Politico noted today that the overseas piles of cash being sat on by the same multinational corporations that are pushing for what’s known as a repatriation tax holiday — which would allow companies to bring overseas money back at a low tax rate — grew throughout 2011:

Overseas cash and earnings stockpiles for 12 of the United States’ biggest businesses — from Microsoft to Merck — grew by about 20 percent in 2011, as most of them lobbied hard in Washington for a “tax holiday” to bring that money home at a steep discount.

A POLITICO review of annual reports and Securities and Exchange Commission filings shows that a dozen of the most vocal corporate critics of U.S. tax policy finished 2011 with more than $455 billion in cash, investments and other earnings held by foreign subsidiaries — up from $381 billion the year earlier.

As economists have noted, this is exactly what happens when Congress grants companies one-time tax breaks to repatriate money: they hoard more money offshore in the hopes that Congress can be enticed into providing yet another holiday. As research from Northwestern showed, following a 2004 repatriation holiday, “companies rationally concluded that if they were granted one special one-time tax break, they might very well be granted another. That gave them the incentive to attribute even more of their profits to foreign operations, like a shopper waiting for an end-of-season sale.”

Last month, Apple admitted it was hoarding money offshore in the hopes that Congress would commit to another tax holiday, starting the cycle all over again. Plus, the country’s effective corporate tax rate is already at a 40-year low, while a repatriation holiday would cost the U.S. $80 billion over the next decade.

According to a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, the last few years have seen the first drop in miles driven annually by Americans since World War II, in large part thanks to a reduction in driving by young people:

From World War II until just a few years ago, the number of miles driven annually on America’s roads steadily increased. Then, at the turn of the century, something changed: Americans began driving less. By 2011, the average American was driving 6 percent fewer miles per year than in 2004.

The trend away from driving has been led by young people. From 2001 to 2009, the average annual number of vehicle miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) decreased from 10,300 miles to 7,900 miles per capita — a drop of 23 percent.

“America’s transportation preferences appear to be changing. Our elected officials need to make transportation decisions based on the real needs of Americans in the 21st century,” said Phineas Baxandall, Senior Transportation Analyst for U.S.PIRG Education Fund. However, it’s quite clear that House Republicans in Congress aren’t quite caught up to speed.

The House GOP has been squabbling for months over a bill to reauthorize the nation’s transportation funding, with more conservative members of the caucus wanting to gut funding and send it back to the states to deal with. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), in the transportation bill that he proposed, called for ending the government’s dedicated stream of funding for mass transit, and instead implementing a cockamamie scheme that the Congressional Budget Office said would cover just five percent of mass transit needs.

The New York Times called the GOP’s plan “uniquely terrible,” and as the research organization PolicyLink found, it would have a disproportionately negative impact on minorities, who depend upon mass transit in greater numbers. The Senate, meanwhile, has had none of these problems, passing a bipartisan transportation bill that the House GOP refuses to take up.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed a bill last night that repeals a law that gave women and others more power to challenge wage discrimination. The Equal Pay Enforcement Act, passed in 2009, gave employers more power to press charges against employers to challenge unfair pay practices, allowing people to plead their case in state courts, instead of the more costly federal court system.

The state legislature passed the Republican-backed repeal bill on party-line votes last week, and Walker waited until almost the last possible minute before signing it. As the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel explains, the Equal Pay Enforcement Act could have helped women in the badger state:

Women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make. In Wisconsin, it’s 75 cents, according to the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health (WAWH), which also estimates that families in the state “lose more than $4,000 per year due to unequal pay.” [...]

Sara Finger, executive director of WAWH, said that the repeal was a “demoralizing attack on women’s rights, health, and wellbeing.” “Economic security is a women’s health issue,” she said. “The salary women are paid directly affects the type and frequency of health care services they are able to access. At a time when women’s health services are becoming more expensive and harder to obtain, financial stability is essential to maintain steady access.”

Our guest bloggers are Adam Hersh, an economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Jane Farrell, Special Assistant for Economic Policy at CAPAF.

Today’s jobs report from the Department of Labor shows that the private sector has added jobs for the past 25 months consecutively. One particular bright spot: auto industry employment continued its winning streak.

Nearly ten percent of the 120,000 U.S. jobs added in March were a result of strong growth in the motor vehicles and parts manufacturing sector, serving as yet another wake-up call regarding whose ideas are working for the economy. Many Republicans — including the GOP’s presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, said we should “let Detroit go bankrupt“.

Auto industry jobs suffered a steady decline in the 2000s even before the Great Recession hit. From March 2001 — the previous cycle peak — to December 2007, auto jobs fell from 1.24 million to 956,000. As the housing bubble economy deflated and the financial crisis on Wall Street threw us further into a tailspin, auto industry employment fell by another one-third.

Fortunately, the Obama administration had the vision and perseverance to come to the aid of the auto industry in early 2009. By organizing a restructuring of the industry instead of letting it go bankrupt, the Administration saved hundreds of thousands of American jobs and a vital sector of the U.S. economy.

The graph here shows the cumulative net change in motor vehicles and parts industries jobs since June 2009–the month that General Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the Obama administration’s strategy for restructuring the American auto industry really kicked into high gear.

From June 2009 to March 2012, the industry increased employment by more than 22 percent, or 139,000 new jobs created. And last week, U.S. automakers registered their strongest sales growth since early 2008, even stronger than during the successful “Cash for Clunkers” program in summer 2009.

Industry output growth recovered, too. After falling 60 percent in 2008 and 25 percent in 2009, U.S. motor vehicle output grew by 27 percent in 2010 and 12 percent in 2011, adjusting for inflation. Growth in 2011 was held back by the March 2011 Japanese earthquake, which disrupted global automotive supply chains.

Without the Obama administration’s bold efforts to restructure the American auto industry, not only would these auto industry jobs not exist, but hundreds of thousands of other jobs upstream and downstream from the auto industry would have disappeared as well.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report this morning, revealing that the American economy added 120,000 jobs. Though the number was lower than in previous months, it marked the 25th consecutive month that the private sector added jobs. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, dropped to 8.2 percent, in part because the labor force participation rate (which measures how many people are seeking employment) fell.

As former Department of Labor chief economist Betsey Stevenson noted on Twitter, female workers accounted for the entire drop in labor force participation:

Declines in labor force participation all came from women: Male particpation +14K, Female particpation -177K

— Betsey Stevenson (@BetseyStevenson) April 6, 2012

The overall drop in the rate is attributable to a number of factors, including a decline in the number of new immigrants to the United States and an increase in retirements from the Baby Boomer generation. Still, it’s another example of how the Great Recession has shifted from the “mancession” it once was into one that has had a greater effect on women. Since the end of the recession, 88 percent of jobs have gone to men, and while the unemployment rate for men has declined, it has stagnated for women, dropping just 0.1 percent in three years.

President Obama spoke at a forum on women and the economy today, following the White House release of a 65-page report (PDF) on the same topic this morning. In a speech that played on the public arguments about a GOP’s “war on women,” the President took the opportunity to argue in front of the largely-female audience that Congress would be more productive if there were more women legislators.

“Fewer than 20 percent of the seats in Congress are occupied by women. Is it possible that Congress would get more done if there were more women in congress?” he asked. “I think it’s fair to say: That is almost guaranteed.” Watch it:

President Obama’s suggestion isn’t new, but it is valid. Women account for only a small fraction — about 15 percent — of Congress, though they make up more than half of the population.

In a response to the speech, Jess McIntosh, a spokesperson for the Democratic advocacy group EMILY’s List, told ThinkProgress that the group agrees with the President on the necessity of more women legislators. “Democratic women are known for getting things done,” McIntosh said. “They’re effective legislators who focus on the things that matter, work well with others, and put women and families first. This GOP-led Congress seems hell-bent on rolling back the clock and restricting our freedoms. It’s pretty clear that if we replace some of these guys with Democratic women, we’ll make more progress.”

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced today that the American economy added 120,000 jobs in March, and though that number is lower than in previous months, the unemployment rate ticked down a tenth of a point to 8.2 percent, largely due to a decline in labor force participation rate (which accounts for how many Americans are actively seeking employment).

After struggling to criticize President Obama for more positive jobs reports over the last three months, Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s campaign seized on today’s numbers. Eric Fehrnstrom, a top adviser to Romney’s campaign, cited the drop in the labor participation rate as the only reason for the drop in unemployment, criticizing Obama on MSNBC for creating an economy in which people have been forced to stop looking for work.

But when host Chuck Todd pushed back , citing Moody’s analyst Mark Zandi’s explanation that the retirement of Baby Boomers and the drop in immigration has contributed heavily to the declining participation rate, Fehrnstrom could only dodge the question, choosing instead to talk about gas prices and other issues:

TODD: Actually, we just had one of those experts, and he didn’t say that. He said that the unemployment rate ticking down had a little more to do with demographics, the aging population and retirements of the Baby Boomers, and that he expected this report to be revised upward when all the data was in.

FEHRNSTROM: If you look at the labor participation rate, you’ll see that it’s going down. It’s been steadily going down. If we just maintained the participation rate that we had when Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 11%, not 8.2. So this is very troubling.

TODD: I understand. But he said demographics, the aging population, there are fewer people in the workforce because there are more people 65 and older now who are retiring and you have fewer immigrants coming into the country.

FEHRNSTROM: Mitt Romney has been around this country meeting with thousands of voters, including people who have grown so discouraged with the state of the economy and the failure of this president to lift us out of these economic problems that they’ve just stopped working altogether. This is a very troubling development. And it’s not just high unemployment, Chuck, you add to that rising gas prices, you look at the increase in consumer goods, the continued decline in home values. It all adds up to a very bad economy.

This isn’t the first time Fehrnstrom has dodged questions about the Romney campaign’s statements on the economic recovery. After Romney slammed Obama for making the economy “worse” at a debate in New Hampshire (a claim he has made and walked back multiple times), Fehrnstrom wasn’t able to answer reporters who asked for evidence that the economy is in worse shape than it was when Obama took office.

President Obama this week signed the badly misnamed JOBS Act, a bill pushed by House Republicans that loosens important investor protections. Before the bill became law, federal regulators and business advocates warned that it would simply be an invitation to financial fraud. “This would be better known as the bucket-shop and penny-stock fraud reauthorization act of 2012,” said former Securities and Exchange Commission official Lynn Turner.

But if her word isn’t enough, perhaps we should listen to a convicted financial fraudster, who told Bloomberg News’ Susan Antilla that guys like him should love the JOBS Act:

[Mark] Morze, 61, hung his hat for 4 1/2 years at federal prisons in Lompoc and Boron, California, after pleading guilty to two counts of fraud for cooking the books at the infamous carpet-cleaning company ZZZZ Best (ZBSTQ) in the 1980s.

He says he’s baffled that President Barack Obama plans to sign a law today that amounts to an open invitation for fraud. “I wish legislators would consult with people like me before they write something like this,” he says, sounding dead serious about the offer. “I could tell them, ‘I know what your intent was with this wording, but we can get around it so easily, it cracks me up.”’

Antilla called the JOBS Act a “slapdash attempt at securities-law deregulation, plain and simple.” An analysis done for the Wall Street Journal shows that 104 companies that have had issues with their anti-fraud procedures since 2004 would have been exempt from audit under the JOBS Act.