The Business Roundtable, a group representing the CEOs of the largest corporations in the nation — including the biggest banks, retailers, and insurance companies — is calling to raise the retirement age to 70. The group argues that Social Security is no longer affordable and plans to lobby Congressional lawmakers and the administration for its plan:

An influential group of business CEOs is pushing a plan to gradually increase the full retirement age to 70 for both Social Security and Medicare and to partially privatize the health insurance program for older Americans. [...]

“America can preserve the health and retirement safety net and rein in long-term spending growth by modernizing Medicare and Social Security in a way that addresses America’s new fiscal and demographic realities,” said Gary Loveman, chairman, president and chief executive of casino giant Caesars Entertainment Corp.

Loveman, who chairs the Business Roundtable’s health and retirement committee, said the business leaders will be meeting with members of Congress and the administration to press them to enact their plan.

CEO’s representing an organization called “Fix the Debt” have made the same argument. But the idea that Social Security is unaffordable for future generations is nonsense. The program can pay full benefits for decades, and nearly full benefits after that, with literally no changes. Minor tweaks — such as raising the payroll tax cap — can render the program solvent for three-quarters of a century. Social Security is also statutorily barred from adding to the federal deficit.

It’s particularly galling for wealthy CEOs to call for raising the retirement age, as they are among those who will be least affected by the change. Average CEO pay for S&P 500 companies is nearly $13 million. Recent increases in life expectancy have only benefited wealthier workers in non-physical jobs. Poorer workers doing physical labor have not seen the same gains and would be most hurt by an increase in the retirement age.

President Obama today rolled out a list of executive orders and suggested Congressional legislation to reduce gun violence, the first major response to the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. It includes banning assault weapons and certain types of ammunition, along with better background checks, as well as some measures to address mental health.

Meanwhile, at the state level, lawmakers are taking a look at some of the tax breaks they dole out to gun manufacturers. As Bloomberg News noted, states have handed out $49 million over the last five years in tax breaks to companies that make guns:

Governments in nine states have awarded at least $49 million in subsidies in the past five years to gun and ammunition makers whose products are under scrutiny after last month’s school shooting in Connecticut.

Almost 85 percent of those tax breaks or grants have gone to two companies: Olin Corp. (OLN), the Clayton, Missouri-based maker of Winchester-brand bullets and shotgun shells, and a unit of Freedom Group Inc., the Madison, North Carolina-based company that produces the rifle used in the Dec. 14 killing of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

The ostensible goal of these subsidies is job creation, but handing out tax breaks to create jobs is simply not a viable job creation strategy, which has been shown time and time again. “We need to be a lot more careful and decide what kind of state we envision,” said Florida state Senator Nancy Deter (R) adding that “she doesn’t want Florida to be known for gun manufacturing.” New York state Sen. Liz Krueger (D) has called for her state to drop subsidies for gun manufacturing as well.

Gun safety measures, in addition to preventing human tragedy, also provide economic benefits by cutting down on medical and public safety costs. One study found that “the average household acquiring a gun imposed a net cost on the rest of society of somewhere between $100 to $1,800 per year.”

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman (R) became the latest Republican governor to propose the elimination of his state’s income tax during his State of the State speech last night, a move that would eliminate $2.4 billion in revenues each year. To replace the lost revenue, Heineman proposed eliminating at least half of the $5 billion in sales tax exemptions Nebraska offers annually, but he did not specify which of those exemptions he wanted to eliminate, KearneyHub.com reports:

“This about the future of Nebraska,” Heineman told state lawmakers. “Nebraska has good schools, affordable homes, a strong work ethic and a low unemployment rate, but taxes are too high.” [...]

He had been promising for weeks to deliver a “bold” tax plan during his address. He outlined a bold vision, to be sure, but didn’t include the rest of the story — exactly how the state would shift taxes to offset the $2.4 billion now collected in state income taxes.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and Republicans in North Carolina have also proposed replacing income taxes with increased sales taxes in their states, a move that would result in a tax cut for businesses and the wealthy while raising taxes on the poor. Jindal’s plan would give the top one percent of Louisiana residents a 2.3 percent tax cut while raising taxes on the bottom 80 percent. The poorest 20 percent would see a 3.4 percent increase.

Though the details of Heineman’s plan are still unclear, it is hard to imagine the poor not picking up the burden, since sales taxes are inherently regressive. The poorest 20 percent of Nebraskans already pay 6.4 percent of their income in sales taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The top one percent pays just 0.8 percent. The poorest fifth of Nebraskans pay 11.1 percent of their income in taxes overall, compared to just 7.1 percent for the richest one percent. Heineman has ruled out ending sales tax exemptions on groceries, but other exemptions, such as those for hospital beds, dorm rooms, and other medical costs would level a direct hit on the state’s poor and middle-class residents.

At Forbes, Bryce Covert highlights a new report showing that women’s participation in the U.S. workforce has essentially stagnated since 1990, allowing many developed countries to pass America by:

In 1990, women’s participation rate in the labor force was 74 percent, ranking us at number six among 22 developed countries. But in the two intervening decades, we’ve only managed to bump that up to 75.2, while the other countries shot up from about 67 percent to nearly 80 percent. We now rank at 17 on the list. On top of all of this, the gap between the rate for men and women has only come down a few percentage points in the U.S., while it plummeted from nearly 30 points for the other countries to just 13. We have just not kept up in helping more women to enter the workforce.

The researchers point to family leave policy as one of the primary reasons for the U.S.’s decline (alongside lack of public spending on child care). The U.S. is the only developed country that does not mandate paid sick leave, which can be used to care for a sick child or elderly parent, and is one of only three nations that does not mandate paid leave for new mothers:

Overall, “only 11 percent of private sector workers and 17 percent of public workers reported that they had access to paid maternity leave through their employer.” 81 percent of mothers without high school diplomas receive no paid maternity leave. And it’s clearly affecting the ability of women to enter the workforce, which the rest of the world seems to have figured out. Here are more policy ideas that the U.S. could adopt to modernize work-family balance.

Democrats in the Minnesota state legislature (officially members of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor party) are attempting to end one of the more pernicious practices that banks have employed in the aftermath of the housing bubble: “dual-tracking,” during which a lender simultaneously starts foreclosure proceedings on a borrower while assessing the borrower’s eligibility for a mortgage modification. A bill doing away with dual-tracking will be introduced at the state capitol today:

A trio of DFL lawmakers plans on Wednesday to unveil a foreclosure reform bill at the Capitol that would spare Minnesota homeowners some of the “unfair practices” that the representatives believe have become notorious.

“I wanted to do what I could to prevent it from happening again,” said first-term Rep. Mike Freiberg (DFL-Golden Valley), who is introducing the bill in his first week on the job.

Freiberg says he was inspired by a constituent who is fighting to win her home back from foreclosure.

“She was the victim of some difficult, unfair practices,” Freiberg said in an interview Tuesday.

As economic policy and law expert Peter Swire wrote, “the dual-track problem symbolizes why our foreclosure mess is so fundamentally unfair to too many families. Mortgage servicing companies (and the lenders and investors they work for to collect monthly mortgage payments) collect the documents needed to consider modifying the mortgages of many responsible but overburdened families, but then swoop in nonetheless to take the home away.” The Minnesota bill is supported by several community groups and Occupy Our Homes MN. The Occupy Our Homes movement has been integral in preventing unfair foreclosures around the country.

In addition to doing away with dual-tracking, the bill provides other key protections for homeowners, including ensuring that they have a single point-of-contact with their lender and requiring that the lender participate in mortgage mediation (a great system for preventing foreclosures) if the homeowners desires. California codified many of these protections in its Homeowners’ Bill of Rights last year.

According to a report from the World Bank, House Republicans are not only threatening the United States economy with their insistence on spending cuts and continued monkeying around with the debt ceiling. The global economy is also at risk:

In an alternative scenario the bank labeled “fiscal paralysis,” the U.S. implements large, across-the-board government spending cuts scheduled to begin in March and Congress provides only a short-term increase in the debt ceiling. That would cause the U.S. economy to shrink by 0.4%, knocking Europe into a deeper contraction and reducing global growth by 1.4 percentage point.

The economic drag from deal that averted the so-called “fiscal cliff” will already hinder growth this year. More spending cuts and the looming possibility of the U.S. defaulting on its obligations would only make the matter worse. As Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) explained, “trying to reduce the deficit right now is wrong, because this position is going to keep the economy in the doldrums and keep the depression going longer and it’s self-defeating.”

President Obama has pledged not to negotiate over the raising of the debt limit. Republicans in the House and Senate have promised not to raise it without extracting more spending cuts. The nation reached the debt limit on December 31 — it is only avoiding it now thanks to “extraordinary measures” from Treasury — and the result of not increasing the limit is almost certainly default. The Treasury will no longer have the authority to pay the bills Congress has already incurred, and by the end of February, the United States will not have enough money to make debt payments, pay Social Security benefits, and keep the government running.

The response to that doomsday scenario from Republicans, however, has been to ignore the perils of not raising the debt ceiling. Members of both the House and the Senate are introducing legislation that will call on the government to prioritize its debt payments to avoid default, as Reuters reports:

Among those advocating the approach is Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who is expected to reintroduce legislation next week to instruct the Treasury to make sure bondholders got paid first if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling by the deadline.

In the House of Representatives, Arizona Republican David Schweikert introduced legislation that would force the Treasury to prioritize payments to bondholders, Social Security recipients and military salaries.

Toomey has introduced similar legislation before, but prioritization, however nice it sounds to him and other Republicans, is simply not a workable option. As Tony Fratto, a former White House and Treasury official for George W. Bush, explained on Twitter last night, most of the government’s bills come due at the beginning of each month. That’s when Social Security and an assortment of other benefits are paid. Most of its tax revenue, however, comes in toward the middle of the month. Failure to raise the debt ceiling would force it to wait until it had enough money from tax revenue to make payments of any sort — a strategy that, thanks to its accounting methods, would be virtually impossible, Fratto said.
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