Hewlett Packard has announced that they will be laying off 27,000 people — eight percent of their staff– after losses of over a billion dollars in the last year.

Mitt Romney, though, thinks that HP’s CEO would make a great governor.

Just last week, Romney stated that if HP CEO Meg Whitman had won her bid for governor, the state of California would be in a much better financial situation:

I wish Californians had elected Meg Whitman. She would have been more successful and explained to Californians the need to cut back on spending and eliminate unnecessary programs. There are other states that have very different records. I think it’s interesting that the state with the highest or among the highest tax rates in the nation also has the worst or near the worst deficit.

California does have a devastatingly high unemployment rate — 10.9 percent — but if all of the HP workers who are getting laid off lived in the state, its unemployment rate would be pushed over the 11 percent line.

Meanwhile, the spending cuts Whitman and Romney advocate wouldn’t actually help the state economy. As Center for American Progress economist Adam Hersh noted in 2011, the states that have cut the most spending have shed the most jobs.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) in January proposed a tax cut he said would give the state a “fairer, flatter, simpler” tax code, even though it raised taxes on the poor to help pay for a massive tax cut for the top one percent of state residents. Tuesday, Brownback signed an even bigger package into law, even as the state Senate’s top Republican and a host of other conservative lawmakers urged him not to.

The new package, largely backed by Tea Party-affiliated state legislators, abandoned some of Brownback’s proposals that would have hit the poor the hardest, though some still remain. But it will force lawmakers to make even deeper cuts to education and other programs to make up a growing budget gap, the Wall Street Journal reports:

The tax plan, which was the subject of weeks of intense debate and political maneuvering in the legislature, will reduce the top individual state income-tax rate to 4.9% from 6.45% in 2013. It also will eliminate income taxes on non-wage income for about 191,000 small businesses.

The plan likely would require additional cuts in spending on education and social services to cover a reduction in annual tax revenue projected by the Kansas Legislative Research Department to exceed $800 million by 2014, or 12.8% of projected state revenues.

“It is not good public policy,” state Sen. Steve Morris (R), the president of the state Senate, said of the legislation. Other Republicans agreed, including a group of 50 former Kansas Republican lawmakers who attempted to persuade Brownback to veto the bill. “I think Kansas taxpayers need to be asking where the governor would make these cuts,” said Rochelle Chronister, who formerly served as a state representative and as the president of the state GOP, said earlier this month.

Kansas’ tax code is already regressive, as the poorest 20 percent of Kansans paying more than 9 percent of their income in taxes, while the richest 1 percent pay less than 6 percent of theirs. Now, it is even more regressive, and on top of that, poor and middle class Kansans will have to deal with spending cuts that hit social programs on which they depend.

Republicans have argued for the last four years that cutting spending is the panacea that will spark a rapid recovery in the American economy, and it has stuck to that line even as the same policies have failed across Europe. Those policies will lead to failure in the United States too, according to a Congressional Budget Office report that found that scheduled spending cuts mixed with scheduled tax increases at the end of this year would likely lead our economy into a second recession.

The GOP and certain media outlets have already begun circulating the report as evidence that the tax hikes are primarily responsible for the potential economic downturn. But even though the budgetary impact of ending the Bush tax cuts is much larger than the budgetary impact of the scheduled spending cuts, adding the CBO’s economic multiplier effects shows that the negative economic impact of the spending cuts is larger than that of ending the tax cuts. That is to say, cutting spending as scheduled in January will have hurt the economy more than ending the Bush tax cuts, as this chart from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget shows:

And while the GOP has argued that tax cuts for the rich will boost economic growth, the CBO report (and a decade of evidence) found the opposite. Instead, letting tax cuts for the rich expire would have a negligible impact on growth. President Obama’s budget allows the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire, and yet the CBO found that short-term growth under that plan would exceed short-term growth under the current scenario.

The major negative impact on the tax side instead comes from an end to the Bush tax cuts for the middle class and an end to the payroll tax cut extension. There is bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill around extending the tax cuts for the middle class — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), in fact, has said it could pass tomorrow if the GOP didn’t insist on tying it to tax cuts for the rich. It was Republicans, meanwhile, who sparked opposition to the payroll tax cut ahead of its expiration this year.

Despite this evidence, the GOP is pursuing these priorities in exactly the reverse order, prioritizing massive, reckless spending cuts and holding tax cuts for the middle class hostage in an attempt to preserve tax cuts for the rich, even though those cuts have little or no impact on economic growth. (A recent analysis of the House GOP’s budget, for instance, found that it would kill 4.1 million jobs over the next two years.)

European countries that pursued massive fiscal contraction over a short period of time killed economic growth and pushed their countries into double-dip recessions. This CBO report proves that the same could happen in the United States, adding to the evidence that we can’t possibly cut our way to growth.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has told voters that his election “would be very positive news to the American economy,” and that by voting for him, voters could spark an economic turnaround.

Romney continued that narrative today, telling Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin that his policies would reduce unemployment to 6 percent by the end of his first term in 2016:

ROMNEY: Over a period of 4 years, by virtue of the policies that we put in place, we get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, perhaps a little lower.

Watch it:

Though 6 percent unemployment is significantly lower than the current 8.1 percent rate, the feat isn’t all that remarkable. In fact, it is exactly where multiple government agencies project unemployment will be at the end of that time frame. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that unemployment will average 6.3 percent in 2016; the Office of Management and Budget, meanwhile, projects unemployment will hit 6.1 percent and ultimately fall below 6 percent the same year.

The automobile industry has been a consistent bright spot in the American economy over the last several months, as automakers have added jobs to meet growing demand. And news from the industry is only getting better, as new estimates expect automakers to sell 14.3 million cars in the United States in 2012 — 1.5 million more than they sold last year.

Factories for both foreign and domestic automakers are now working “at maximum capacity” and the industry is adding shifts and jobs to keep up with that rising demand, the USA Today reports:

Some plants are adding third work shifts. Others are piling on worker overtime and six-day weeks. And Ford Motor and Chrysler Group are cutting out or reducing the annual two-week July shutdown at several plants this summer to add thousands of vehicles to their output.

“We have many plants working at maximum capacity now,” says Ford spokeswoman Marcey Evans. “We’re building as many (cars) as we can.”

Chrysler and General Motors, the major beneficiaries of the auto rescue, have both reported their best profits in more than a decade, and both were already planning to add jobs this year. With factories now struggling to meet demand, both foreign and domestic auto companies are planning to add even more jobs — and, as the Center for American Progress’ Adam Hersh and Jane Farrell noted in April, the industry has added more than 139,000 jobs in the last three years.

The strength of the auto industry is yet another sign that letting it fail would have been a major mistake. Not only would it have cost more than a million jobs at a time when the economy was struggling, it would have prevented the current growth that is helping both the industry and the American economy recover.

Two of the nation’s top financial regulatory agencies don’t have enough funding to competently regulate the Wall Street banks they oversee, top regulatory officials told the Senate Banking Committee yesterday. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) both took on new regulatory responsibilities under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, but multiple rounds of Republican-led budget cuts aimed at neutering the new law have left them without sufficient funding to carry out those mandates.

As a result, the agencies are “outgunned” by the Wall Street banks they oversee, SEC head Mary Schapiro and CFTC head Gary Gensler told the committee Tuesday, the Huffington Post reports:

“We’re way underfunded at the CFTC,” Gensler told lawmakers, after a question on the subject from Senator Chuck Schumer (D- N.Y.). “Imagine if, all of a sudden, there are eight times the number of teams on the [football] field, but only seven refs,” Gensler said. “There would be would be mayhem on the field. The fans would lose confidence.”

SEC chief Schapiro echoed the point: “We’ve been asked to take on very significant new responsibilities,” she said. Though the SEC has made progress in hiring new staffers and improving its technological capabilities, Schapiro conceded that, in some areas, the efforts haven’t gone far enough.

As ThinkProgress noted in January, adequately funding the CFTC and SEC is imperative to successfully implementing new regulations and policing Wall Street. Republicans oppose those efforts and have repeatedly pushed for cuts to the agencies’ budgets. “The less we fund those agencies,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last June, “the better America will be.”

The SEC is funded by fees paid by banks, not by taxpayers, so cuts to its budget won’t affect the federal deficit. But it is prohibited from collecting more in fees than it is allocated in the budget, so the $225 million cut Republicans pushed last year amounts to a massive giveaway to Wall Street, which will save exactly that amount.

As the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated, failure to police Wall Street can have perilous consequences for American taxpayers and the economy. But when one party’s purpose, as Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) said last year, is to “serve the banks,” preventing another such fiasco is apparently of little matter.

POMPANO BEACH, Florida — Perhaps the most beloved member of the freshman Republican class, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) made a startling announcement on Tuesday: he’s willing to discuss raising taxes in order to address the nation’s budget shortfall.

The Tea Party congressman’s concession came at a small town hall meeting in Pompano Beach. West stipulated that before he would consider increasing taxes, he would have to be satisfied that Congress had first “eliminated a lot of that waste, fraud, and abuse.” Once that threshold was met, West said it’d be time “to talk about raising taxes as a means to make sure we keep our debt and our deficit at a manageable level”:

QUESTIONER: How can we balance the budget without raising taxes?

WEST: [...] There are many things we can do in Washington DC. Last year, as a wet-behind-the-ears freshman, by April I found three wasteful programs in the Department of Defense. It saved the American taxpayer $357 million over 10 years. But, the question is this. If every single member in the House of Representatives, every single member in the Senate, went in on the committee of jurisdiction and oversight and they did the same thing, find $350 million in wasteful programs over the next 10 years, get it and eliminate it, think what happens for our budget. We get ourselves on the road to being able to balance this thing . Now, once we get to a point where we have waxed out the federal government, we have eliminated a lot of that waste, fraud, and abuse, then it certainly comes to the American people to talk about raising taxes as a means to make sure we keep our debt and our deficit at a manageable level.

Watch it:

The fact that West’s announcement is so surprising speaks to just how intransigent congressional Republicans have become when addressing tax and budget issues.

One of the primary reasons for their obstinance is because of a single anti-tax crusader in Washington DC, Grover Norquist. Nearly every Republican in Congress has signed Norquist’s pledge to “oppose and vote against tax increases.” Just seven House GOPers and seven in the Senate have refused.

Still, cracks are beginning to appear. Other House Republicans have shown similar angst about Norquist’s pledge recently, despite being signatories. They include Reps. Steve King (R-IA), Timothy Johnson (R-IL), Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), Charles Boustany (R-LA), Mike Simpson (R-ID), and Frank Wolf (R-VA).