According to an analysis in the Wall Street Journal, members of the Standard & Poor’s 500 — the largest publicly held companies in the U.S. — have returned to their pre-recession levels of sales and profits. However, that is not translating into more American jobs jobs:

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal of corporate financial reports finds that cumulative sales, profits and employment last year among members of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index exceeded the totals of 2007, before the recession and financial crisis.

Deep cost cutting during the downturn and caution during the recovery put the companies on firmer financial footing, helping them to outperform the rest of the economy and gather a greater share of the nation’s income. The rebound is reflected in the stock market, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at a four-year high.

“U.S. companies became leaner, meaner and hungrier,” said Sung Won Sohn, a former chief economist at Wells Fargo WFC -0.77% & Co.,

The performance hasn’t translated into significant gains in U.S. employment. Many of the 1.1 million jobs the big companies added since 2007 were outside the U.S. So, too, was much of the $1.2 trillion added to corporate treasuries.

In addition to hiring overseas, companies have been squeezing more productivity out of their employees. In fact, “in 2007, the companies generated an average of $378,000 in revenue for every employee on their payrolls,” while last year, “that figure rose to $420,000.”

Meanwhile, corporate taxes have not rebounded like corporate profits, hitting a 40 year low in fiscal year 2011. A new report today found that 26 major corporations have made billions over the last four years while paying no corporate income tax at all. These sorts of numbers once again put the lie to the GOP claim that corporate taxes are stifling American job creation.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly repealed his state’s equal pay law last week, a decision that will make it harder for victims of wage discrimination to sue for lost earnings and back wages. The law was enacted primarily to address the massive pay gap that exists between male and female workers, which is even bigger in Wisconsin than in other states.

Repealing the law was a no-brainer for state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R), who led the effort because of his belief that pay discrimination is a myth driven by liberal women’s groups. Ignoring multiple studies showing that the pay gap exists, Grothman blamed females for prioritizing childrearing and homemaking instead of money, saying, “Money is more important for men,” The Daily Beast reports:

Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.” [...]

Grothman doesn’t accept these studies. When I ran the numbers by him, he replied, “The American Association of University Women is a pretty liberal group.” Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”

Among Grothman’s inaccuracies is the idea that only males “expect to be a breadwinner someday.” In two-thirds of American families, women are either primary or co-breadwinners, and yet they still earn less than their male counterparts in all 50 states.

In 2011, the Wisconsin GOP carried out an extensive war on workers that led to recall efforts for state representatives, senators, and Walker himself. In 2012, Grothman and his colleagues have expanded that war to one on women, meaning a group of workers that was already struggling to keep pace with their male counterparts is only going to fall further behind.

Last fall, when President Obama debuted the Buffett Rule — the simple idea that millionaires and billionaires should pay at least the same tax rate as middle class workers — we climbed into the wayback machine and found a video of President Ronald Reagan decrying “crazy” tax loopholes (originally stated on June 6, 1985) that allowed a millionaire to pay a lower tax rate than a bus driver.

With the Senate set to vote one week from today on a Buffett Rule bill that would make sure millionaires and billionaires pay a minimum tax rate of 30 percent, we now present another video of former President Reagan supporting the principle behind the Buffett Rule (originally stated on June 28, 1985).  In today’s video, President Reagan describes a letter he received from an executive who wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why it’s “wrong” that he was able to “take advantage of the present tax code” to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. Watch it:

Sounds pretty familiar.

We need to build an economy that works for everyone, not just the privileged few.  We can start by passing the Buffett Rule to make sure millionaires and billionaires can no longer take advantage of unfair tax loopholes to pay a lower tax rate than millions of middle class workers.

A month after deadly tornadoes ripped through Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) used part of his spring recess to visit storm victims. Five died in the March 2 tornadoes that hit Laurel County, Kentucky, where McConnell visited Saturday, and the area was among the most devastated by the storms.

McConnell came to Laurel County to “thank all the volunteers that have been helping this community come together and comfort those that lost their homes,” he said, and the county’s residents were happy to see him, WKYT reports:

“It’s comforting to know not only for myself but also the other victims in the area that there is somebody that has their best interest at heart,” said Jeremy Jarvis of Arthur Ridge Baptist Church.

Perhaps McConnell’s visit would have been less comforting, however, had he mentioned how he helped hold federal emergency disaster relief funds hostage in 2011 before his own state needed them. Nearly a year before the March storms hammered Kentucky, a similar outbreak battered Joplin, Missouri, and 2011 quickly became a year of unprecedented natural disasters that drained the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s budget. Republicans, led by House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), opposed emergency funds to rebuild FEMA’s coffers without finding spending offsets, and McConnell gladly went along with those plans.

“What’s at issue is whether we are going to add to the debt or not,” McConnell told CBS in September, less than a week after he voted against a measure that approved disaster funds without the partisan offsets Republicans sought. That position contradicts one held by McConnell’s former leadership colleague, ex-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX), who ignored Republicans calling for spending offsets in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “It is right to borrow to pay for it,” DeLay said at the time.

Last year, Citizens for Tax Justice found that 30 major corporations had made billions of dollars in profits while paying no federal income tax between 2008 and 2010. Today, CTJ updated that report to reflect the 2011 tax bill of those 30 companies, and 26 of them have still managed to pay absolutely nothing over that four year period:

– 26 of the 30 companies continued to enjoy negative federal income tax rates. That means they still made more money after tax than before tax over the four years!

– Of the remaining four companies, three paid four year effective tax rates of less than 4 percent
(specifically, 0.2%, 2.0% and 3.8%). One company paid a 2008-11 tax rate of 10.9 percent.

– In total, 2008-11 federal income taxes for the 30 companies remained negative, despite $205 billion in pretax U.S. profits. Overall, they enjoyed an average effective federal income tax rate of –3.1 percent over the four years.

Amongst the 30 are corporate titans such as General Electric, Boeing, Verizon, and Mattel. The only four companies that slipped into positive tax territory were DTE Energy, Honeywell, Wells Fargo, and DuPont, with DuPont the only one that paid more than 4 percent over the four years.

Corporate taxes in the U.S., contrary to the constant protestations of conservatives, are at a 40 year low, with many of the most profitable companies paying nothing at all. CTJ noted that “had these 30 companies paid the full 35 percent corporate tax rate over the 2008-11 period, they would have paid $78.3 billion more in federal income taxes.” And this is not a problem that only afflicts the U.S., as the UK found out last week that online retailer Amazon made billions in sales in 2011, while paying nothing in corporate taxes.

Private businesses have added jobs for 25 consecutive months as the American economic recovery continues, slowly but surely. At the same time, however, the loss of public sector jobs at the federal, state, and local levels has inhibited that recovery, preventing it from becoming as robust as it could be.

Despite cries from conservatives about the growth of government under the current administration, the public sector has shed more than 600,000 jobs since President Obama took office and has added jobs in just two months since the beginning of 2011. The only other time state governments have contracted in two consecutive years came during the healthier economic times of the mid-1990s. Altogether, the first three years of the Obama administration has been the worst three-year stretch on record for public sector job losses, Reuters reports:

The result? The last three years of job losses at the state and local government level has been the most dramatic since Labor Department records began in 1955, according to a Reuters analysis. [...]

Local governments have cut 482,000 jobs since the beginning of 2009. They added jobs in just two months since 2011 started. Previously, states only had two consecutive years of layoffs, 1995 and 1996, when they scrapped about 57,000 jobs, or about one-third of the 150,000 cut since the beginning of 2009.

The loss of government jobs has had dire effects on the recovery. In 2011, government job losses pushed total layoffs past the 2010 total, despite better job growth in the private sector. “If public-sector employment had grown since June 2009 by the average amount it grew in the three previous recoveries (2.8 percent) instead of shrinking by 2.5 percent, there would be 1.2 million more public-sector jobs in the U.S. economy today,” the Economic Policy Institute found in a recent report.

Those job losses have led to slower emergency response times, backlogged courts, and larger classroom sizes, and the public sector losses aren’t likely to cease in 2012. The public sector lost 1,000 jobs in March, and according to Moody’s, states are expected to lose another 15,000 jobs while local governments will shed between 150,000 and 175,000 this year. And yet, Congress is doing little to help. Republicans have blocked numerous efforts to aid states since stimulus funds expired, including a provision in the president’s American Jobs Act that would have helped prevent layoffs of teachers, firefighters, and police officers.

Ever since the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was signed by President Obama in 2010, the financial industry has been trying to delay, change, and otherwise obstruct it, claiming that its costs are too high or that it puts U.S. banks at a competitive disadvantage. One of the highest profile targets has been the Volcker rule, which is meant to prevent banks from trading for their own benefit with federally insured dollars.

For instance, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who runs the biggest bank in the U.S., has taken issue with the rule (while admitting he hasn’t read it all). But not all big banks are opposed to the regulation. Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal flagged a missive from M&T Bank CEO Robert Wilmers, in which he criticized big banks for “a pattern of investing in areas where they possessed little knowledge.” He went on to criticize large bank bonuses and to chastise Wall Street for lobbying against the Volcker rule:

Public cynicism about the major banks has been further reinforced by the salaries of their top executives, in large part fueled not by lending but by trading. At a time when the American economy is stuck in the doldrums and so many are unemployed or under-employed, the average compensation for the chief executives of four of the six largest banks in 2010 was $17.3 million – more than 262 times that of the average American worker. One bank with 33,000 employees earned a 3.7% return on common equity in 2011, yet its employees received an average compensation of $367,000 – more than five times that of the average U.S. worker. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the public would judge the banking industry harshly – and view Wall Street’s executives and their intentions with skepticism.

Nor can one say with any confidence that we have seen a fundamental change in the big bank business approach which helped lead us into crisis and scandal. The Wall Street banks continue to fight against regulation that would limit their capacity to trade for their own accounts – while enjoying the backing of deposit insurance – and thus seek to keep in place a system which puts taxpayers at high risk. In 2011, the six largest banks spent $31.5 million on lobbying activities. All told, the six firms employed 234 registered lobbyists.

Willmers, who oversees the 29th largest bank in the U.S. with $77 billion in assets, is surely no huge fan of Dodd-Frank, and he heaps disproportionate blame for the financial crisis onto government backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But his critique of Wall Street banks is spot-on, as is his assessment of the financial industry’s tarnished image. According to a Stanford University study, the number of Americans with hardly any confidence in the banking sector is at an all-time high.