As Reuters’ Felix Salmon noted, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit went to the Davos Economic Forum to announce that job creation should be a top priority for the international business community:

The 42nd World Economic Forum Annual Meeting closed today, with business leaders urging resolute action to promote growth and employment, particularly among young people. “Jobs should be our number one priority,” declared Annual Meeting Co-Chair Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer of Citi, in a session on the global agenda for 2012. “Ultimately it is about growth. Nothing creates jobs better than growth.”

But this proclamation comes just seven weeks after Citigroup announced 4,500 job cuts, and some analysts think those job cuts are just the “tip of the iceberg.” Overall, the financial industry cut 200,000 jobs in 2011. Bank of America has announced 30,000 job cuts that will take place over the next several years.

“Everybody knows, in any case, that profits are Pandit’s number one priority; to be honest I’d be surprised if jobs are on his priority list at all,” Salmon noted. “The markets like it when big banks cut jobs, and hate it when they add jobs. And Pandit’s job is to do what the market wants. Which is, fire people.”

To explain how to boost growth, Pandit broke out the favorite right-wing canard about “uncertainty” holding back job creation. But as economist Bruce Bartlett has pointed out, “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.”

President Obama renewed his call for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to help reduce the deficit during his State of the Union speech, a proposal that became known in 2011 as the “Buffett Rule” after Obama mentioned that Warren Buffett paid a lower tax rate than his secretary last year.

Obama’s State of the Union speech offered the first concrete details about the oft-mentioned idea, as he called for a 30 percent minimum tax rate for millionaires. And according to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) will introduce a bill this week that could make the Buffett Rule law:

Today, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse will unveil a new proposal — first reported on this blog — to bring the tax rate of millionaires paying less than middle class taxpayers up to 30 percent. While we don’t know if the Dem leadership will act on this particular proposal, the “Buffett Rule” will get some sort of Senate vote. Republicans are all but certain to oppose it, perhaps unanimously.

Whitehouse told reporters today that he plans to introduce the bill Wednesday, after it is scored by the Joint Committee on Taxation. As Sargent noted, Senate Republicans are likely to rule out the proposal unanimously. Republicans have, indeed, gone a long way to protect the low tax rates of the wealthiest Americans. They insisted on a one-year extension of the budget-busting high-end Bush tax cuts in December 2010 and their intransigence on taxes repeatedly took the government to the brink of shutdown and default in 2011, even costing the U.S. its first credit downgrade.

Up until now, Congress has tried to reduce the deficit through spending cuts alone, many of them to programs that disproportionately affect the poor and middle class. The one tax hike the GOP has supported, meanwhile, would primarily affect working class Americans. Whitehouse’s legislation, however, gives Congress a chance to ask the rich, who have benefited from falling tax rates even as their incomes have skyrocketed, to share in the sacrifice.

Sunday marked the third anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first legislation signed into law by President Obama. The law, which expanded the statute of limitations on fair pay lawsuits, was a response to a Supreme Court ruling against Ledbetter in her fair pay case.

Though the law expanded the legal remedies available to women who have been victims of discriminatory pay, little has been done to address the pay gap that exists between male and female employees. Since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed into law, the pay gap has closed at less than half-a-cent per year. That trend is continuing, as the pay gap barely closed from 2009 to 2010.

Women made 77 percent of men’s earnings in 2009, the year the law passed. In 2010, that was virtually unchanged, as women’s wages rose to 77.4 percent of men’s. The gap is even larger for African Americans and Latinos: black women made 67.5 percent of all men’s earnings in 2009, while Latino women made 57.7 percent. In 2010, those figures ticked up to 67.7 percent and 58.7 percent, respectively.

Women make up half of the American workforce, and in two-thirds of American families, the mother is the primary breadwinner or a co-breadwinner. But they make less than their male counterparts in all 50 states, though the size of each state’s wage gap varies. While the gap continues to close in places like Washington, D.C., where women make 91.8 percent of men’s earnings, it is growing in others, like Wyoming, where women’s earnings dropped from 65.5 percent of men’s in 2009 to just 63.8 percent in 2010.

Because of the gender pay gap, women with the same education doing the same job as men earn far less over their working lifetimes. The wage gap costs $723,000 over a 40-year career for women with college degrees. In some industries, the gap can cost women close to a million dollars.

In November 2010, Senate Republicans killed efforts to close the pay gap when they unanimously voted to block the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have updated the Equal Pay Act, closed many of its loopholes, and strengthened incentives to prevent pay discrimination.

The Commerce Department reported last week that the economy grew at a 2.8 percent rate in the fourth quarter of 2011, higher than GDP growth has been recently, but still not enough to significantly bring down unemployment. And as the New York Times’ David Leonhardt explained, one of the major drags on growth has been the budget-cutting that has been going on at all levels of government for the past year and a half:

The public sector has been shrinking for the last year and a half — mostly because of cuts in state and local government, with some federal cuts, especially to the military, playing a role as well. In the fourth quarter, government shrank at an annual rate of 4.5 percent.

Over the last two years, the private sector grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, while the government shrank at an annual rate of 1.4 percent.

The combined result has been economic growth of 2.3 percent.

“The obvious conclusion seems to be that economic growth, and employment growth, would have been significantly stronger over the last two years without government cuts,” Leonhardt noted.

Of course, Republicans in Congress have been staunchly opposed to helping states weather the nation’s continuing economic storm, forcing them to resort to layoffs that not only hurt the economy, but leave communities worse off, with fewer teachers, firefighters, and police officers. (Some teachers in Pennsylvania have decided to work without pay, while one school district in that same state decided to use sheep to cut its grass in order to minimize costs.) More than half a million public sector workers have lost their jobs in the Great Recession.

For those conservatives pushing austerity as a solution to the nation’s economic woes, these numbers should come as a bit of a warning, as should the fact that the United Kingdom’s austerity program has led it’s economy to do worse than it did during the Great Depression.