After anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform released a report detailing the taxes that Olympic athletes have to pay on their winnings, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R) sprung to action, introducing legislation that would exempt Olympics-related earnings from taxation. The law was quickly endorsed by other lawmakers, and President Obama said this week that he wouldn’t veto it should it pass.

One Republican senator, however, is breaking with Rubio. A spokesperson for Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn (R), who has a long-running feud with Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, told Bloomberg columnist Josh Barro today that Coburn wouldn’t support the legislation:

If tax code gymnastics was an Olympic sport this idea might get a medal. Like the carve outs for NASCAR, rum makers and electric motorcycles, tax earmarks are a tax increase for everyone who doesn’t receive the benefit. I’m not sure taxpayers want to pay higher rates to help beleaguered Olympic medalists who have to manage endorsement offers.

Tax accountants have debunked certain parts of ATR’s analysis — despite the group’s claims, Olympic medals are not subject to taxation — and others have pointed out a massive loophole in Rubio’s law that would allow athletes to avoid paying taxes on endorsement money. That loophole would give an athlete like swimmer Michael Phelps a tax break worth some $300,000 or more.

Coburn also signaled opposition to another collection of inane tax breaks passed through the Senate Finance Committee last week. That bill, as Coburn notes, would provide a tax break to NASCAR team owners, rum producers, and companies that offshore their profits.

The Walt Disney Corporation today announced its highest quarterly earnings ever today, due to higher prices at its theme parks and the success of several cable channels it owns, including ESPN. This comes after the company made $7.3 billion in profits last year.

But Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, still appeared on Fox Business today to bemoan the U.S. corporate tax rate, which he said is undermining U.S. competitiveness. Iger falsely called the U.S. “among the highest in the world, if not the highest” and said that America’s corporate tax rate is causing “a loss of jobs.” Watch it:

It’s somewhat commendable that Iger seemed to endorse deficit neutral corporate tax reform, unlike many Republicans who actually want to decrease corporate tax revenue. (Still, corporate tax reform in the U.S. should be revenue positive.)

But Iger spreads a pair of falsehoods about the U.S.’s level of corporate taxation. First, the U.S. may have the highest corporate tax rate on paper, but because of the proliferation of loopholes and credits, its effective rate — which is the rate that corporations actually pay — is the second-lowest in the developed world. While Iger cited the UK as a country with an enviable rate, the U.S. raises far less from its corporate tax:

To put some more perspective on this, U.S. corporate taxes are currently at a 40-year low, while corporate profits hit an all-time high in June. Last year, America’s ten largest corporations paid an average 9 percent corporate income tax rate.

And while Iger bemoaned corporations taking advantage of tax loopholes and credits, as the Orlando Sentinel noted, Disney benefits from a host of tax breaks. It also “maintains a web of subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions.”

As billionaire investor Warren Buffett said, “it is a myth that American corporations are paying 35 percent or anything like it…Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness.” But its a convenient story for CEOs to tell to push for a lower tax rate.

The Romney campaign on Tuesday accused the Obama administration of attempting to “gut welfare reform,” a charge that former President Bill Clinton — who signed welfare reform into law in 1996 — called “not true.” All the administration has done is give states the ability to experiment with new programs, provided that they still meet federal requirements.

In the meantime, Romney has been blasting around press releases noting that Obama was opposed to the 1996 welfare reform law, with the obvious implication being that the law was successful. However, the current welfare program, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is far less responsive to the needs of Americans than its predecessors. It fell woefully short during the Great Recession, getting aid to just a fraction of those who needed it.

As this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows, in 1979, welfare reached 82 out of every 100 families with children who were living in poverty. By 2010, that had dropped to just 27, leaving many impoverished families out to dry:

These troublesome characteristics also pre-date the recession. This chart shows the drop in poor children receiving benefits that occurred between 1988 and 2003:

As the American Prospect put it, “At the heart of the worst recession in 80 years, TANF funds only reached 4.5 million individuals, or 28 percent of those living in poverty. By contrast, in 1995, the old welfare system covered 13.5 million individuals, or 75 percent of those living in poverty.” This drop occurred for a host of reasons, several of them tied to the 1996 law.

The social safety net is supposed to be available for those who need it during an economic emergency, and TANF was simply inadequate for the task at hand. But this hasn’t warranted any campaign trail discussion.

Across the country, American corporations are freezing pension benefits or cutting them altogether, using union negotiation processes to change the way workers save for retirement. General Motors and Ford Motor Company have recently downsized their pension plans, and Caterpillar, a company that pays its chief executive more than $17 million a year and raked it $4.9 billion in profits last year, pushed a pension freeze on its workers last month.

The decline in dependence on pension benefits will likely lead to a rise in poverty for America’s future retirees, according to a new study by the National Institute on Retirement Security. The study found that seniors — a demographic that typically has lower poverty rates than younger Americans — who live in a home without pension income are far more likely to fall into poverty, Reuters reports:

As recently as 1998, 52 percent of Americans over age 60 received income from a defined benefit pension, according to a new study by the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS). By 2010, that figure had fallen to 43 percent. In the private sector, the decline has been more dramatic – down from 38 percent in 1979 to 15 percent in 2010. [...]

How important are defined benefit pensions in keeping seniors out of poverty? The study – which is based on U.S. Census Bureau data – found poverty rates were nine times greater in 2010 in households without defined benefit pension income. Pensions resulted in 4.7 million fewer poor or “near poor” families and 1.2 million fewer families on various forms of public assistance.

Estimates show that more than half of middle class workers are likely to outlive their retirement savings, and half of all American workers don’t even have a retirement plan at work. As profitable corporations continue cutting back their pension requirements, those numbers are likely to grow.

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin (D) recently proposed legislation to create a new retirement program in the United States that would combine the “best elements of defined-contribution plans and defined-benefit plans to deliver a portable, cost-effective, and stable level of benefits for retirees at a constant cost to employers,” as the Center for American Progress’ David Madland noted when the plan was released. And as the Great Recession proved, America needs a more stable retirement system to ensure that our seniors stay out of poverty even after they leave the workforce.

The group behind the Nuns On A Bus tour that highlighted the ill-effects of the House Republican budget in congressional districts across the country is now setting its sights on the party’s presidential candidate, inviting Mitt Romney to spend a day with the nuns to learn about the plight of America’s poorest citizens.

NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby, is inviting Romney to “spend a day with Catholic Sisters who work every day to meet the needs of struggling families in their communities,” according to a release. The group is specifically targeting Romney a day after his campaign released a misleading ad about welfare reform that Sister Simone Campbell, NETWORK’s executive director, said “demonize[s] families in poverty” and shows Romney’s “ignorance about the challenges” the poor face in America:

“Recent advertisements and statements from the campaign of Governor Romney demonize families in poverty and reflect woeful ignorance about the challenges faced by tens of millions of American families in these tough economic times,” stated Sister Simone Campbell. “We are all God’s children and equal in God’s eyes. Efforts to divide us by class or score political points at the expense of the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters reveal the worst side of our country’s politics.”

Romney has endorsed the House GOP budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). It was that plan, which includes deep cuts to food stamps and other safety net programs that benefit the middle class, that NETWORK’s Nuns On A Bus tour targeted, with Campbell and other sisters blasting it as “immoral” at the tour’s conclusion in Washington D.C. Romney has also proposed massive tax cuts for the rich that would likely come at the expense of lower- and middle-class families, which would see higher taxes or significant cuts to the programs they depend on.

Those policies, Campbell told ThinkProgress, show that Romney “doesn’t have clue” about the struggles the poor face. “The fact is, his policies shift wealth to the upper class,” she said. “Yes, it hurts the middle class, but it devastates those at the margins of our society.” If Romney were to accept their invitation, Campbell said she would take him to places like St. Augustine’s in Cleveland, where food programs “provide a hand up” to the community’s neediest members. “He thinks they’re lazy,” Campbell said, in reference to Romney’s misleading welfare reform ad. “It is hard work to keep things together when you’re poor. He doesn’t have a clue. Let him talk to them, and maybe they’ll touch his heart. And his mind too.”

The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Campbell said she “lives in hope” that he will accept, even if he spends only an hour with the group. “I’ll take whatever I can get,” Campbell said. “He should accept.”

Morgan Stanley will pay $4.8 million and admit no wrongdoing as part of a settlement with the federal government over allegations that it helped KeySpan, an electricity generating company, fix prices against New York consumers. A federal judge “begrudgingly” approved the deal Tuesday, overruling claims from consumer advocacy groups that the government was letting Morgan Stanley off the hook too easily.

The $4.8 million settlement pales in comparison to the $300 million the price fixing reportedly cost New York consumers, and it even falls far short of the $21.6 million in revenue the deal generated for Morgan Stanley, Reuters reported:

The government said the arrangement allowed KeySpan to withhold substantial electricity generating capacity from the market, driving prices higher for consumers, and generated $21.6 million of net revenue for Morgan Stanley.

New York state officials and the AARP both opposed the settlement on grounds that it was too small, and U.S. District Judge William Pauley seemingly agreed. But he approved the settlement anyway, saying that “despite this court’s misgivings, the government’s decision to settle for less than full damages is entitled to judicial deference.” AARP wanted Morgan Stanley to relinquish the $21.6 million in revenue and also wanted the $4.8 million redistributed to consumers. Pauley rejected that claim; the money will instead go to a U.S. Treasury fund to serve the public interest.

Morgan Stanley isn’t the only bank to get off easily. Multiple Wall Street banks have reached settlements that amount to a pittance compared to their profits, and as Pauley noted, these slaps on the wrist carry the substantial risk that a “large financial services firm like Morgan Stanley could view such a modest penalty as merely a cost of doing business.”

Mitt Romney spent Tuesday on a media blitz claiming that President Obama is out to “gut welfare reform.” An ad released by the Romney campaign first pointed to President Clinton as having successfully reformed welfare, before excoriating Obama. However, in a statement, Clinton called Romney’s charge against Obama “disappointing” and “not true”:

Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. That is not true. [...]

The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment. The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the 1996 act, will not be waived.

The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that could have eliminated time limits altogether. We need a bipartisan consensus to continue to help people move from welfare to work even during these hard times, not more misleading campaign ads.

In reality, the Obama administration is simply giving states the ability to experiment with new work programs, along the lines of a reform that Romney himself requested in 2005.

As the directive from the Department of Health and Human Services states, “HHS is encouraging states to consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families], particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment.” HHS says it will cancel waivers that do not further TANF’s goals.

CBS’s AdWatch said of Romney’s ad, “It’s a leap to assume that governors and legislators will seek to return to ‘plain old welfare’ and that the Obama administration will give them the go-ahead.” The Romney camp, however, doubled down on its claims, saying in a statement that Obama is erasing “sixteen years of progress…with one stroke of a pen.”

And none of this deals with the inescapable fact that TANF failed to reach a significant number of needy families during the Great Recession, calling into serious question whether the current program is the best way to administer aid to those who need it.