Our guest blogger is Sarah Jane Glynn, an economic policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

When is a democracy not a democracy? Apparently the answer to that riddle is “when voters indicate they are interested in passing paid sick days laws.” In 2008, voters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin passed a referendum requiring earned sick leave for workers, but before it could go into effect Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) signed a bill which deprived individual cities of the ability to pass laws governing workers benefits, including paid sick leave.

Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA) has preemptively signed a very similar law in the state of Louisiana, before advocates even had the chance to get a paid sick leave referendum on the ballot. And as November’s election draws closer, Florida is poised to do the same.

The campaign for earned sick leave in Orange County, Florida sparked serious opposition even before advocates submitted more than 50,000 signatures from registered voters to qualify the initiative for placement on the ballot. And now Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs and the County Commission are attempting to follow in the footsteps of Walker and Jindal by trying to place another initiative on the same ballot that would bar any workplace regulation covering employer-employee benefits.

If passed, the mayor’s initiative would render the paid sick days law moot, even if the sick days measure passed as well. Why all the fuss in the first place? The earned sick time initiative would allow workers in businesses with at least 15 employees to earn up to 56 hours of paid sick leave per year. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has found that such a policy would result in a net savings of $5.1 million for Orange County employers each year.

But the opposition continues to inflate the cost to businesses, by assuming every worker would take the maximum amount of leave (when workers take on average only 2-3 days per year), ignoring the fact that small employers are exempt, and pretending that seasonal workers would be covered (when an employee must work 90 days before they could start accruing leave).

The County Commission will be meeting tomorrow to decide whether the countermeasure will be on the ballot alongside the earned sick time initiative.

The non-partisan Tax Policy Center last month released a study showing that if Mitt Romney were to keep his promise to cut tax rates by 20 percent while still balancing the budget, he would have to raise taxes on middle class families by more than $2,000. The Romney campaign has disputed the study, saying that it will close enough loopholes to pay for its huge rate cut; however, it refuses to divulge one single loophole that would be on the chopping block.

Notably, the TPC study found that even if Romney eliminated every single loophole and deduction for wealthy taxpayers, he still couldn’t offset the revenue loss without raising taxes on the middle class. During an interview yesterday on NBC’s Meet The Press, Romney claimed that five other studies show that he could, in fact, accomplish all his budget goals:

GREGORY: So Governor, we talked last night about jobs and the economy and also the debt. And I want to begin there. You’ve called the debt and our deficit a moral crisis, and yet in addition to extending the Bush tax cuts, you want to cut tax rates an additional 20 percent. You’ve rejected a 10 to one spending ratio when it comes to spending to increasing taxes. And, yet, you want to balance the budget. The math simply doesn’t add up, does it?

MR. ROMNEY: Well, actually, it does. And the — the good news is that five different economic studies, including one at Harvard and Princeton and AEI and a couple at The Wall Street Journal all show that if we bring down our top rates and actually go across the board, bring down rates for everyone in America, but also limit deductions and exemptions for people at the high end, while you can keep the progressivity in the code, you could remain revenue neutral and you create an enormous incentive for growth in the economy.

The Romney camp hasn’t indicated exactly which fives studies their candidate was referencing, but it seems likely that they were the following. All they do is further prove that Romney would, in fact, have to raise taxes on the middle class if he were to keep his promise not to lose revenue with his tax rate reduction:

– Harvard Professor Martin Feldstein’s, which, as the Center for American Progress’ Seth Hanlon pointed out, didn’t take into account Romney’s corporate tax cut, redefined the middle class, and cherry picked numbers to overstate savings.

– Princeton Professor Harvey Rosen’s, which, as UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong noted, says Romney’s tax cuts will cause economic growth that every other recent tax cut package has failed to deliver. “We simply do not see such supply responses in the historical record, do we?” DeLong asked.

– American Enterprise Institute’s Matt Jensen’s, who claimed that the TPC study did not take into account that Romney may eliminate “the exclusion of interest on state and local bonds and the exclusion of inside-buildup on life insurance vehicles.” TPC re-ran the numbers to include eliminating those deductions and found that “our main result still holds.” Another AEI tax expert said, “It’s not as if the entire philosophical approach [Romney's] pursuing is doomed…But he’s going to need to cut rates significantly less than 20 percent if he wants to honor his other goals.”

– A pair of Wall Street Journal editorials that add no new information and merely regurgitate right-wing talking points.

Since the TPC study first came out, the Romney campaign has flailed for a response. Romney’s effort on Meet the Press was certainly no better.

One of the most passionately held premises amongst conservatives and the Republican Party is that employers’ fear of taxation and regulation is what’s holding back job growth. The unspoken corollary to this premise is that demand in the economy is fine as is — that consumers could be buying far more goods and services than they are.

But as the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted on Monday, this theory is empirically testable. Measurable data in the economy would behave one way if the taxes-and-regulations theory is correct, and another way if the lack-of-demand theory is correct. A prime example is average weekly hours worked by employees across the economy:

If employers are seeing increased demand but don’t want to hire because they fear an attack from the regulation monster or higher taxes then they would work their existing work force more hours. That one should be pretty painless even for our fearful job creators. After all, do we really think that they would turn away customers from their stores, restaurants, and factories rather than have workers put in a few extra hours each week?

In other words, weekly hours worked will be up if the problem is taxes and regulations, and down if the problem is weak demand. Here are the numbers from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics:

Weekly hours worked remain down from their pre-recession level. This is not the behavior of businesses held back by government interference, but of businesses hiring as many employees as consumer demand in the economy justifies.

This finding echoes a report put out by the Economic Policy Institute last year. It noted that weekly hours worked, as well as several other economic indicators, are not behaving in accordance with the “taxes and regulation” narrative. In fact, while the 2008 recession blew a much deeper hole in the economy than previous recessions, the pace of private sector job growth in the current recovery is on par with the recovery after the 2001 recession under President Bush. That doesn’t square with the theory that America now faces a uniquely burdensome threat of taxation and regulation brought about by Obama and the Democrats.

Tara Wall, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign who has proven unable to outline policy specifics before, struggled on Monday to specify a single loophole Romney would close to pay for his proposed massive tax cuts. Romney has said he would eliminate loopholes that benefit wealthy taxpayers to avoid increasing the deficit or raising taxes on middle income families.

Wall continued that tradition on MSNBC. When asked by host Chris Jansing which specific loopholes Romney would close, Wall demurred, instead choosing to talk about “pro-growth policies,” “energy independence,” and Obamacare, none of which are tax loopholes:

JANSING: What are the loopholes you would close? Will you tell the American people how you’re going to to this better place that you say they have?

WALL: Well, again, the campaign has laid out a number of specifics relative to the principles that will guide the policies of a Romney-Ryan ticket. [...] Again, the specification include policies that are pro-growth in nature, that reduce the deficit, that reduce the burden on taxpayers and small businesses, small businesses number one have been hit hard by a number of regulations that have stifled growth and job creation. And so number one, those are some of the things you have to start with.

JANSING: Well, with all due respect, a pro-growth policy is not specific.

WALL: The other part of that is energy independence. That’s an approach to energy independence that will create millions of jobs. There is a target of 12 million jobs by the Romney-Ryan target. Relative to those loopholes that you mention, I agree that Congressman Ryan pointed out taht have to be put out in a public debate. But I think, again, we have to look at the overall principles that are going to drive the policies and not ram through policy as we saw with Obamacare.

Watch it:

Neither Romney nor his advisers want to answer the question about loopholes because they understand the math: even if politics were such that closing every loophole that targets the wealthy was a possibility, it wouldn’t offset the trillions of dollars in lost revenue that Romney’s plan would cause. That means, as a recent Tax Policy Center analysis made plain, that Romney would have to abandon one of his core campaign promises by either raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a huge hole in the federal budget.

House and Senate Republicans succeeded in watering down some of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act’s toughest new rules before it became law in 2010. Now, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Mark Warner (D-VA) are pushing new legislation that could make it even harder to implement new financial regulations that manage to become law.

The bill could “delay a number of rules for the financial industry” by giving the White House the ability second-guess independent regulatory agencies and order additional reviews of the effects of new rules, as the New York Times reports:

The measure, which a Senate committee is planning to debate this month, aims to empower the president in the rule-writing process. The proposal would allow the White House to second-guess major rules and mandate that agencies carefully study the economic effects of new regulation. The change could, in effect, delay a number of rules for the financial industry. [...]

The bill, introduced in the Senate last month, would offer a path to challenge the Dodd-Frank law, the sprawling regulatory overhaul passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Regulators have already encountered significant delays as the financial industry mounts legal challenges to the law.

New financial regulations have already faced significant hurdles in the implementation process thanks to lawsuits and other delays. This legislation would make those delays even worse, particularly in the hands of a president who does not want to implement regulations on Wall Street, according to the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform.

“Although it may appear to be a simple change in administrative requirements for cost benefit analysis, this legislation would give Wall Street lobbyists another powerful set of tools to delay and derail the implementation of financial safeguards that are needed to protect our economy,” AFR wrote in a letter opposing the law. “Independent financial agencies already face extensive requirements for economic analysis, as well as mechanisms of appeal for those requirements. This legislation would add an unnecessary, costly, and time-consuming additional layer of requirements to the process of completing oversight rules for our largest banks.”