Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) took the Senate floor today to argue against Wall Street mega-banks that have been deemed “too big to fail” and thus receive the implicit backing of the federal government, arguing that lawmakers should act immediately to break up the big banks that now have assets worth more than three-fifths of the American economy.

Wall Street banks sparked the financial crisis in 2008 and were rescued by the federal government. Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act in 2010, but many of its rules have yet to take effect and banks are even bigger today than they were before the crisis. They are also just as scandalous, as financial institutions have faced lawsuits over mortgage and foreclosure fraud, money laundering, interest rate-rigging, and other practices. That, Brown said Thursday, should drive lawmakers to learn from past mistakes and break up the big banks to protect the health of the American economy:

BROWN: In the last five years alone we have seen faulty mortgage-related securities; foreclosure fraud; big losses from risky trading; money laundering; and Libor rate rigging. [...]

How many more scandals will it take before we acknowledge that we can’t rely on regulators to prevent subprime lending, dangerous derivatives, risky proprietary trading, and even fraud and manipulation?

Wall Street has been allowed to run wild for years. We simply cannot wait any longer for regulators to act. These institutions are too big to manage, they are too big to regulate, and they are surely still too big to fail.

Watch it:

Two decades ago, the six largest Wall Street banks held assets worth just 16 percent of the American economy, Brown said. They now hold assets worth more than 60 percent of the total economy:

Brown has emerged as a leading critic of Too Big To Fail in the Senate, and his efforts have attracted bipartisan support. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) joined Brown’s call for action on the Senate floor today, and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) has ripped big banks for holding a “get out of jail free card” and, with Brown, has urged the Department of Justice to prosecute large banks for fraudulent practices.

The Volcker Rule — a part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that is meant to rein in risky bank trading — is on the verge of being delayed, again, as regulators squabble over its exact parameters. Wall Street banks and congressional Republicans, after successfully watering down the Volcker Rule when Dodd-Frank was being debated, have been trying to get rid of what little bits are left ever since.

But Occupy the SEC, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement that focuses on matters before government regulatory agencies, is suing the federal government in an attempt to speed up the process and get the Volcker Rule in place. The two plaintiffs in the case claim that their deposits are at risk, so long as banks are allowed to engage in risky gambling with federally backed funds:

Plaintiffs suffer the risk of irreparable injury to their deposits by reason of [the government's] non-action. The Plaintiffs’ bank accounts are subject to potential dissipation or liquidation resulting from bank losses occasioned by excessively risky trading activities by those banks. The Volcker Rule would institute structural safeguards insulating depository accounts from banks’ proprietary trading activities, thereby protecting Plaintiffs’ bank accounts. Defendants’ unjustified delay in finalizing the Volcker Rule puts Plaintiffs’ bank accounts at continued risk of financial loss.

This is the first lawsuit challenging regulators to implement, rather than delay, the Volcker Rule. As Public Citizen’s Bart Naylor wrote, the suit is “making the straightforward case that banks shouldn’t gamble with savings because real people may be harmed.”

Currently, less than half of the rules in Dodd-Frank have been finalized. Wall Street, meanwhile, had its second most profitable year ever last year.

Republicans love to claim that low-tax states such as Texas enjoy a disproportionate amount of economic success, while higher-tax states like California are economic basket cases. Republican governors in several states are using that rationale to propose gutting their state income taxes (and, in many instances, replacing them with regressive sales taxes).

But a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows that so-called “high tax states” are actually experiencing more growth and less decline in income than states that are supposedly super-conducive to economic expansion:

In reality, states that levy personal income taxes, including the states with the highest top rates, have seen more economic growth per capita and less decline in their median income level over the last ten years than the nine states that do not tax income. Unemployment rates have been nearly identical across states with and without income taxes.

Here’s the breakdown:

– Four of the nine states without income taxes are actually doing worse than the average state in regards to economic growth per capita: Texas, Tennessee, Florida, and Nevada.

– Five of the nine states without income taxes are doing worse than average in terms of median income growth: New Hampshire, Florida, Tennessee, Alaska, and Nevada.

– Six of the nine states without income taxes had higher than average annual unemployment rates over the last decade: Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Washington, Alaska, and Nevada.

In fact, it was the “high tax” states that did the best in terms of growth, as this chart shows:

During his State of the Union address, President Obama called for raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour. Some Congressional Democrats have called to increase it all the way up to $10.10 (getting it close to the buying power it had in the 1960s).

But at the state level, conservative lawmakers are trying to go in the opposite direction. According to the National Employment Law Project, lawmakers in 31 states have introduced 105 bills aimed at suppressing workers’ wages, with a little help from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative group that provides model legislation on everything from union-busting to voter disenfranchisement:

Since January 2011, legislators from 31 states have introduced 105 bills reflecting ALEC’s “model” legislation designed to suppress the wages of low-paid workers in the United States — these bills aimed to repeal state minimum wage laws, reduce minimum wage rates for youth and tipped workers, weaken overtime compensation policies, and prevent local governments from establishing living wage ordinances. Of these 105 bills, 67 were directly sponsored or co-­‐sponsored by ALEC-­‐affiliated legislators from 25 different states. [...]

While only 11 of the 67 ALEC-affiliated wage suppression bills were ultimately passed into law, the cumulative impact of the 105 bills that have been introduced over the past two years remains significant. The persistent introduction of legislation to weaken or repeal wage standards drains the political momentum behind improving wages and workplace standards for low-paid workers by forcing a defensive fight over protecting the standards that already exist. As retail and fast-food workers in New York, Chicago, and cities across the country take collective action to improve wages in the nation’s fastest-growing low-wage industries — and as dozens of legislatures consider new proposals to increase minimum wages this year — ALEC’s wage suppression agenda serves as a significant source of inertia undermining the current push for better wages and workplace standards.

The minimum wage already isn’t enough for families to get by, while wage theft is a rampant problem across the country. Chicago, in fact, recently passed one of the nation’s strongest laws protecting workers against wage theft. But ALEC and its conservative allies wants to make it easier to steal money from workers’ pockets, while making it harder for them to get a raise.

A trio of Democratic lawmakers today introduced legislation to institute a small tax on financial transactions, a proposal that would reduce volatility in financial markets and raise substantial revenue for the federal government. Under the plan from Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), financial trades would be subject to a 0.03 percent tax, which they say would raise approximately $352 billion in revenue over the next decade.

Such a tax would slow down high-frequency trading that poses a threat to the health of financial markets while also incentivizing investment that drives economic growth. Opponents argue that the tax would slow down growth, but DeFazio told ThinkProgress last year that those claims are unfounded. “For 50 years we had a tax that was about seven times larger than this when the country was seeing the greatest growth in its history, post-World War II,” he said. “So we’ve proven this will not have a detrimental impact on growth. In fact, it perhaps is beneficial to growth. It’s not necessarily beneficial to salaries of hedge fund managers on Wall Street.”

“This commonsense proposal will raise billions in new revenue to get rid of the sequester or reduce the deficit while also discouraging the kind of reckless high-volume trading that contributed to the financial crash in 2008,” Whitehouse said.

11 European countries recently announced that they will institute a financial transactions tax, and Britain, which taxes stock and bond trades but does not tax more complex trades involving derivatives and swaps, is open to expanding its tax as well, Labour Party MP Chris Leslie said last week. “I don’t see any evidence that there would be a negative effect on economic growth,” Leslie said. “In fact, quite the opposite.”

Harkin and DeFazio have introduced the transactions tax in the past, but it has not received support from Treasury or President Obama. Many consumer groups and business and financial leaders, however, have offered support for the tax. “A modest financial transaction tax of less than 1 percent would serve as a remarkably efficient tool to achieve needed reform,” John Fullerton, a former director at JP Morgan Chase, wrote in 2011.

2012 was the second most profitable year in Wall Street’s history, with banks making north of $140 billion. Wall Street’s bonus pool, while not yet back to the heights it achieved before the financial crisis, is growing again, and the average cash bonus hit $121,900.

This is part and parcel of a longer trend on Wall Street, which has seen pay skyrocket as the financial industry was deregulated. According to Bloomberg News, Wall Street’s bonus pool has nearly quintupled since 1985, growing from $4 billion to more than $20 billion (in constant dollars):

Since 1985 the average securities industry bonus in the city has risen about four-fold. There’s a big jump from 1990 to 1991, when bonuses went from about $27,000 in real-dollar terms to $52,000, and a series of further increases from there. Bankers and traders in a bad year now earn much more than they did in a good one. You can see the chart to the right…Meanwhile, the bonus pool has risen in real-dollar terms from $4.1 billion to $20.1 billion.

One pernicious side effect of the near-constant growth in Wall Street bonuses is that regulators make vastly less money than those they are supposed to regulate. As a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, over the last few decades, it’s become “impossible for regulators to attract and retain highly skilled financial workers because they could not compete with private sector wages.”

Senate Republicans unveiled their plan to avert sequestration this week, and though they are still demanding that the looming budget reductions be offset totally by a different set of budget cuts, they are refusing to say what new budget cuts they prefer. Instead, they want to give President Obama the authority to choose which programs would face cuts as part of the $85 billion plan.

Republicans have, at times, offered specific spending cuts. The House GOP budget decimated Medicare and Medicaid while cutting taxes for the rich, and the GOP offered to replace sequestration in 2012 with a plan that protected defense while shifting all the cuts to domestic programs that have already faced steep reductions. But these proposals have been unsuccessful at brokering a spending compromise with Democrats and deeply unpopular with the American people, who largely want to protect the social safety net.

To avoid that problem, the GOP has often turned to demanding spending cuts without actually naming specific cuts they want, as they attempt to extract painful cuts without taking any of the blame:

1. BUSH TAX CUTS: In 2010, when Republicans wanted to extend the Bush tax cuts, they refused to name actual spending cuts they would support to offset the $4 trillion cost. Instead, Republican lawmakers only detailed programs that were off-limits and said cuts would have to be across-the-board.

2. FISCAL CLIFF: During negotiations to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff” at the end of 2012, Republicans again struggled to specify exactly how they would cut spending. GOP Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, asked to detail specific spending cuts, could only offer that the GOP was “looking at the spending” and “the growth in government.” The House GOP’s plan to avoid sequestration that time around ultimately made deeper cuts to popular programs so that they could protect the defense budget.

3. DEBT CEILING: Republicans again demanded spending cuts to increase the nation’s borrowing limit last month, and again they had a hard time saying exactly what spending cuts they wanted. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) offered the most honest response yet, saying the GOP couldn’t offer specifics because that would be unpopular. “[A]s soon as a specific is put out there, it is attacked by the spending piranhas on the other side,” King said, ignoring that the “spending piranhas” also include the American people.

4. ENTITLEMENTS: Throughout these budget battles, Republicans have blasted Obama for not putting forward plans to cut entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, ignoring that Obama’s health care law cut Medicare (a fact the GOP was eager to remind Americans of during the November election). But even as Democrats made it clear that they would not support further cuts to entitlements, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) held a press conference to beg them to take the lead. Boehner’s party, perhaps learning from the backlash it has faced when it offered plans to cut Medicare in the past, refused to specify how, or by how much, it would cut entitlement programs.