Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced this week that HHS will grant waivers to states under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) law. The waivers will allow states to experiment in order to improve “welfare to work” programs that help low-income Americans find jobs.

Republicans and the conservative blogosphere have denounced the move, saying it would “gut” the 1996 welfare reform law. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called it a “misdirected” move that decoupled “the linkage of work and welfare” that “is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.”

Despite the GOP’s concerns, however, the waiver process will have benefits for a welfare reform law that has struggled to live up to the program that preceded it. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, the waivers and the new requirements would force states to set specific measures that they will have to reach; if they fail, the waiver will be canceled. The waivers will also give the states more flexibility in linking employment and education and tailor ways to better use their limited resources.

Most importantly, CBPP notes, it will increase, not decrease, the focus on employment:

In its waiver announcement, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) notes that demonstration projects approved will be “focused on improving employment outcomes” for participants. This is a major step forward. Under the current structure, states can meet their TANF work participation rate – the only measure of state performance – without recipients finding paying jobs. These demonstration projects will help to shift the focus of TANF employment programs from process and “bean counting” (whether recipients participate in programs) to outcomes (whether they actually find and keep jobs).

“This policy is pro-work, and it acknowledges that not all wisdom resides in Washington,” Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI), the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement. That would seem to be welcome news to Republicans, who have decried federal control of programs like Medicare and Medicaid and attempted to send those programs to the states (the House GOP budget, for example, would block grant Medicaid payments to the states).

Republican support for flexibility, Levin said, appears to extend only to reducing benefits to low-income Americans. “Curiously, some of the same voices that pay lip service to the virtues of state flexibility now appear to oppose providing waivers under the TANF program,” he said. “It turns out that Republican support for state flexibility is a one-way street – they support flexibility when it comes to reducing assistance for needy Americans looking for work, but they oppose giving states greater discretion in helping people find work.”

While Republicans oppose the waivers, states are coming out in favor of them. Even though Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) criticized the waiver plan, the state’s Republican governor, Gary Herbert, want to see it implemented. “Utah is especially interested in the development of waiver authority in the TANF grant,” Herbert wrote in a letter to HHS after the decision was announced.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon held a conference call today to announce the bank’s latest earnings and address the mounting losses from the so-called “London Whale” trade. So far, the bank’s losses from that trade total nearly $6 billion, and could be headed north to $9 billion.

During the call, one analyst asked Dimon whether the failed trade — which was originated from a trading desk that was supposed to help the company reduce risk — shows that JP Morgan is simply too big to manage. Dimon, of course, said, “no“:

During the Q&A portion Mike Mayo, an analyst with CLSA, asked Dimon about Too Big To Fail “I’m wondering if the firm as a whole has reached some sort of tipping point in terms of size or complexity that makes it more difficult to manage,” Mayo asked.

Dimon replied, “No”

Mayo probed Dimon with “Have you lost a step?” The crowd on the conference call laughs and someone shouts out “Are you too old?”

Dimon will have none of it, saying “Mike, this company is the same company went from ’06, ’07, 2010, 2011, Bear Stearns, while Mike, we had a record last year.”

Many financial experts, however, disagree. “I think it does underscore that even with very good management these institutions are just too big to manage,” said former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Sheila Bair. “Such banks have become too large and complex for management to control what is going on,” added economist and big bank critic Simon Johnson. “The regulators also have no idea about what is going on. Attempts to oversee these banks in a sophisticated and nuanced way are not working.”

As Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said during an interview with ThinkProgress, “these banks are not just too big to fail, they’re too big to manage…I think these banks will be stronger and healthier and probably more profitable if they’re smaller.” However, Dimon clearly doesn’t see it that way, and has done everything he can to ensure that regulations restricting risky trading by the biggest banks get watered down.

Opponents of President Obama’s plan to extend the Bush tax cuts on income up to $250,000, but to let the cuts for higher incomes expire, continue to claim that he is levying a massive tax increase on the wealthy and small business owners, even though the small business point has been repeatedly debunked and the rich would still receive a tax cut under Obama’s plan.

As we pointed out when Obama proposed the plan, every single taxpayer still receives a tax cut on income up to $250,000. As this Citizens for Tax Justice chart shows, the size of remaining tax cut dwindles the more income an earner makes, and those just above the $250,000 line would still keep nearly all of the tax cut they received under George W. Bush:

The Tax Policy Center also crunched the numbers for the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and found that many of the richest Americans will barely see their tax liabilities change. For the 95th-99th percentiles of income earners, the tax liability hardly increases, according to TPC’s numbers:

This may be hard for Republicans who oppose Obama’s plan to believe, but the only people who will truly see a sizable increase in their tax liabilities come from the top 1 percent of income earners. The rest — including the small businesses Republicans continue to cite — will hardly feel an impact at all.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said, regarding the LIBOR interest rate rigging scandal that is gripping Europe, “it would amount to a rip-off of almost cosmic proportion — trillions of dollars that you and I and other average people would otherwise have received or saved on our lending and borrowing that have been going instead to the bankers. It would make the other abuses of trust we’ve witnessed look like child’s play by comparison.”

As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, the scandal could have a big effect on American consumers. Several cities, led by Baltimore, are suing the banks involved, saying they were forced to cut services and lay off workers because their investments attached to LIBOR were undermined. But mainstream television news programs seem to not have much interest in the story, at least according to the amount of time that they have dedicated to it, as Media Matters noted:

Despite the massive scope of the controversy — LIBOR is “used as a benchmark to set payments on about $800 trillion worth of financial instruments” — CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC have only spent about 12 minutes combined covering the story during their evening newscasts and opinion programming.

Notably, flagship nightly news programs like ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer, NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams and Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier have never mentioned the rate-fixing scandal. Sunday morning standards including ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CBS’ Face the Nation, CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley, and Fox’s Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace have also been silent on the story.

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes’ — which airs on weekend mornings — ran a July 7 segment on the LIBOR scandal that “was almost 19 minutes long, including a roundtable discussion with two economists.” Media Matters noted, “That’s longer than all broadcast and cable morning coverage surveyed and substantially more than primetime coverage, arguably when these networks have their highest viewership.”

The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate to maintain low inflation and high employment — a job description that requires a balancing act, as these two goals can be in tension. The Fed has put its inflation target at 2 percent, while 5 percent is generally viewed as the normal unemployment rate when the economy is operating at full strength.

But as economist Chad Stone shows in U.S. News & World Report this morning, the Fed has usually hit its inflation target ever since the Great Recession while utterly failing to meet its obligation to bring down unemployment:

So the Fed has spent the last three years treating 2 percent inflation as a ceiling rather than a happy median, refusing to allow it higher even to bring down America’s sky-high unemployment rate of 8 percent. But the good news is that in late June, the Federal Reserve finally decided to extend what monetary easing it has engaged in by another $267 billion, and the institution’s hesitation to do more to help the economy could be dissapating. Whether it will be sufficient to help the economy at this point remains to be seen.

Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who authored a no-new-taxes pledge popular among GOP politicians, has called Republicans who raised taxes “rat heads in a Coke bottle.” A former Republican president who raised taxes during his administration, however, is now challenging Republicans to set aside the Norquist pledge.

In an interview with Parade Magazine, George H. W. Bush, who broke his “no new taxes” election pledge, said he didn’t like the “rigidity” of pledges like Norquist’s. “Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?” Bush added:

PARADE: During your presidency you gave in on your “no new taxes” pledge. You’ve been vindicated in many respects for that decision. I wonder how you view the “no new tax” pledge from Grover Norquist that seems to be requisite for GOP political candidates.

GB: The rigidity of those pledges is something I don’t like. The circumstances change and you can’t be wedded to some formula by Grover Norquist. It’s—who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?

BB: I think he ought to go back to Alaska. [laughs] Don’t quote me! [A reference to a comment Mrs. Bush made about Sarah Palin in a 2010 interview, in which she said, “I think she’s very happy in Alaska—and I hope she’ll stay there.”]

Bush isn’t the only member of his family to disavow the Norquist pledge — his son and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) told the House Budget Committee that signing the pledge was akin to “outsourc[ing] your principles and convictions to people.” Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) refused to sign the pledge during his brief presidential campaign, and lately, even conservative stalwarts like Rep. Steve King (R-IA) have wavered in their support for the pledge. Dozens of candidates backed by the National Republican Congressional Committee, meanwhile, have declined to sign it.