Over the last four quarters, big Wall Street banks have been more profitable than at any time since before the Great Recession, with the six largest banks making $63 billion. While some high-profile Wall Street firms say they’ll reduce their bonus pool, some bankers will still be pulling in seven-figure bonuses, and starting bonuses easily clear six-figures.

But one Wall Street executive is taking issue with sky-high pay. James Gorman, chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, told the Financial Times that compensation on Wall Street is “way too high,” chiding banks for increasing pay in good times and bad:

“There’s way too much capacity and compensation is way too high,” Mr Gorman said in an interview with the Financial Times. “As a shareholder I’m sort of sympathetic to the shareholder view that the industry is still overpaid.” [...]

“Comp [compensation] comes down because the amount of people in the business comes down,” said Mr Gorman. “What the Street has historically done is when revenues went up, they kept the comp-to-revenue ratio flat. They rank comp by ratio. When revenues went down, they increased the comp-to-revenue ratio because they said, ‘We might lose all our people. We have to increase it’. ”

He added: “That’s a classic Wall Street case of ‘Heads I win; tails, you lose’. The current Wall Street management is a little tougher-minded about that and shareholders are certainly tougher-minded.”

Over the last 30 years, skyrocketing Wall Street pay has contributed to the country’s increasing income inequality. And as one former Wall Street trader put it, “there’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little.” Pay for Wall Street CEOs jumped by double-digits last year according to multiple analyses.

Our guest blogger is Gadi Dechter, managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today’s positive jobs report offers further proof that the unremittingly bleak picture of the economy that Mitt Romney has been painting — and which he emphasized in Wednesday’s presidential debate — is incomplete and inaccurate.

Employers added 114,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent, going below 8 percent for the first time in almost four years. The economy has added private sector jobs for the past 31 months, totaling 5.2 million jobs over that period.

But you wouldn’t know that by listening to Romney, who in his initial reaction to the jobs report ignored the headline gains and dismissed good news for American workers as “not what a real recovery looks like.” Unfortunately for the GOP candidate, very real economic improvements continue to rob him of his best attack lines.

During last week’s debate, Romney declared, “We’ve had 43 straight months with unemployment above 8 percent.” Romney won’t be able to repeat that zinger when he and Obama face off again in two weeks.

Nor can Romney disparage the president for presiding over a term of net employment loss. Romney lost that line late last month when the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed that Obama is net positive for job creation, even after accounting for the president’s first few months in office, when the economy was still hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs a month because of the Bush-era recession.

Even without accounting for those revisions, today’s job report bolsters net job creation under Obama, to 663,000.

To be sure, unemployment is too high and economic growth too slow to quickly knock the unemployment rate down to the traditional “full employment” rate of about 5 percent. But any balanced look at today’s report and at economic improvements in recent years suggest that the 2009 stimulus, the successful auto industry rescue, and landmark financial regulatory reform, have put the economy on a firm path to full recovery.

Our guest blogger is David Abromowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Of all the many claims that Mitt Romney pitched to the American public with such confidence that most viewers declared him the “winner” during Wednesday night’s debate, few were as brashly misleading as his response to the President’s objection to tax breaks that enable outsourcing jobs overseas. “Look, I’ve been in business for 25 years. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I maybe need to get a new accountant,” Romney said. “But the idea that you get a break for shipping jobs overseas is simply not the case.”

But even Fox News acknowledges that “companies can claim a deduction for the costs associated with moving jobs overseas.” The idea that former Bain CEO Romney wouldn’t know this is simply not believable. Instead, his advisers have argued that this isn’t a “special” tax break for outsourcing — it’s just a deduction like any other cost of doing business.

But beyond any semantic argument, Romney certainly would know that just this summer, Republicans in the Senate (with three exceptions) blocked a bill to eliminate this deduction when the expenses are for relocating jobs out of the US. As ABC New reported, “Under existing law, employers may take tax deductions for the costs associated with moving jobs out of the country. The proposed legislation would have eliminated that, and used the resulting new revenue to fund a 20 percent tax credit for the costs companies run up ‘insourcing’ labor back into the U.S.”

The biggest rebuttal to Romney’s claim of not having a clue of what the President was talking about, however, is Romney’s own tax plan. It actually includes a far more favorable tax break that would increase incentives for American companies to move operations overseas. As the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Seth Hanlon has explained in detail, Romney’s tax plan “pledges to move the United States toward a ‘territorial’ tax system. What this means is that instead of paying a deferred tax on their foreign profits, U.S. corporations would pay no U.S. tax. Exempting overseas profits from tax would be a tax cut for multinational corporations of $130 billion over 10 years.”

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, facing criticism over how he would keep his tax plan from adding to the deficit or raising taxes on the middle class, this week proposed a new feature: he would cap the amount of tax deductions that could be claimed at $17,000. But that idea still doesn’t make the math work for Romney’s plan, according to Tax Policy Center economist William Gale, who worked on the original TPC report that showed Romney’s plan couldn’t possibly achieve all of his outlined goals.

And even as Romney’s new feature won’t “come close” to paying for his plan, it could also lead to additional tax increases on families who wrote off more than Romney’s cap, unless it exempts common deductions for the middle class (like health care and home mortgage interest), Bloomberg reports:

That won’t bring in enough revenue to make up for almost $5 trillion the government will lose over 10 years once tax rates are reduced by 20 percent as Romney has proposed, according to economist William Gale of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“It doesn’t come close to paying for the $5 trillion,” said Gale, who co-authored a study of Romney’s tax plan for the non-partisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.

At least 3.7 million U.S. taxpayers last year reported deductions of $25,000 or more. About 10 million others wrote off $15,000 to $25,000. Romney says their taxes wouldn’t go up, and in fact would decline, under his 20 percent across-the-board tax rate cut.

Romney has made several promises about his plan: it won’t add to the deficit, it won’t reduce the share of taxes paid by the rich, and it won’t raise taxes on the middle class. The original Tax Policy Center report found that Romney couldn’t possibly keep all three of those promises if he cut rates by 20 percent across the board, as he says he will.

In the abstract, capping deductions is not necessarily a bad idea, and could cut taxes for some middle class families. But for others, it could lead to a higher tax bill. Deductions popular with both parties, like the home mortgage interest deduction and the deduction for health care costs, could also be limited by Romney’s plan, eating up large chunks of the amount middle class families are able to write off each year.

As ThinkProgress reported this morning, it didn’t take long for conservatives to begin pumping out conspiracy theories about today’s unexpectedly positive jobs report. The notion that the White House somehow leaned on the Bureau of Labor Statistics to cook the books is, of course, cosmically implausible. Unfortunately, the mainstream media — including outlets such as CNN, Fox News, and CNBC — were just as swift to present the conspiracy theories as matters for serious debate.

ThinkProgress has the video report. Watch it:

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis went on CNBC Friday morning to discuss today’s strong jobs report, which found unemployment falling to 7.8 percent. However, one host, Carl Quintanilla, was more interested in talking about the conspiracy theorists who claim the Bureau of Labor Statistic is fixing the jobs report to help President Obama win the election.

Quintanilla insisted on asking Solis to defend the BLS against conspiracy charges three separate times during the interview. When Solis attempted to turn the conversation to a more substantive discussion, Quintanilla asked her to respond to former GE CEO Jack Welch, who tweeted that Obama cooked the jobs report to distract from the presidential debate. The CNBC host praised Welch, who was caught manipulating GE’s accounting data as CEO, as someone who “knows a bit about how economic data is created”:

QUINTANILLA: A lot of people do not believe the 7.8 number. They believe that somehow BLS fixed this to coincide with the election cycle. What is Labor’s response?
SOLIS: I’m insulted when I hear that. Because we have a very professional civil service organization, where you have top top economists at work at the BLS. They’ve been doing these calculations, these are our best trained and best skilled individuals working at the BLS. It’s really ludicrous to hear that kind of statement. [...]

QUINTANILLA: We can go through all the talking points we do every month, Madame Secretary. Congress needs to do more, but I want to read you one tweet from Jack Welch who used to run General Electric, a man who I think most people would argue knows a bit about how economic data is created…what do you say to him?
SOLIS: I would say I have the highest regard for our professionals who do the calculations in the BLS. They are highly skilled economists trained in this area.

Watch it:

At the end of the interview, Quintanilla interjected to insist that “large sections of the country don’t believe the data.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released an unexpectedly strong monthly jobs report on Friday, finding a dramatic drop in unemployment to 7.8 percent and revised the number of jobs added in July and August up from initial estimates. While for most Americans, the growing economy is good news, conservatives immediately expressed their skepticism in the jobs report’s credibility.

1) Minutes after the report was released, Jack Welch, who famously cooked General Electric’s accounting books when he was CEO, accused President Obama of manipulating the numbers to distract from his debate performance:

2) Conn Carroll, a senior writer at the Washington Examiner, doesn’t think the problem is the BLS, but a widespread conspiracy of Democrats lying about their unemployment:

3) Former Rumsfeld Chief of Staff Keith Urbahn questioned the timing:

4) Stuart Varney on Fox News claims the drop in unemployment five weeks before the election is too “convenient”:

5) Also on Fox News, Charles Payne “guarantees” that unemployment rate will be revised back up to above 8 percent after the election:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that payrolls expanded by 114,000 last month, dropping the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent. 873,000 Americans reported having found jobs in September (in the so-called household survey), the most since 1983.

This adds to the total number of jobs created over President Obama’s term; revisions released last week by the BLS showed that Obama is net positive for jobs since January 2009. Here are some other highlights from the report:

– Labor force grows. The labor force grew by 418,000 people, so the drop in the unemployment rate was not due to people giving up on looking for work.

– Revisions shows stronger summer job growth. The number of jobs created in both July and August were revised up, adding a total of 86,000 jobs.

– Public sector finally stopped shedding jobs. State, local, and federal government finally ended a long period of job contraction, adding 10,000 jobs. Revisions show that the public sector created jobs in both July and August.

– Average hourly earnings rise. Earnings rose 7 cents to $23.58. Average hourly earnings have risen by 1.8 percent over the last year.

Of course, one month’s report does not make for a good economy, but the three-month average for job growth hit 145,000, a sign of a recovering labor market (albeit, one that is recovering slowly). Overall, the economy has added 1.3 million jobs this year.

The unemployment rate would be under 7 percent without public sector jobs cuts, while the American Jobs Act that Republicans filibustered in Congress would have added millions of jobs, according to economists.