The Senate GOP plan to preserve the Bush tax cuts on incomes above $250,000 already amounts to a budget-busting tax cut for the rich, and in addition to it, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) also added another tax cut that benefits only the super-wealthy. The Hatch-McConnell plan effectively eliminates the estate tax, costing billions in revenue and giving a huge tax cut to the very wealthiest Americans, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes:

Specifically, the new Senate Republican proposal, which Senators Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch unveiled earlier this month, would:

Cost $119 billion more in forgone revenues over the next ten years than the Obama Administration proposal to reinstate the already generous 2009 estate-tax rules. Analysis by the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center shows that all of the $119 billion would flow to the heirs of the estates of the wealthiest three of every 1,000 people who die, since those are the only estates that would owe any estate tax under the 2009 rules.

Give taxable estates an average of more than $1.1 million each in tax reductions, compared to the tax that would be owed under a reinstatement of the 2009 estate-tax rules. The bigger the estate, the more lavish the tax break would be. Estates worth more than $20 million would receive an average tax reduction of $4.2 million in 2013.

As CBPP notes, even President Obama’s estate tax plan is generous, allowing exemptions on millions of dollars of an estate’s value. The GOP’s plan would provide an even larger exemption, and though critics of the tax claim the estate has already been subject to taxation, in most instances it is not because the increase in value of the estate classifies as unrealized capital gains. If the estate was sold, the increase in value would be taxed. When it is inherited, however, those taxes are never levied.

The GOP doesn’t only give huge tax cuts to the very wealthy, though. It also mitigates a small amount of the budgetary damage done by those cuts by ending three tax breaks that benefit the middle class, a decision that will ultimately raise taxes on 20 million working families if the GOP plan went into effect. That isn’t shocking given the bill is co-sponsored by Hatch, one of the leaders of the Republican Party’s movement to raise taxes on the poorest Americans.

House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor have taken every opportunity to tout the work that the GOP has done on jobs. From carrying around cards that lists the “more than 30 jobs bills” to bringing it up in every press conference or campaign ad, Republicans have been keen to publicize their jobs package in light of accusations that they are “do-nothing obstructionists.” However, expert economists who have analyzed the jobs package now say that the package has no meaningful impact on job creation.

In interviews conducted by The Huffington Post, five senior economists, including Gary Burtless, Mark Zandi, Carl Riccadonna, Joel Prakken, and Jesse Rothstein, have indicated that the GOP jobs package would accomplish nothing positive and would go so far as to even potentially damage the economy. According to Gary Burtless, a senior economist at Brookings, the notion that the Republican proposals might boost jobs is absurd and laughable:

A lot of these things are laughable in terms of a jobs plan that would produce noticeable improvements across the country in the availability of employment in the next four or five years. Even in the long run, if they have any effect at all, it would be extremely marginal, relative to the jobs deficit we currently have.

The economists interviewed agreed more with environmental advocates, who argued that the GOP proposals were more likely to kill people than create jobs, than they did with Republican claims that the bills would lead to job creation. Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, was concerned with the ramifications of environmental deregulation which would offset any new jobs — “If you increase employment but you have a lot more sick people, you have to ask yourself, ‘What’s the trade-off?’”

GOP antics were not lost on the senior economists. Each expert clearly expressed that they felt the Republican jobs plan remains much more a political maneuver than any earnest effort to combat unemployment. Carl Riccadonna, senior economist at Deutsche Bank, indicated that “jobs are a second- or third-order effect, not the main priority.” According to Jesse Rothstein, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the jobs package is purely political fodder: “It’s game playing to try to pretend like they’re doing something,” he told HuffPo. “It’s silly season, and so they know they have to put up something that has the label ‘job creation’ on it, whether or not it would work.”

–Angela Guo

Pressure mounted in recent days on Linda McMahon, a candidate in the Republican primary for Connecticut’s open U.S. Senate seat, to release her tax returns from the last two years, as former Rep. Chris Shays (R), her opponent in August’s primary, raised the issue as a matter of transparency. McMahon, who co-founded World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband, has used her wealth to run for public office — she spent more than $21 million on her ill-fated 2010 Senate campaign and has already dumped millions into this campaign.

McMahon finally released her 2010 tax return last week, and it showed that her and her husband made $30.6 million for the year. Because most of the income came from investments, she paid just $4.7 million in federal taxes, according to the Associated Press, meaning that her effective tax rate was roughly 15 percent — far lower than the income tax rate for her income level.

That much of her income came from investments allowed McMahon to take advantage of tax breaks on both capital gains and carried interest, both of which would be partially eliminated under Senate Democrats’ tax reform plan. Under current tax law, both capital gains and carried interest are taxed at a 15 percent rate, but under the Democrats’ plan, the rates would rise to 20 percent. Letting the Bush tax cuts on high incomes fully expire, as President Obama plans to do at the end of the year, would mean capital gains would once again be taxed as normal income.

McMahon, predictably, opposes the expiration of those tax cuts. She also opposed the Buffett Rule, which would have established a minimum tax rate on millionaires like herself. A Congressional Research Service study released this year found that the capital gains tax cut, because it primarily benefits the wealthy, is the biggest driver of America’s skyrocketing level of income inequality.

A top Federal Reserve official is calling on regulators to prevent banks from circumventing a provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that aims to prevent the kind of risk-taking that led to the financial crisis. In a speech to graduate students in Colorado, Fed Gov. Sarah Bloom Raskin criticized the Volcker Rule — which prohibits proprietary trading by federally insured banks and their affiliates — for not going far enough.

Raskin told students that she voted against a regulatory measure because it undermines the Volcker rule’s goal to prevent banks enjoying access to government emergency lending from participating in dangerous speculative trading:

I was concerned that, as proposed, the guard rails were too broad and would allow banks to be able to go too far off the road. Further, I was concerned that the guard rails as crafted could be subject to significant abuse–abuse that would be very hard for even the best supervisors to catch. [...] I feel it is very important that the guard rails be strong and be set very close to the road because of the potentially severe dangers of, and costs associated with, proprietary trading by institutions that have access to the federal safety net.

Raskin goes on to argue that, when it comes to federally insured banks, the high level of liquidity brought on by proprietary trading has no public benefit:

Indeed, proprietary trading involves buying and selling purely for speculative purposes that have little to do with a true assessment of a financial position’s underlying value. Price discovery actually is impeded by this hyper-liquidity that is introduced by such speculation. This hyper-liquidity, motivated by nothing more than expectations of short-term price movements, creates inefficient subsidies to buyers and sellers with no compelling public benefit. [...] In other words, certain capital market activities for federally insured banks should not be supported by vast amounts of public and private expenditure.

The Volcker rule does not ban all proprietary trading. Instead, it shifts the practice to conventional banks, hedge funds, and other market participants. The notion that ending proprietary trading among “Too Big To Fail” banks will impact overall market liquidity is false, according to Raskin.

Nonetheless, banks have spent the better part of the last two years successfully lobbying Congressional Republicans, and the Volcker Rule has already been watered down so much that the measure’s namesake, former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, says he doesn’t like it.

– Steven Perlberg

The last increase in the federal minimum wage was passed into law four years ago today, but the current minimum wage falls far short of meeting the needs of the average worker. To match the buying power of the 1968 minimum wage, for instance, today’s would need to be increased to $10.55 an hour.

And yet, more than a quarter of America’s private sector workers make less than $10 an hour, according to a report released this month by the National Employment Law Project:

In 2011, more than one in four private sector jobs (26 percent) were low‐wage positions paying less than $10 per hour. These jobs, moreover, were concentrated in industries where low‐wage workers make up a substantial share – in some cases more than half – of the entire workforce.

Worse yet, the share of low-wage jobs is increasing, as five industries that are comprised primarily of low-wage workers have grown faster than total employment since the end of the Great Recession, as this NELP chart shows:

While the share of low-wage jobs continues to rise, so to do the profits of the corporations that utilize low-wage workers. Two-thirds of America’s low-wage workers are employed by corporations with more than 100 employees, and the nation’s biggest low-wage employers are faring well since the end of the recession. 92 percent were profitable last year, and 63 percent are more profitable than they were before the recession, according to the report.

And even as they employ low-wage workers, chief executives continue to rake in massive salaries, as AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe notes. At the 50 companies that employ the largest number of low-wage workers, CEOs made an average of $9.4 million — roughly 450 times more than the gross income of a full-time worker who makes $10 an hour.

It’s been two years since the passage of Dodd-Frank, and the finance industry is still doing its best to completely gut the reforms meant to prevent another financial crisis. Republicans have spent the last two years trying to water down Dodd-Frank, and data suggests they have been solidly rewarded for their efforts.

The finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector is the biggest giving sector so far this election cycle, and they are donating to GOP candidates more than ever before. Republicans now hold a 64 percent share of campaign contributions from Wall Street, compared to just 48 percent in 2008, as this chart from Public Campaign shows:

Thanks to Citizens United, outside spending from the finance sector has now ballooned 20-fold from 2008, with almost 90 percent of dollars favoring conservatives.

The influx of cash has especially benefited members of the Financial Services Committee, who fundraise between three and five times more than those with a seat on Appropriations, once viewed as Congress’ most powerful committee. Wall Street mega banks like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase are among the biggest industry donors, with Goldman leading the industry with nearly $5 million in contributions so far this cycle.

– Steven Perlberg