A favorite GOP talking point is that a slew of regulation and taxes are preventing employers from creating jobs, which explains the stubbornly high unemployment rate. “By pursuing a steady repeal of job-destroying regulations, we can help lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over small and large employers alike, empowering them to hire more workers,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA). “Business owners are reluctant to create jobs today if they’re going to need to pay more tomorrow to comply with onerous new regulations,” claimed Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).

But a new study from the San Francisco Federal Reserve finds that this line of thinking is largely bunk:

Figure 3 shows there was almost no correlation between job growth in a state from 2008 to 2011 and the increase in the percentage of businesses citing regulation and taxes as their primary concern. In fact, if anything, the correlation is positive.

States in which businesses increasingly cited regulation and taxes experienced higher job growth, although this correlation is not statistically significant. The lack of correlation is not a matter of the timing we choose. For example, there also is no strong correlation if we examine the 2009–11 period or the 2010–11 period instead.

As this chart shows, there is basically no relationship between businesses citing increased regulations and taxes and higher unemployment rates:

In fact, some studies show that far from killing jobs, regulations help create them and help boost economic growth.

Instead, the San Francisco Fed shows that lack of job creation is tied to a lack of demand — customers don’t have any money to spend, so businesses have no reason to expand. “U.S. counties with high household debt levels coming into the recession are the same counties with depressed levels of employment in the nontradable sector today,” the study said.

Rep. Dan Campbell (R-CA), in a smart move, wants to require the biggest banks to hold more capital against potential losses (meaning they have a bigger cushion, and thus less potential need for a bailout, if the economy goes south). However, he plans to pair his legislative push for higher capital requirements with the repeal of two other important parts of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law:

U.S. Representative John Campbell plans to offer legislation aimed at reducing the size of “too- big-to-fail” banks by requiring them to hold more capital including long-term debt. [...]

His legislation would also repeal Dodd-Frank’s heightened standards for systemic institutions and its ban on proprietary trading, known as the Volcker rule. Campbell said that with additional capital requirements, a ban on proprietary trading would be unnecessary.

The first measure Campbell wants to repeal allows regulators to place more stringent regulations on the biggest banks, making them adhere to even stricter requirements than their competitors that are small enough to be allowed to fail. The GOP has wanted to do away with this provision for years, which amounts to ignoring the problem of too-big-to-fail, not mitigating it.

Campbell’s bill would also repeal the Volcker Rule, which is meant to prevent the biggest banks from engaging in trading for their own benefit taxpayer-backed dollars. Congressional Republicans have done the bidding of the financial services industry by watering this rule down to a shell of its former self, but it still would help reduce some of the risky practices that contributed to the financial crisis.

Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen

In a speech today, Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen took policymakers to task for failing to provide support for the economy, noting that spending cuts have been a “headwind for the recovery“:

Discretionary fiscal policy hasn’t been much of a tailwind during this recovery. In the year following the end of the recession, discretionary fiscal policy at the federal, state, and local levels boosted growth at roughly the same pace as in past recoveries, as exhibit 3 indicates. But instead of contributing to growth thereafter, discretionary fiscal policy this time has actually acted to restrain the recovery.

State and local governments were cutting spending and, in some cases, raising taxes for much of this period to deal with revenue shortfalls. At the federal level, policymakers have reduced purchases of goods and services, allowed stimulus-related spending to decline, and have put in place further policy actions to reduce deficits…While a long-term plan is needed to reduce deficits and slow the growth of federal debt, the tax increases and spending cuts that would have occurred last month, absent action by the Congress and the President, likely would have been a headwind strong enough to blow the United States back into recession. Negotiations continue over the extent of spending cuts now due to take effect beginning in March, and I expect that discretionary fiscal policy will continue to be a headwind for the recovery for some time, instead of the tailwind it has been in the past.

Former President Bill Clinton said much the same thing last week, noting that “everybody that’s tried austerity in a time of no growth has wound up cutting revenues even more than they cut spending because you just get into the downward spiral and drag the country back into recession.” The experience of Europe should be showing U.S. policymakers that cutting spending in a weak economy backfires, squashing economic growth, which causes debt to expand. But it doesn’t seem like that lesson is taking hold.

American workers rarely receive paid sick leave, but cities and states across the country are taking up proposals to mandate that employers pay employees who have to miss work because they are sick. A group of Democratic lawmakers has added Maryland to that list with a proposal that would mandate up to seven earned sick days.

Under the proposal, the leave would be accrued based on hours worked, the SoMdNews.com reports:

The proposal, led in the House by Del. John A. Olszewski Jr. (D-Baltimore), allows all full-time employees to earn an hour of sick time for every 30 hours worked, or up to seven sick days per year. Part-time workers would earn fewer days, depending on how often they work.

Nearly 40 percent of America’s private sector workers do not receive paid sick leave, and the number swells to 80 percent for both low-income workers and food workers, 60 percent of whom said they have reported to work even while sick. A 2011 study found that 40 percent of Maryland’s private sector workers don’t receive paid sick leave.

The lack of such leave jeopardizes the health and safety of other workers — in 2009, it led to an addition 5 million cases of the H1N1 flu virus, according to estimates.

Business groups have targeted paid sick day legislation with faulty studies, but in other areas where paid sick leave is being considered, studies have shown the legislation would have little effect on labor costs. The Main Street Alliance of Oregon, a supporter of Portland’s paid sick leave proposal, estimates it would add no more than 1.9 percent to labor expenses for the city’s businesses.

A combination of federal and state unemployment insurance programs kept 2.3 million Americans out of poverty in 2011, mitigating some of the negative effects the Great Recession had on jobless workers. But even as unemployment remains stubbornly high, several states are taking the axe to their unemployment programs, and the result is that recipients are losing federal unemployment insurance too.

Seven states have reduced the length of their unemployment programs from 26 weeks, the standard since the 1950s, by as much as 14 weeks, according to a new policy paper from the National Employment Law Project. But because federal benefits depend on the number of weeks offered at the state level, those cuts are also costing workers access to the federal program. In those states, five of which have unemployment rates higher than the federal level, those cuts are costing individual recipients as much as $5,000, according to NELP:

The average jobless worker has been unemployed for 35 weeks, and 40 percent of unemployed workers have been out of a job for at least 27 weeks, meaning the cuts will hammer large numbers of the unemployed in these states. While opponents of unemployment insurance decry the “culture of dependency” the program creates, research shows that recipients work harder to find a new job than those who don’t have access to the program.

America’s unemployment program, stingy as it is, also has benefits for the economy: the Congressional Budget Office estimated that failure to extend the federal program at the beginning of the year would have cost the country 300,000 jobs.

At the moment, about 11 million homeowners in the U.S. are underwater, owing more on their mortgage than their home is currently worth. President Obama and congressional Democrats have been trying to pass a refinancing plan that would allow homeowners to access historically low interest rates and maybe claw out from beneath their mortgages. But Republicans have, so far, balked.

So according to the Washington Post, Obama may forge ahead with a plan by executive order:

Obama is weighing whether to use his executive authority to give more of the country’s nearly 11 million struggling homeowners a chance to refinance at today’s ultra-low interest rates, according to the Treasury Department and others in talks with the administration on the issue.

Obama already has used his executive powers to make refinancing easier for people with loans backed by government-financed mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But the new plan could extend the opportunity to people who are underwater on their privately backed mortgages, which have not been eligible for the same relief.

The plan, if adopted, would likely be aimed at homeowners who have otherwise kept up with their mortgage payments but have been unable to refinance because the loan against their home exceeds its depressed value.

The Treasury Department hinted at this route last month when Michael Stegman said, “we will also consider non-legislative means at our disposal to help responsible non-GSE homeowners access these low rates. To be the most effective, as well as address investor concerns, the legislative route would be preferable to using existing Making Home Affordable program authority. Legislation would facilitate a refinance, whereas under our existing authority, Treasury could only modify the most deeply underwater loans and pay investors for some amount of forgone interest.”

It’s far preferable to pass one of the many proposals various members of Congress have put on the table to bolster refinancing programs, which would not cost taxpayers anything, according to an early analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. Meanwhile, millions of families would receive some help:

But in the meantime, forging ahead with a plan by executive order will at least do something for the millions facing an untenable housing situation.

The New York Times’ Floyd Norris noted over the weekend that, since the labor market bottomed out, the recovery has been much more favorable to men than women. In fact, a lower percentage of women over the age of 20 are working now than were working at the bottom of the recession:

From December 2009 through last month, the economy added 5.3 million jobs, according to the Labor Department’s monthly survey of households. Only 30 percent of them went to women. To some extent, that is simply a reflection of the fact that the recession hit men much harder than women, but the result has been at least a temporary reversal of the long trend of women holding an ever-increasing share of jobs. [...]

In January, 54.6 percent of women over the age of 20 had jobs. That was the lowest proportion since 1993, and 0.8 percentage point lower than the figure in December 2009. By contrast, 67.6 percent of men over 20 had jobs, a rate that is 1.3 percentage points higher than it was at the end of 2009, although still below prerecession levels.

Part of the explanation is that the recession was especially brutal in industries like construction that are dominated by men, so they’re picking up more of the jobs as the economy comes back. But austerity is also contributing to this problem, as government job losses disproportionately hurt women.

As the National Women’s Law Center noted last year, nearly half of the job gains made by women in the recovery were being wiped out by public sector job losses. This trend is particularly problematic since a growing number of women are the primary breadwinners in their homes: currently, nearly two-thirds of American households feature a woman as a primary or co-breadwinner.