Foodborne illnesses sicken and kill thousands of Americans each year, but the threat is still taken lightly by Washington’s law- and policymakers. One in six Americans suffer from a foodborne illness, each year, with 128,000 resulting in hospitalization and 3,000 in death. The federal government, however, has outsourced much of its food inspection responsibilities to third-party companies that aren’t transparent and have no accountability or oversight.

The Food and Drug Administration inspected just 6 percent of the nation’s food producers in 2011, and it has no rules governing third-party inspectors or how often producers should be inspected, according to Bloomberg News. For-profit inspection services often examine “only those areas their clients ask them to review,” and as a result, they often miss sickening and potentially deadly pathogens that infect food that will hit supermarket shelves:

What for-hire auditors do is cloaked in secrecy; they don’t have to make their findings public. Bloomberg Markets obtained four audit reports and three audit certificates through court cases, congressional investigations and company websites.

Six audits gave sterling marks to the cantaloupe farm, an egg producer, a peanut processor and a ground-turkey plant — either before or right after they supplied toxic food.

Collectively, these growers and processors were responsible for tainted food that sickened 2,936 people and killed 43 in 50 states.

Despite these facts, food safety and inspection continues to be a relatively ignored issue in Washington and beyond. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has proposed a rule that could privatize much of its poultry inspection — poultry companies would reap huge profits — even as salmonella outbreaks have hammered parts of the country. Both President Obama’s and the House Republican budgets included cuts to the Food Safety Inspection Service.

The GOP has fought efforts to fully fund an overhaul of the nation’s food safety laws, signed by Obama in 2011, cutting funding to the FDA, USDA, and other programs even as food safety outbreaks hit meat, poultry, and produce industries across the country. Foodborne illness rates are on the rise, according to the CDC, but Republicans cut $700 million from Obama’s requested FDA budget, which included funding for the Food Safety Modernization Act. The House GOP’s farm bill, which never passed, also included cuts to food safety.

“You need to be in a culture that takes food safety seriously,” Doug Powell, who authored a study on third-party food monitors, told Bloomberg. “Right now, what we have is hidden. The third-party auditor stickers and certificates are meaningless.”

Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Tarullo called for placing limits on bank size in a speech yesterday, making him one of the highest ranking economic officials to propose a remedy to reduce big bank dominance of the economy. Tarullo said that, in order to keep big banks from growing so large that they threaten the entire financial system, they should be limited in size to a certain percentage of the overall economy:

The idea along these lines that seems to have the most promise would limit the non-deposit liabilities of financial firms to a specified percentage of U.S. gross domestic product, as calculated on a lagged, averaged basis. In addition to the virtue of simplicity, this approach has the advantage of tying the limitation on growth of financial firms to the growth of the national economy and its capacity to absorb losses, as well as to the extent of a firm’s dependence on funding from sources other than the stable base of deposits. While Section 622 of [the Dodd-Frank financial reform law] contains a financial sector concentration limit, it is based on a somewhat awkward and potentially shifting metric of the aggregated consolidated liabilities of all “financial companies.”

Tarullo also said that “the Fed should block any merger or acquisition this group of big banks attempts to make,” which it is allowed to do under Dodd-Frank.

Last month, former Bank of America executive Sallie Krawcheck said that the complexity of today’s Wall Street banks “makes you weep blood out of your eyes.“ She joined a parade of former Wall Street bankers calling for limiting the size and systemic importance of the nation’s biggest financial firms. Even former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, who is credited with creating the superbank, said, “What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail.”

The tax plan proposed by Mitt Romney, which he says will avoid adding to the debt and won’t cut taxes for the rich, will work exactly the way the 2003 high-income Bush tax cuts worked, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) said during an appearance on CNN on Thursday. Romney has faced criticism over how his tax plan will provide a 20 percent, across-the-board tax cut without adding to the debt or raising taxes on the middle class. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan analyst, recently found that Romney’s plan as outlined is mathematically impossible.

But Hensarling has confidence that it will work, because the Republican Party has tried this before. In fact, Hensarling said, Romney’s tax plan will work just because it followed the “recipe” outlined by earlier GOP-led tax cuts, including the 2003 Bush tax cuts:

HENSARLING: This is the tax plan: fairer, flatter, simpler, more competitive tax code. We broaden the base by getting rid of a lot of these special interest deductions, exclusions — by one estimate, one-third of the tax code is what is known as tax expenditures.

HOST: Why couldn’t Paul Ryan explain that 11 days ago?

HENSARLING: My guess is he could have had he had time. But we did this in ’03, it was done in the Reagan administration, it was done under President Kennedy under JFK, and guess what: when you follow this recipe, you get more jobs, more economic growth, and more tax revenue.

Since their passage, the Bush tax cuts have been a major driver of the nation’s increased debt and deficits. Without the Bush tax cuts, in fact, the nation’s debt would be at sustainable levels.

Even worse, the Bush tax cuts, which the Romney plan maintains before cutting taxes even deeper, were heavily skewed toward the rich and failed to lead to the economic and job growth Republicans promised. The decade following was one of the worst on record for economic, job, and income growth.

Hensarling is correct: the Romney tax plan certainly follows the Bush recipe. That recipe, though, is one that leads to fewer jobs, slower economic growth, and even bigger debts and deficits.

During an appearance at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers offered a harsh analysis of Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan, saying we were in “uncharted territory of being wrong.” Summers also addressed the five “studies” the Romney campaign cites in support of its budget, two of which come from the Wall Street Journal. He said, “It’s a modest abuse of language to refer to a Wall Street Journal editorial as a study, much less two Wall Street Journal editorials.” (ThinkProgress addressed these studies here.)

Summers, who backed up the Tax Policy Center’s analysis that found the math of the Romney plan to be impossible, said the tax plan was the “daughter of voodoo economics,” riffing off the term George H.W. Bush used to describe Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economic policies:

SUMMERS: I’ve seen it where if you really parse the arithmetic closely and imagined what the CBO would do, the challenger’s errors were in the tens of billions of dollars. I’ve seen it where if you really parsed the errors, the challenger’s errors were in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the first time that the challenger’s errors have, on my accounting,  been measured in the trillions of dollars. This is daughter of voodoo economics.

It’s easy to say that my plan is to eat ice cream sundaes and chocolate cake and hamburgers as much as I want. My plan is to lose 60 pounds. And my plan is to avoid painful exercise. And those are all my objectives and I’m committed to every one of them. You can do that, but it isn’t likely to get you — you don’t know quite where you’re going to go if you’ve got all three of those objectives.

I think what’s important to recognize, and I think what the nature of political discourse tends to lead one not to see, is that we’re sort of in uncharted territory of being wrong.

Watch it:

Romney says his plan would cut taxes “across the board” by 20 percent, and — by closing loopholes and eliminating deductions — would not contribute to the deficit. However, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center (TPC) says that if Romney closed every single deduction in the tax code — including those for home mortgages and charitable contributions — 95 percent of Americans would see their taxes increase. Those making more than $200,000, though, would see a net tax break.

It’s virtually impossible that these tax cuts would not substantially increase the deficit because, as TPC’s Roberton Williams observed, “Nothing comes to mind to broaden the tax base enough to pay for the lower rates.”

– Greg Noth

The number of workers who receive pensions from their employers has declined precipitously over the last three decades. 84,350 pension retirement plans have been eliminated since 1985, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Donald L. Barlett and James W. Steele. That decline followed three decades of steady increases in the number of pensions in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, Barlett and Steele found, and the current decline was even steeper than expected.

Most of the defined-benefit pensions were eliminated in favor of defined-contribution 401(k) plans to save costs for corporate employers. And the reliance on 401(k)s, which Steele and Barlett say were originally intended as supplemental retirement programs rather than a primary form of savings, has made American workers less prepared for retirement than before, they told the AFL-CIO:

Steele says there is another number we should pay attention to: $17,686. That’s the median value of 401(k) accounts in 2011. For most working people, the amount in their 401(k) account would pay them less than $80 a month for life.

Corporations from Caterpillar, the industrial machinery giant, to the National Football League have targeted workers’ pensions recently, and they have largely succeeded. Caterpillar froze wages and pensions for its workers earlier this year; the NFL negotiated a plan with its union officials to eliminate the majority of their pensions by 2016. Other companies have taken similar actions.

In 1998, 52 percent of Americans over age 60 received pension payments. By 2010, that had fallen to just 43 percent. Just 15 percent of Americans over 60 received pension payments in the private sector that year, down from 38 percent in 1979. 401(k)s, meanwhile, leave workers more susceptible to economic downturns, subjecting their savings to the whims of the market and increasing their chance of falling into poverty.

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin (D) proposed legislation this year to create a new, modified pension program that would address America’s retirement crisis, but it is unlikely to become law any time soon.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) told Fox News on Wednesday that he would hold hearings into the September job numbers, buying into a widely-discredited conspiracy theory that President Obama faked last month’s figure to improve his re-election chances.

After the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released an unexpectedly strong monthly jobs report last 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, a group of conservatives led by former GE CEO Jack Welch — suggested that the numbers could have been fudged. Issa has now promised to look into the matter:

FOX HOST: We asked [Issa] … whether or not he was concerned about Friday’s jobs report and that big drop in the unemployment rate from 8.1% to 7.8%, which some economists have called fluky and as a result there have been questions about the Labor Department’s methodology in calculating the unemployment report. Now, Chairman Issa says he wants to have hearings on this, take a listen.

ISSA: The way it is being done with the constant revisions, significant revisions, tells us that it is not as exact science as it needs to be and there’s got to be a better way to get those numbers or don’t put them out if they’re going to be wrong by as much as half a point.

FOX HOST: Now, Greta [van Susteren] asked him when he wants to have these hearings…and he said, that, “we very much intend to work every day through November and December to get these kind of things done. We’re hoping that this is a good nonpartisan time,” he said.

Watch it:

BLS has flatly dismissed the allegation. “The data are not manipulated for political reasons. I’ve been involved in the process myself for almost three decades. There’s never been any political manipulation of the data, period,” Steve Haugen, an economist at the BLS, told CBSNews.com. BLS “does not at the moment have a single political appointee working in the entire agency,” he added.

As part of the Dodd-Frank 2010 financial reform law, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was directed to implement limits on oil speculation. Many analyses have shown that speculation has been a significant driver of recent spikes in oil prices.

A judge last week blocked the CFTC’s rules from taking effect on schedule, ruling in favor of a consortium of big banks and energy companies. The CFTC is considering appealing the ruling. However, Republicans are seizing on the judge’s ruling to claim that the CFTC’s efforts to limit oil speculation are just wasteful spending. Four House Republicans said in a letter:

Given the court’s finding that the CFTC failed to properly justify the rule, we are concerned that CFTC funds were prioritized to promulgate and defend a rule that was not central to the financial crisis…We are very concerned, in the wake of the financial crisis, that CFTC staff are using limited resources to pursue ideological and political goals rather than using the resources allocated by Congress to carry out the direct requirements of the agency.

These Republicans act as if the Dodd-Frank law did not instruct the CFTC to implement speculation limits, thus making it a “direct requirement” for the agency. But this is just part and parcel of the House Republican effort to scuttle Dodd-Frank by not providing regulators with enough funding to implement the law.

The House Republican budget, for instance, would force the CFTC to lay off 8 percent of its staff, while it already can’t handle its workload. “We’re way underfunded at the CFTC,” said Chairman Gary Gensler. “Imagine if, all of a sudden, there are eight times the number of teams on the [football] field, but only seven refs,” Gensler said. “There would be mayhem on the field. The fans would lose confidence.”

House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) has even admitted that the agency doesn’t have the resources to do its job. But instead of providing those resources, it seems that the House GOP will be claiming that the rules themselves are a waste of money.

Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake (R), the Republican candidate for his state’s open Senate seat, denied signing the no-tax pledge authored by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and promised he wouldn’t sign such a pledge during his debate with Democratic candidate Richard Carmona on Wednesday. But Flake, according to Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform organization, has already signed the agreement.

Flake told the debate moderator last night that the only pledge he would sign “is a pledge to sign no more pledges”:

MODERATOR: Did you sign the Grover Norquist no-tax pledge?

FLAKE: No.

MODERATOR: Would you sign such a pledge?

FLAKE: No.

MODERATOR: Why?

FLAKE: The only pledge I’d sign is a pledge to sign no more pledges. We’ve got to ensure that we go back and represent our constituents in a way — I believe in limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility. I don’t want higher taxes. But no more pledges.

Watch it:

Flake, as the Huffington Post’s Elise Foley noted after the debate, is listed as one of the 279 pledge-signers on ATR’s web site. In fact, Arizona’s entire Republican delegation, including both senators, Flake, and four other congressmen, have signed the pledge.

Norquist’s pledge was a major hindrance to the passage of a debt ceiling deal that included new revenues last summer, when Congress nearly caused the government to default. Republicans took fire from constituents at town hall meetings across the country afterward, and a slate of Republican lawmakers and candidates have either disavowed the pledge or refused to sign it since. Former Republican leaders have also criticized Norquist’s death-grip on the party: after Norquist criticized him earlier this year, former president George H.W. Bush asked, “Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?”

International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde today warned countries against implementing austerity in the face of weakening economies, saying, “it’s sometimes better to have a bit more time” to get budget deficits under control, if doing so will lead to stronger growth:

The fund warned earlier this week that governments around the world had systematically underestimated the damage done to growth by austerity. Ms Lagarde said that, given this reassessment of the impact of fiscal consolidation on output, it was no longer sensible for governments in Europe to stick to budget deficit targets, should growth disappoint.

Economist Paul Krugman compiled this chart from the latest IMF World Economic Outlook data, which shows the European countries that have implemented the most austerity have seen their economies contract the most:

As Krugman wrote, “this indicates that the contractionary effects of fiscal consolidation are substantially bigger than policy makers were assuming.” Republicans, however, continue to insist that spending cuts and balancing the budget will lead the economy to turn around, when all evidence points to the contrary.