Since he came into office, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) has complained about the nation’s deficit, at one point blocking a crucial extension of unemployment benefits because it wasn’t offset with spending cuts. “The federal government continues its binge spending at an astonishing pace — running up our national debt and leaving our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren with an ever-expanding IOU,” Brown wrote in a Politico op-ed.

However, according to an analysis by independent budget analysts requested by the Boston Globe, Brown’s opponent — consumer advocate Prof. Elizabeth Warren — would do more to reduce the deficit if her preferred policies were put in place:

In response to a request from the Globe, the two competitors in the nation’s most high-profile Senate battle provided five ideas for bridging the nation’s $1.2 trillion deficit, with the results highlighting why the problem has deadlocked Washington. The candidates were also asked to explain what cuts they would make to entitlement programs, and to describe how they would raise more revenue.

Though Brown has made the deficit a larger issue in his campaign, an analysis prepared for the Globe by a nonpartisan group showed that responses offered by Warren, and positions taken on her website, would trim 67 percent more from the debt over 10 years than those offered by Brown.

Neither candidate submitted a full plan for deficit reduction, but still, the fact that Warren’s policy preferences came out so far ahead in terms of deficit reduction should prove that Brown is just a deficit peacock: willing to use the deficit to score political points, but not actually interested in reducing it. Warren’s reductions were largely the result of tax increases on the wealthy, while Brown actually lost some deficit reduction when he proposed repealing President Obama’s health care law.

Most workers face long, troublesome commutes if they try to use public transportation to access jobs, even though most jobs are technically accessible by public transportation, according to a new study from the Brookings Institution.

Nearly three-quarters of American jobs are near public transportation, but thanks to suburbanization of both jobs and households, barely a quarter of Americans can access those jobs in less than 90 minutes via public transportation, the report found:

The typical job is accessible to only about 27 percent of its metropolitan workforce by transit in 90 minutes or less. Labor access varies considerably from a high of 64 percent in metropolitan Salt Lake City to a low of 6 percent in metropolitan Palm Bay, refl ecting differences in both transit provision, job concentration, and land use patterns. City jobs are consistently accessible to larger shares of metropolitan labor pools than suburban jobs, reinforcing cities’ geographic advantage relative to transit routing.

Access to both transit and a job might not be a big deal to the average car-owning American worker. For poorer Americans, though, the struggle to use public transportation to get to work restricts which jobs they can take. “The costs of owning and operating a vehicle are such that ten percent of American households in the nation’s largest metro areas do not have access to a private vehicle,” the report states. “Compared to their car-owning counterparts, zero-vehicle households are more likely to earn low incomes, live in cities, and take public transportation to work.”

The report also found that reliance on automobiles to commute to work has important consequences for both commuters and businesses. The average commute has jumped by 3.5 miles in the last 30 years, from 9.9 miles in 1983 to 13.3 miles today. A steady rise in gas prices means a longer commute costs drivers money, and businesses lose money too, thanks to reduced productivity and the necessity of increased wages to compensate for commuter costs.

“Improving metro areas’ transit access could be as simple as running more buses and trains,” the report says. “Yet a serious public funding crisis limits agencies’ ability to expand their service and enhance connections between jobs and households Instead, revenue declines are widespread and many agencies are already planning fare increases and operating cuts to close yawning budget gaps. … It becomes critical then for the nation to focus on smart transit investments, specifically those that coordinate with other transportation and land use decisions.”

A longstanding Republican canard is that overregulation has deterred companies from doing business in the United States. Now, thanks to the economic safeguard-destroying Jumpstart Our Business Start-Ups (JOBS) Act — crafted by House Republicans and signed into law in April — America’s newly deregulated IPO market has become an unfortunate haven for companies seeking lower compliance costs.

One such international company, the English soccer club Manchester United, is filing to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, and will benefit from the lax regulation that America now offers. The JOBS Act weakens protections put in place in the early 2000s after Enron and similar scandals. Under the law, Manchester United — which earns less than $1 billion in revenue — classifies as an “emerging growth company,” thus avoiding more stringent business regulations.

As the New York Times’ Dealbook notes, United will be exempted from many American securities laws:

Manchester United will not need to file quarterly reports, report material events, file proxy statements or disclose extensive compensation information, all of which American companies must do. Under a different S.E.C. rule adopted in 2008, Manchester United also does not need to report financials under the generally accepted accounting principles used in the United States, but can instead rely on international financial reporting standards.

Critics of the JOBS Act warn that the slackening of reporting requirements of IPO companies increases the likelihood of fraud and manipulation. Even a majority of bankers believe the law opens the door to accounting scandals.

For the Glazers, the American family that owns Man U., the U.S. can also offer a much more attractive shareholder structure than other nations. As it stands, United’s ownership is saddled with $655 million of debt and is largely unpopular with fans. The Glazers may be willing to sell shares to reduce their debt, but they do not want to relinquish voting control over the company. America’s “dual-class” shareholder structure — where the Glazers could get 10 votes per share versus one vote for a public investors’ share — would mean they won’t have to.

– Steven Perlberg

It’s clear that income inequality has been skyrocketing in the United States, and that it is stifling the American dream of equal opportunity for all citizens, regardless of class or race. This trend is confirmed by a new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts, which looks at the “most current estimates of mobility and the first estimates that overlap with the recession.”

The Pew researchers found striking increases in wealth for the wealthy and decreases for the middle and lower classes: “Median wealth for those in the lowest wealth quintile decreased from just under $7,500 in the parents’ generation to less than $2,800 in the children’s generation. Conversely, at the top of the wealth distribution, median wealth increased from just under $500,000 in the parents’ generation to almost $630,000 in the children’s generation.” Further, the researchers found clear connections between wealth at birth and wealth at death. This chart summarizes their discoveries:

These effects were especially pronounced in the African-American community, which was hit particularly hard by the financial crisis. Not only were more blacks than whites unable to move up when born into the poorest quintile, but “[m]ore than two-thirds of blacks (68 percent) raised in the middle fall to the bottom two rungs of the ladder as adults compared with just under a third of whites (30 percent).”

There is a silver lining, though. The Pew researchers found that access to college for the poor and middle class was able to mitigate the worst effects of inequality on social mobility. Though income inequality is also restricting access to higher education for the poor and middle class, the student loan reforms passed in the Affordable Care Act are likely to boost aid for students who need loan assistance to attend college. Congressional Republicans, by contrast, want to cut Pell Grants for more than one million students.

Oversight committees in both the House and Senate have begun investigating the London InterBank Offered Rate (LIBOR) scandal, where bankers colluded to fix the important interest rate marker. While Congress looks into past wrongdoing (and how much regulators knew about what was going on), observers of the financial sector are arguing that updated regulations — starting with a strong Volcker rule to rein in banks’ risky trading — may be necessary to prevent something like the LIBOR catastrophe from happening in the future:

• The staunchly pro-business Economist, calling LIBOR the financial sector’s “tobacco moment,” called for “a new system” for setting the LIBOR rate.
• In the New York Times, Joe Nocera wrote that “there is going to be a lot more opportunities for Americans to become outraged over this scandal. And, maybe, to finally summon the will to change banking once and for all.”
• Also in the Times, Gretchen Mortenson touted “a rule proposed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that would require pretrade price transparency in the swaps market,” but worries that the financial sector is pushing Congress to kill it.
• Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich went further, demanding “that Glass-Steagall be reinstituted and the biggest banks be broken up. The question is whether the unfolding Libor scandal will provide enough ammunition and energy to finally get the job done.”
• And former White House economist Jared Bernstein explains how the LIBOR contretemps gives the lie to big banks’ notion that they don’t need to be regulated because they “self-regulate:”

The head of Barclays has already had to step down due to the scandal, though he will be keeping his £2 million salary.
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Mitt Romney is making his pitch to African-American voters at the NAACP conference today, but while he plans to focus on the economy, he probably won’t discuss the tax hike that many African-American households would face under his economic plan.

Romney has touted his tax plan as good for the middle class, with tax cuts for everyone. But while millionaires would indeed get a giant tax cut — worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — more than two million African-American working class families would lose their current tax credits for children and earned income.

And since Romney has not yet explained how he will pay for the millionaire tax cuts, the tax hike on working class families could be even higher.

To hear conservatives and Tea Partiers tell it, President Obama is a serial tax-raiser who has increased taxes on “millions of Americans.” But according to the latest data from the Congressional Budget Office, tax rates under Obama hit a 30-year low in 2009, in part because of the tax cuts he implemented in response to the country’s economic downturn:

Americans paid the lowest tax rates in 30 years to the federal government in 2009, in part because of tax cuts President Obama sought to combat the Great Recession, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday. [...]

During Obama’s first year in office, the average tax rate paid by all households fell to 17.4 percent, down from 19.9 percent in 2007, according to the CBO. The 2009 rate was significantly lower than the previous low of 19.4 percent in 2003 and well below the 30-year average of 21 percent.

Now, Obama is proposing to raise tax rates on income in excess of $250,000 (which would still keep tax rates for the rich below where they were under the Clinton administration). And of course, Republicans are breaking out every falsehood in the book in order to oppose the move.