The Mitt Romney campaign met with editors of the Washington Post today in an attempt to get the paper to retract a story about how the private equity firm Bain Capital helped outsource jobs when Romney was its CEO. Initially, the campaign merely admonished the Post for not distinguishing between “outsourcing” and “offshoring,” but today it brought a set of slides in an attempt to refute the entire premise of the story.

However, the evidence that the campaign provided does not contradict the paper’s reporting, which was gleaned from documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Instead, the campaign’s document simply includes assertions from executives of the companies in which Bain invested, claiming that they did not outsource jobs.

Left unsaid is that these executives have a vested interest in not being seen as offshoring jobs. “None of these 6 companies sent jobs overseas under Bain Capital during Mitt Romney’s tenure, in fact they added jobs,” the campaign’s document claims, providing no sources of evidence. Here are some of the slides:

The Post is standing by its story.

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

A House subcommittee held a hearing today titled “How Welfare and Tax Benefits Can Discourage Work.” The clear subtext of the hearing is that negative work incentives can justify cuts to safety net programs and tax credits for the working poor — in other words, that such cuts can actually be good for affected families.

The House Republican budget, authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), cuts low-income programs by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years. And by reducing tax credits for working parents, it raises taxes, on average, on households with incomes below $30,000.

A new report shows that these cuts are not justified by the supposed concern that tax credits discourage work. The report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities summarizes the economic literature on the Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the nation’s most important pro-work, anti-poverty programs. That literature indicates that the EITC increases work – not only among the parents who claim the credit but also their children, later in life. Among the important findings:

– “The overwhelming finding of the empirical literature is that the EITC has been especially successful at encouraging the employment of single parents, especially mothers.”

– EITC expansions were more important than welfare reforms enacted in 1996 in increasing employment and decreasing cash welfare assistance among single mothers during the 1990s.

– While the EITC “induces substantially more workers to enter the labor force,” there is “little evidence that the phasing down of EITC benefits as income rises above certain levels causes workers to significantly reduce their work hours.”

As the report emphasizes, a growing body of literature also indicates that a critical aspect of tax credits like the EITC and CTC is increased educational achievement, income, and levels of work among the children of tax credit recipients. Recent studies have found:

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Gilles Simon, the 13th ranked mens tennis player in the world, said this week at Wimbledon that he believes women tennis players should be paid less than men, because the men’s game is “more attractive.” He added that he thinks equal pay is “something that doesn’t work in sport“:

Simon, the world number 13, had criticised the move towards equality, insisting that the men’s game has more to offer spectators.

“We often speak of equal money, but I think it’s something that doesn’t work in sport,” said Simon.

“Tennis is the only sport today where we have parity even though men’s tennis remains more attractive than women’s at this time.”

Simon is a member of the Association of Tennis Professionals’ player council, which helps advise the tour’s Board of Directors. It was only five years ago that Wimbledon began paying male and female players the same amount, using the fact that men play five sets to womens’ three as justification. Both the U.S. and Australian Opens have been paying equal wages for years.

Even with Wimbeldon’s decision, women tennis players make substantially less than men. As Collin Flake, Mikaela Dufur, and Erin Moore of Brigham Young University found, “Women make $337 less per [tour] point than men, as well as “$27,620 less per singles title won.” Overall, women “are paid $31,337 less per year.”

In a statement, the CEO of the women’s tennis tour, Stacey Allaster, said, “tennis, including the Grand Slams, is aligned with our modern, progressive society when it comes to the principle of equality. I can’t believe in this day and age that anyone can still think otherwise.” Other players have responded similarly. “Over the whole year, we are a long way from winning as much as the men — only in a few tournaments and Grand Slams,” said Marion Bartoli, France’s top women’s player. “We are fully-invested as much as them. The physical demands, training, investment on a personal level are the same as theirs.”

Back in 2007, tennis great John McEnroe said, “I think when you’ve got men and women playing at the same tournament, it is ludicrous to have a difference in pay. It would be setting an example to the rest of society in general to have equal prize money.” Evidently today’s players have yet to catch up with his views.

Big companies and interest groups that represent them are resisting a piece of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act that is meant to help rein in executive compensation, even as pay for chief executives skyrockets and is increasingly untethered from company performance.

The rule, a draft of which is set to be issued at the end of the month, would force companies to disclose the gap between the pay of their CEOs and average employees. Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has grown 127 times faster than worker pay, and the average CEO at America’s largest companies now makes $14.5 million. CEO pay grew twice as fast as workers’ wages in 2011 alone.

Despite those alarming disparities, business groups and companies are lining up to oppose the rule, saying calculating such a disparity would be too hard and “would make them easy targets for CEO-pay critics,” the Wall Street Journal reports:

Companies say they have a rough sense of their internal pay ratios, but they argue that their global workforces and varied payroll systems make calculating the median cumbersome, if not virtually impossible. What’s more, they say, disclosing pay ratios would make them easy targets for CEO-pay critics.

“The ratio is not going to be a meaningful way to help investors but will be used as a political tool to attack companies,” says David Hirschmann, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets, which opposes the measure.

But other companies that tie executive pay to the pay of average workers have pushed back on the criticism. Mark Ehrnstein, a vice president at Whole Foods, told the Wall Street Journal that tracking pay “takes a few days” and isn’t as cumbersome as business groups allege. Whole Foods tracks pay to ensure that no employee makes more than 19 times the median company salary. By comparison, the average American CEO now makes 380 times more than the average worker.

Today, Mitt Romney will bring his campaign to EIT, a circuit-board and electronics manufacturing company, in Sterling, Virginia. But while he is likely to highlight the success of the company, it represents a curious location choice for the Romney campaign.

A decade ago, the Northern Virginia suburb was home to a major circuit-board factory for the DDI Corp. DDI, based in Anaheim, CA, was a major Bain Capital investment during Romney’s tenure with the firm. Romney personally invested in the company and Romney’s name appeared on a 2001 SEC filing as a designated liaison from Bain’s management committee for the company.

While Romney and Bain made tens of millions on its investment in DDI, the company saw large layoffs in Sterling and ended up in Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2003. A 2003 Washington Business Journal report noted:

Circuit board maker Dynamic Details has laid off 167 people at its Sterling manufacturing plant since the beginning of July — and a total of 460 over the past two years — as it weathers the lingering effects of the tech and telecom industry implosion.

According to the same story, the Sterling plant employed 550 in 2001 and just about 130 in 2003. While the Romney campaign has repeated claims that Bain is responsible for creating thousands of jobs, hundreds lost theirs at DDI, at least in part thanks to Romney and Bain.

Additionally, today’s company — EIT — appears to contradict the Romney campaign’s gloomy assessment of the nation’s economy. Virginia state legislator Joe May (R), who owns the company, told the Washington Post that his private sector firm is indeed doing “just fine.”