 trillion in reported corporate income subject to tax. A flat 9 percent would have yielded $112 billion in revenue.

– For the sales tax portion: I used generally accepted estimates of the revenue generated from a value-added-tax (see here and here, for example). Those estimates suggest that a broad-based 5 percent tax on goods and services would generate about 2 percent of GDP in revenue. That implies that a 9 percent tax in 2007 would have generated about $500 billion.

– Together, then, the 9-9-9 plan would have generated a bit less than $1.3 trillion in total federal tax revenue. That may sound like a lot, but it’s only 9.2 percent of GDP. In 2007, we actually collected 18.5 percent of GDP in tax revenue. In other words, the 9-9-9 plan would cut federal revenue in half!

“Even if we reduced federal spending to the ‘historical average’ (when the population was younger and health care cost much less) it would still leave us with deficits over 11 percent of GDP (bigger than any deficit since WWII, including the deficits of the past three years),” Linden noted.

Linden also found that someone in the bottom quintile of earners — who currently pays about 2 percent of his or her income in federal taxes — would pay about 18 percent under Cain’s plan (9 percent on every dollar they make, plus 9 percent on every dollar they spent, which would likely be close to all of them). A middle-class individual would see his or her taxes go from about 14 percent to about 18 percent. But someone in the richest one percent of Americans would see his or her tax rate fall from about 28 percent to about 11 percent.

So Cain’s plan — which has earned accolades from the likes of supply-side guru Art Laffer — would explode the deficit, while increasing taxes on the poor to pay for a giant tax cut for the rich. As Center for American Progress Vice President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger put it, the plan “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.”

A cadre of multinational corporations have been pushing for the revival of a tax repatriation holiday, which would allow companies to bring money that they have stashed overseas back to the United States at a dramatically lower tax rate (rather than the standard 35 percent corporate tax rate). The idea has been endorsed by many Republicans, including most of the GOP’s presidential candidates.

The corporations — and the Republicans who support them — have been claiming that they would use the cash from this tax break to create jobs in America. However, Congress already tried this exact policy in 2004, and the corporations who took advantage of that break, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, proceeded to cut and outsource hundreds of thousands of jobs:

Following a tax holiday on repatriated foreign earnings in 2004, 58 corporations that benefitted from the holiday slashed a total of nearly 600,000 jobs. These 58 giant corporations accounted for nearly 70 percent of the total repatriated funds and collectively saved an estimated $64 billion from what they otherwise would have owed in taxes.

It’s a well-known fact that some of the corporations that took advantage of that 2004 repatriation holiday proceeded to cut jobs, but IPS’ report pulls back the veil on just how many of these companies laid off workers or outsourced jobs after pledging up and down that they would do just the opposite. Here are some of the worst offenders:

All of the empirical evidence suggests that reviving this tax break wouldn’t create jobs, but would merely encourage corporations to push even more money overseas (in the hopes that Congress will keep on granting repatriation holidays). Yet many in the GOP keep floating this as a plan that would cure what ails the economy.

Asked about the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that posted today, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain said he suspected that they were “orchestrated” to help President Obama. Cain went on to blame the unemployed for their woes, saying, “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”:

CAIN: I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! [...] It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.

Watch it:

Cain’s conspiracy theory that the protests are a plot to help the White House is pretty far fetched, especially considering that there seems to be no love lost between the protesters and Obama.

But Cain’s claim about the unemployed is especially heartless and uninformed. There are simply not enough jobs to go around, with 4.32 unemployed people for every job opening in the country. So even someone looking hard for a job will have a difficult time finding one. Moreover, Cain fails to understand the astronomical income inequality in the U.S. and the negative effect it has on economic growth.

Blaming unemployment on the unemployed is a common trend among conservative politicians, but it’s a as wrong as it is offensive to the millions of Americans looking for a job.