When the Dodd-Frank financial reform law first passed, Senate Republicans refused to confirm a director for the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They promised to block any nominee — regardless of that nominee’s qualifications for the job — unless the Bureau was weakened and made subservient to the same bank regulators who failed to prevent the 2008 financial crisis.

President Obama was thus forced to recess appoint Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the Bureau’s first director. Now that Obama has renewed Cordray’s nomination, the Senate GOP is again promising to block any nominee unless the Bureau is watered down:

In a letter sent to President Obama on Friday, 43 Republican senators committed to refusing approval of any nominee to head the consumer watchdog until the bureau underwent significant reform. Lawmakers signing on to the letter included Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee.

“The CFPB as created by the deeply flawed Dodd-Frank Act is one of the least accountable in Washington,” said McConnell. “Today’s letter reaffirms a commitment by 43 Senators to fix the poorly thought structure of this agency that has unprecedented reach and control over individual consumer decisions — but an unprecedented lack of oversight and accountability.” [...]

In particular, Republicans want to see the top of the bureau changed so it is run by a bipartisan, five-member commission, as opposed to a lone director.

They also want to see the bureau’s funding fall under the control of congressional appropriators — it currently is funded via a revenue stream directly from the Federal Reserve.

Republicans want to implement a commission (instead of a lone director) and subject the CFPB to the appropriations process in order to stuff it full of appointees with no interest in regulating and starve it of funds. The other financial system regulators that have to go before Congress for their funds already don’t have the resources to implement Dodd-Frank, thanks the House GOP, leaving large swathes of it unfinished. There are also a host of other reasons that the CFPB needs to be both independently funded and have a strong, independent director.

The CFPB has done important work on behalf of consumers, winning wide praise from consumer advocates and the financial industry. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have made it abundantly clear that they believe that blocking any and all nominees is an acceptable strategy.

While the richest Americans have fared well during the sluggish economic recovery, most Americans continue to struggle with falling wages and job uncertainty. According to a new report from the Conference Board, 62 percent of workers between 45 and 60 plan to delay their retirements, a stark jump from 2010 when 42 percent of workers planned a delay.

Job loss, financial loss, and a lower salary caused many workers to reshape their future plans:

Right now, more than half of middle class workers are expected to outlive their retirement savings, as pension plans have declined dramatically. Unfortunately, Republicans’ answer to the financial difficulties for two-thirds of Americans has been to propose raising Social Security and Medicare eligibility to age 70.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the U.S. economy added 157,000 jobs last month, which is not enough to quickly bring down the unemployment rate. At the same time, America faces a huge infrastructure gap that is going to cost it 3.5 million jobs over the next decade.

The obvious solution should be more infrastructure spending, especially considering that the U.S. can borrow at historically low rates. This would help address the twin problems of a deteriorating infrastructure and persistently high unemployment. As this chart from BLS shows, U.S. construction jobs are far below where they were a decade ago:

As Calculated Risk noted, public construction spending “is now 17% below the peak in March 2009 and at the lowest level since 2006.” This chart shows the year over year change in construction spending since 1994 (the yellow-ish line is public spending):

Study after study has shown that infrastructure spending has a huge return in terms of jobs and economic growth. According to Smart Growth America “every $1 billion in additional funds committed to highway projects between 2009 and 2010 produced 2.4 million job-hours.” As Kristina Costa and Adam Hersh noted, “the return on investment on transit projects was even higher, with 4.2 million job-hours produced by every $1 billion in investment.” Meanwhile, the San Francisco Federal Reserve found that “each dollar invested into infrastructure boosts state economies by at least two dollars.”

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced today that it settled charges against the operator of the Path social networking app for allegedly deceiving consumers. The app was collecting personal information from mobile devices address books without the users’ consent and collecting the personal information of around 3,000 children under the age of 13 in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule.

Under the settlement, Path will pay an $800,000 fine, establish a comprehensive privacy program, and be required to obtain independent privacy assessments every other year for the next two decades. A report in February of last year detailed the disappointing privacy protections in apps aimed at children, such as those alleged in today’s settlement.

The announcement came at the same time the FTC released a report of recommendations for privacy protections on mobile devices, which grew out of a May 2012 workshop with industry and consumer representatives, and provides non-binding guidance on mobile privacy for consumers, app developers, and platform development — much of it focused on providing adequate disclosure about what information is being collected and for what purpose, rather than directly limiting the collection of data.

Forty-five percent of adults in the U.S. and two-thirds of young adults owned a smartphone as of September 2012, and those users care about the security of their personal information according to the press release accompanying today’s report:

“[...]57 percent of all app users have either uninstalled an app over concerns about having to share their personal information, or declined to install an app in the first place for similar reasons. Less than one-third of Americans feel they are in control of their personal information on their mobile devices.”

But while today’s settlement announcement and recommendations represent a step in the right direction for mobile privacy, their limited scope provides even more evidence that the FTC doesn’t have the authority necessary to protect American consumers in the digital age. An $800,000 fine to a company valued at $250 million amounts to a slap on the wrist and the mobile privacy recommendations are just that: Non-binding guidelines for behavior, not actual privacy standards mobile app or platform developers will be held accountable to.

The tenth Super Bowl played in New Orleans, and the first since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005, will kickoff in a stadium that has received more than $470 million in public support since the storm, as taxpayers have footed the bill for renovations and upgrades in the face of threats from ownership and the National Football League to move the team to another city.

In the aftermath of Katrina, New Orleans was desperate to keep the Saints from skipping town. The NFL and Saints owner Tom Benson seem to have taken advantage of that desperation, leveraging it into hundreds of millions of dollars in public support — from the city, state, and federal governments — for renovations to the decimated Superdome, which housed Katrina refugees during and after the storm. In 2009, the state committed $85 million more to keep the Saints in town and attempt to woo another Super Bowl, all while signing a lease worth $153 million in a nearby building owned by Benson.

While investors and Benson have profited from the deals, taxpayers haven’t been as lucky, Bloomberg reports:

Talks headed by then-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue led to a plan to fix and renovate the Superdome with $121 million from the state, $44 million from the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District, which oversees the facility, $156 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and $15 million from the league. Blanco said a rushed bond deal followed.

Ultimately, the financing cost the district more than three times its $44 million commitment, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from state documents and interviews. [...]

In April 2009, Louisiana negotiated a new lease to secure Benson’s promise to keep the team in New Orleans through 2025. The state made $85 million in fresh Superdome improvements, adding luxury seating and moving the press box. A company owned by Benson, Zelia LLC, bought the 26-story tower next to the stadium that had stood mostly vacant since Katrina and renovated it. At the time, Benson put the total cost at about $85 million. The state then signed a $153 million, 20-year lease for office space in the building, which now houses 51 state agencies, according to the Louisiana Administration Division. [...]

“A lot of folks in New York made a ton of money,” [former state Treasurer John] Kennedy said. “Louisiana taxpayers didn’t do so well.”

The Superdome certainly needed renovations following Katrina. But its original construction was financed solely by taxpayers, and Benson, who is worth roughly $1.6 billion, didn’t contribute and repeatedly hinted that the Saints would move to San Antonio, Los Angeles, or another city unless taxpayers ponied up. Kennedy, the state treasurer, told Bloomberg he went into negotiations with the NFL and Benson “with a gun against my head.”

Benson isn’t alone. Minnesota Vikings owner Zygi Wylf used the threat of relocation to help secure public funding for a new stadium, and owners across the NFL are doing the same. Owners of the Miami Dolphins are using the promise of future Super Bowls (even though the event rarely provides the promised economic boost) to lure more money from taxpayers who are already on the hook for the city’s new baseball stadium.

The NFL’s program that provides loans to teams for new facilities is contingent on taxpayer support for at least part of the cost, and only one current NFL facility was built without some sort of public funding.

In response to today’s report showing that the economy created 157,000 jobs last month, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) released a statement lamenting the disbanding of a symbolic jobs council and blasting a nonexistent surge in government spending:

“This is the wrong time for President Obama to scrap his jobs council and delay his budget. Month after month we see the same thing: high unemployment and even more debt. More than 12 million Americans are still unemployed, and it’s been that way for far too long. If government spending were what causes economic growth, as the president believes, then the economy today should be booming, and the unemployment rate in America should be plummeting.”

“Instead of accepting sluggish job growth as the new normal, we need to work together to grow our economy, address our debt crisis, and expand opportunity for all Americans. In the weeks ahead, Republicans will outline another budget that addresses our spending problem and promotes robust job creation.”

This statement shows Boehner has no interest in conveying that he understands what’s happening in the economy. For starters, there has been no surge in government spending: spending under Obama is growing at its slowest rate since the Eisenhower administration. In fact, the slight economic contraction that occurred in the fourth quarter of last year is solely attributable to a drop in government spending, as the private sector hummed along.

Next, Boehner decries the disbanding of a purely symbolic jobs council about 18 months after congressional Republicans blocked the actual American Jobs Act. While President Obama’s jobs council was powerless to implement real changes, the American Jobs Act, according to several independent economic analyses, would have significantly boosted economic growth and created millions of jobs.

Europe’s current economic malaise and the latest GDP numbers show the detrimental effect that spending cuts can have in a weak economy. Yet Boehner and the GOP continue to push in that direction, clinging to an economic theory that simply hasn’t worked.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the economy created 157,000 jobs last month. With significant upward revisions to previous months (including revising November up to nearly 250,000 jobs created), the jobs picture for 2012 is much clearer. Here’s where things stand:

1) 181,00 jobs per month were created in 2012. In 2011, it was 175,000 per month. Calculated Risk charts the improvement:

2) 2.17 million jobs were created in 2012. As Steve Benen noted, this “is the best annual total since 2005, and tops seven of the eight years Bush/Cheney was in office.”

3) The so-called “fiscal cliff” didn’t create “uncertainty.” During the fourth quarter of last year, with the “fiscal cliff” looming, 201,000 jobs were created per month. “All these concerns that the fiscal uncertainty deterred businesses from hiring, they certainly haven’t materialized,” said UniCredit economist Harm Bandholz.

4) 74,000 government jobs were lost last year. This includes 9,000 layoffs last month, 2,000 of which were in education. Since February 2010, the public sector has lost 600,000 jobs.

5) 5.5 million lost jobs have been recovered. As Bloomberg News noted, “The economy has recovered 5.51 million of the 8.74 million jobs that were lost as a result of the last recession.”

6) About 100,000 construction jobs were created in the last four months. In a sign that the housing market is rebounding, the economy has added 296,000 construction jobs since January 2011, and a third of those gains occurred in the final four months of 2012. Still, construction employment is 2 million jobs below its 2006 peak.

According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added 157,000 jobs in January, with the unemployment rate ticking up slightly to 7.9 percent. Economists expected an increase of 170,000 jobs. The private sector added 166,000 jobs, while the public sector lost another 9,000 jobs.

BLS revised the number of jobs created in November up by 86,000 to 247,000, and December was revised up by 41,000 to 196,000. Due to revisions done to the 2012 numbers, 181,000 jobs per month were created last year, higher than previously thought.

The wider U-6 measure of underemployment held steady at 14.4 percent. 38.1 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for six months or more, a slight drop from December.