A day after Attorney General Eric Holder asserted that prosecutions of Wall Street’s largest financial institutions have lagged because they are, in fact, “too large” to prosecute, a pair of Democratic senators again challenged regulators over the lack of legal oversight into the banks’ activities before and after the financial crisis.

Large banks have reached a slew of settlements with federal authorities over mortgage and foreclosure fraud, rate-rigging scandals, and money laundering schemes, but they have largely avoided prosecution, a fact Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) pointed out to regulators from multiple agencies during a Senate Banking Commiteee hearing this afternoon. Prosecution, Warren noted, is less likely for banks that jeopardize the integrity of the American economy than it is for common criminals, The Hill reports:

“If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to jail,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at the Banking Committee hearing. “Evidently, if you launder nearly $1 billion for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night.”

Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley (D), a strong supporter of financial regulation and author of many of the new rules in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, joined in the criticism by questioning Holder’s assertion that large banks were “too big” to prosecute and wondered if Wall Street had become a “prosecution-free zone”:

Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee he was concerned that the size of some banks had made prosecuting them difficult because their downfall could damage the financial system and economy.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) contended that this claim suggested that “we have a prosecution-free zone for large banks in America.”

Despite the well-documented financial abuses that occurred during and after the financial crisis, Wall Street prosecutions fell to a 20-year low in 2011. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have previously challenged the Justice Dept. over its lax approach to prosecutions, and Brown and another Republican senator, Louisiana’s David Vitter, called for legislation to break up the largest banks last week.

Instead of prosecutions, regulators have resorted to settlements that often appear as slaps on the wrist compared to the banks’ abuses. Banks have already figured out multiple ways to game foreclosure and mortgage abuse settlements, which haven’t extended the help to homeowners that was promised (in part because states weren’t required to pass money on to homeowners). And even when regulators levy large financial penalties on law-breaking banks, those penalties are tax deductible, allowing Wall Street to claim a tax break on the cost of its wrongdoing.

In 1999, James Glassman and economist Kevin Hassett, who eventually both worked for President George W. Bush, famously wrote a book predicting that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would go to 36,000 within three to five years. Of course, instead of the Dow going on the rocket ride they predicted, the financial crisis sent it spiraling into oblivion, bottoming out at 6,547 in March of 2009.

But with the Dow having climbed to its record high this week, Glassman is back, writing in Bloomberg View today that “Dow 36,000″ is achievable “quickly,” as long as a slew of conservative policy ideas are embraced:

To get it, we need policy changes that will create a better environment for businesses to increase revenue, profits and jobs: a rational tax system that keeps rates low and eliminates special deductions and credits;…entitlement reform to bring down costs and provide incentives for productive seniors to keep working; sensible environmental, workplace and financial regulation that allows entrepreneurship to thrive; a K-12 education system that boosts student achievement and holds teachers, administrators and politicians accountable …

Chime in and make your own list, because it’s time to focus on what counts in an economy: growth. Even with relatively high risk aversion (let’s say, what we have now), faster growth would significantly increase stock prices.

How fast can the U.S. grow? Four percent is attainable, but I’d settle for 3 percent. Get there quickly, and we’ll get to Dow 36,000 quickly, too.

When asked if he feels “the need to apologize to someone who read your book, went in and got creamed,” Glassman replied, “Absolutely not.” Former Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration economist Bruce Bartlett had, perhaps, the most proper reaction to Glassman’s new prediction: “Nitwit Jim Glassman is again predicting that the Dow will reach 36,000. Time to sell everything?”

Glassman proves, like many before him, that those clinging to the economic ideology of the Bush years feel no need to grapple with the economic catastrophe Bush left in his wake. And of course, the stock market’s recent meteoric rise has had little benefit for workers in the real economy.

Glassman is now the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute.

A new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research shows that the pay gap between men and women increased between 2011 and 2012, leaving women making $163 less per week:

In 2012, the ratio of women’s to men’s median weekly full-time earnings was 80.9 percent, a decline of more than one percentage point since 2011 when the ratio was 82.2 percent. This corresponds to a weekly gender wage gap of 19.1 percent for 2012. Women’s median weekly earnings in 2012 were $691, a marginal decline compared to 2011; men’s median weekly earnings were $854, a marginal increase compared to 2011.

Another measure of the earnings gap, the ratio of women’s and men’s median annual earnings for full-time year-round workers, was 77.0 in 2011 (data for 2012 are not yet available), less than half of a percentage point lower than in 2010 and equal to the gap in 2009. (This means the annual gender wage gap for full-time year-round workers is 23 percent.)

As Bryce Covert noted at Forbes, “What’s particularly strange about this is that the wage gap typically narrows during a recession.” But women have been hammered by the hemorrhaging of public sector jobs that has occurred in the last few years, as states and the federal governments cut back significantly due to conservative insistence on austerity.

The wage gap between women and men persists even for high-paying jobs, and women are significantly more likely to work for the minimum wage. A woman’s total lifetime earnings lost to the pay gap could feed a family of four for 37 years.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday called on Republican House leadership to take up legislation recently introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) that would raise the federal minimum wage above $10 an hour. Miller and Harkin announced the bill, which would set the minimum wage at $10.10 per hour and index it to inflation so it raised automatically thereafter, this week.

Pelosi cited recent stock gains that pushed markets to record highs even as worker incomes remain stagnant as her reason for backing the legislation, The Hill reports:

“This week, we saw something quite remarkable, the stock market soaring to record heights. At the same time, we see productivity keeping pace,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “But we don’t see income for America’s middle class rising. In fact, it’s been about the same as since the end of the Clinton years.” [...]

“If we are going to honor our commitment to the middle class,” she said, “we have to reflect that intention in our public policy.”

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would bring it in line with its historical borrowing power, which peaked in 1968, and indexing it to inflation would prevent Congress from having to repeatedly raise it to keep up with rising costs. The current wage would be $10.40 had it been indexed to inflation in 1968.

Top Republicans have already signaled their opposition to any increase in the minimum wage, even though 65 Republicans currently serving in Congress voted for the last increase, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007.

Without wading too deep into recent debates about whether wealthy CEOs and college professors understand the needs of working class people when it comes to balancing work and family life, it should be noted that we might not even have these conversations today if it weren’t for Richard Nixon’s crass political calculations in 1971 to veto legislation that would have provided near-universal, publicly-supported child care for Americans.

As Robert Self recounts in his excellent book on the politics of the family, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA), sponsored by Democratic Senator Walter Mondale and Democratic Rep. John Brademas, passed both houses of Congress in 1971 and awaited President Nixon’s signature. The bill “included a sliding-scale payment system that would have made child care far more affordable for the nation’s poor and middle class alike. It came closer than any previous legislation to recognizing child care as part of women’s economic citizenship.”

Instead of doing the right thing for American families, Nixon listened to Pat Buchanan and other right-wing voices in shooting down the bill. As Self describes:

The internal debates within Nixon’s circle were heavily influenced by anti CCDA diatribes in the conservative press—attacks led by the conservative columnist James Kilpatrick and the conservative newspaper Human Events—as well as the tide of letters arriving at the White House castigating the bill as an assault on traditional motherhood and a discredited form of liberal social engineering.

After a conspicuous delay, Nixon vetoed the bill. Calling it the ‘most radical piece of legislation to emerge from the ninety-second Congress,’ he claimed that it called forth ‘communal approaches to child rearing over the family-centered approach.”

None of this true, of course. Millions of families, of all ideological stripes, depend on child care every day as a basic means for both working and raising a family. And millions more would love to have high-quality care and pre-school for their children but can’t afford it. As Self writes about the aftermath of the defeat of the CCDA, “While women on welfare could qualify for some subsidized child care, and child tax credits were added in subsequent years, on balance, women and families were left to their own devices and to the private market to care for children while parents worked.”

So because of Nixon and his allies, here we are in 2013 with progressives and President Obama having to once again bring up the “radical” idea that working parents should be supported in their efforts to both succeed at work and take care of their children.

Hopefully Congress today will listen to Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) who calls the President’s push for universal pre-school “a great idea” rather than acquiesce once again to the political logic of Tricky Dick.

Our guest blogger is John Halpin, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the co-director and creator of the Progressive Studies Program at CAP.

Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) railed against the Medicare savings included in the Affordable Care Act, campaigned against President Obama’s desire to increase marginal tax rates on the very wealthy, and promised that a Romney administration would offset the looming sequester.

But next week, just four months after losing the November election, Ryan plans to unveil a budget that incorporates many of the policies he campaigned against, since the very changes he opposed as a vice presidential candidate can now help him reach his goal of balancing the budget in 10 years — and go a long way towards reducing the deficit:

1. Savings from Obamacare. On the campaign trail, Ryan criticized Obama for cutting $716 billion out of Medicare and using it to expand access to health care for millions of Americans through Obamacare.The House Budget Committee Chairman and most House Republicans had voted to preserve the savings in the GOP budget in 2012, though Romney and Ryan promised to restore the cuts if elected in November. Ryan is preserving the savings in this year’s budget even as the National Republican Congressional Committee is still attacking Democrats for the reductions.

2. War savings. Ryan’s budget “will make adjustments for an expected decline in war spending, a move that could reduce assumed expenditures by up to $600 billion over the next decade.” But Ryan’s has consistently derided war savings as “phantom savings.” “The savings that they’re talking about, they suggest that they’re going to be in Afghanistan and Iraq at current levels for 10 years and then they have a withdrawal that saves $1.1 trillion. So a lot of the savings they’re claiming, I think, are phantom savings,” Ryan said when Democrats included the same number in their budget.

3. Revenue from the fiscal cliff deal. Ryan’s budget will include the roughly $620 billion in revenue raised by the deal to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff” that Obama signed in January. Though Ryan ultimately voted for the deal, he was opposed to the tax increases that were used to raise that money. “Our fear is that if you raise tax rates you hurt economic growth,” Ryan would claim.

Ryan’s budget is also expected to include savings from the so-called sequester, which Ryan voted for but later opposed. During the presidential campaign, he claimed that its defense cuts are “devastating,” though after losing admitted, “that $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, we can’t lose those spending cuts. “

British Prime Minister David Cameron will use a speech Thursday to reiterate his commitment to the austerity policies that have hampered the nation’s economic recovery since the Great Recession. Great Britain is on the brink of an unprecedented triple-dip recession, but Cameron and United Kingdom finance chief George Osborne have pledged to continue deficit reduction efforts.

Turning away from austerity now, Cameron will say, would send Britain “back into the abyss,” Reuters reports:

However, Cameron will tell his audience he has cut the country’s deficit by a quarter, interest rates are at a record low, exports are reviving, the number of people on welfare has fallen, and there are more people in work “than ever before in our history”.

“Of course, these signs of progress are just the beginning of a long hard road to a better Britain,” he will say.

Britain’s deficit has fallen, but it has done so far more slowly than Osborne and Cameron projected when they began austerity three years ago. In 2010, the British government projected that austerity would reduce the deficit from 4.8 percent of the economy to just 1.9 percent by now. Anemic economic growth and a second recession brought on by those policies, however, have left the deficit at 4.3 percent. The country is now one quarter of contraction away from its third recession in four years.

Austerity has plagued the European Union, of which Britain is a member, since the recession, forcing unemployment to record highs. Britain, however, is not a member of the European currency union and maintains its own central bank, making the conservative government’s continued adherence to deficit reduction all the more confounding. The same could be said of the United States, which is now focused almost solely on deficit reduction even as unemployment remains high, the recovery remains tepid, and evidence exists that the stimulative policies it originally pursued put it on a faster pace of recovery than Europe has experienced.