ELKHORN WI — At a Wisconsin town hall last week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) offered his strongest endorsement yet of a key financial reform generally pushed by Democratic lawmakers.

In the past, Ryan held a more lukewarm position on the Volcker Rule, where he endorsed the concept in theory but not in name.

By banning federally insured banks from risky proprietary bets, the Volcker rule is a key component of Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and is meant to protect taxpayers from bank speculation. Ryan’s words put him at odds with conservatives in the House and Senate who have repeatedly worked to delay and weaken the bill. He cited Volcker at two different town halls, as well as Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and David Vitter’s (R-LA) bill to rein in big banks:

RYAN: I have concerns about the Vitter bill. The idea is one I find very appealing. I also believe in what we call the Volcker rule, which mean if you’re going to act like a hedge fund then be a hedge fun. If you’re going to be a bank, then you have to be regulated like a bank. Meaning separate the ability of banks to take the implied subsidy of insured deposits and leverage that. I think that was one of the mistakes that was made.

Watch the video:

Although he says he supports consumer protections in theory, Ryan is still lockstep with Republicans on demanding the repeal of Dodd-Frank.

House and Senate Republicans are responsible for repeatedly delaying the Volcker rule after their unsuccessful attempt to cut it from Dodd-Frank. For instance, Reps. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) and Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) have done their best to ensure it does not take effect anytime soon. “While the Volcker Rule promises little if any benefit, what little benefit it does promise will not be realized if regulators further fragment financial markets and ratchet up the costs of compliance for market participants by issuing multiple versions of the Volcker Rule,” Bachus and Hensarling wrote. Even now, the expected date of the final rule was moved from the beginning of 2013 to sometime this year.

While bank industry lobbying has not managed to eliminate the rule in its entirety, Republicans have successfully watered it down to the point where even Paul Volcker has said he doesn’t like it. But a strong Volcker Rule like the one originally proposed is still necessary, and it has garnered support from many former bankers and industry insiders. As one former Merrill Lynch banker said, the Volcker Rule is “necessary to correct a mistake that poses a danger to our economy.”

Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 15,056, an all-time record. For one conservative group, this can only mean one thing: it’s time to impeach President Obama.

That was the message Capitol Hill Daily, a conservative publication based out of Baltimore, sent to Citizen United’s listserv today. They accused President Obama of “wreck[ing] the stock market” and asked readers to take a poll about whether he should be impeached as a result.

From the email:

Dear Concerned Reader,

Fearing the very worst, the nation’s super-rich are unloading their stocks at an alarming rate.

Even more troubling, the wealthiest 1% of Americans, who typically know the most, are the ones most anxious to sell.

You see, Obama just allowed 13 new tax increases to further slow the economy, wreck the stock market and make it even harder on the 12 million Americans already looking for work.

The bigger question is this…

Is Obama’s Latest Tax Screw Up Grounds For Impeachment?

See a screenshot below:

When Obama took office on January 20, 2009, the Dow Jones was at 7,949. Over the last 4 years, it has gone up approximately 90 percent before reaching a new high today.

It’s important to remember that the health of the stock market is very different from the health of the overall economy. Middle class wages are stagnating and millions are still unemployed or underemployed.

But when a conservative organization claims ignores reality in such a blatant way, one can’t help but quote former Rep. Barney Frank: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”

Last week, ThinkProgress spoke to directors of Meals on Wheels programs across the country, and they detailed how sequestration is cutting meal delivery and on-site meal services to needy seniors who may now have to go hungry. Since then, stories about sequestration’s harmful cuts to seniors have continued to pour in from across the country. The stories from Florida and Maine have been particularly wrenching:

• Throughout Florida, meal services for seniors have been cut. In the Orlando area, five senior meal sites are closing, another 20 seniors are losing their home support services, and other seniors will lose their transportation services, including help getting to medical appointments. Similarly, Aging Matters in Brevard had to close two of its lunch sites. In Ocala, Marion Senior Services will serve 6,000 fewer meals in 2013. Meanwhile, Holly Hill, Ormand Beach and six other locations from Deland to New Smyrna Beach had to cut its on-site meals from 5 days a week to 4 days a week while the waiting list for home-delivered meals is at 2,356 and growing. These may just be numbers to some, but not to the seniors who depend on the meals. Sometimes, these meals are seniors’ “only hot meal of the day.”

• The same stories are playing out in Maine. In central Maine, Spectrum Generations has had to cut its meal delivery service to just once a week, while Eastern Agency on Aging in Bangor had to furlough its employees once a week. “It is having a tremendous impact on people who need services…These are services that help to keep people — the elderly and the disabled — living in their homes and in their communities rather than living in institutions, which are much more expensive,” said Jessica Maurer, executive director of the Maine Association of Area Agencies on Aging. Meanwhile, in midcoast Maine, the Meals on Wheels program is facing funding shortfalls that may impact its on-site meal service program.

But losing crucial nutrition support services is not the only way sequestration is hurting seniors. It is also robbing $75 million from Aging and Disability Services programs. These include programs that protect vulnerable adults from elder abuse, that support services for people experiencing Alzheimer’s disease, and that provide home and community-based services that allow seniors to live at home for as long as possible. These drastic cuts are funneled down to the local level in various forms, from funding cuts to senior centers in Missouri to layoffs at a hospice in Kentucky.

In total, sequestration is cutting more than $230 million to four critical programs that support seniors. It cuts $117 million from Social Services Block Grants, which fund Meals on Wheels and other important initiatives, $75 million from Aging and Disability Services programs, $23 million from Community Service Employment for Older Americans programs, and $19 million from Housing for Elderly programs. But while Congress rushed to stop flight delays right before they flew home for recess, they have done nothing to ease the pain of these cuts on seniors.

We’ve laid out before some revenue options that can help ease the sequester. Many have been suggested in the president’s budget, including the elimination of the special tax break for derivatives traders that would yield $2.4 billion — well more than what is needed to stop sequestration’s harmful impacts on seniors. Ending subsidies for corporate jet owners and tax breaks for golf courses would get us halfway there. And so we ask this question again: what, exactly, are Congress’ priorities?

Our guest blogger is Anna Chu, Policy Director for the ThinkProgress War Room at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today, the House is set to vote on the Working Families Flexibility Act, legislation that would weaken rules requiring businesses to pay employees overtime wages when they work more than 40 hours in a given week and instead give employers the option of providing their workers with “comp time,” or time off from work. The bill is being touted as a Republican response to the need for today’s working parents to balance work and family by allowing them to accrue unpaid overtime hours.

A big worry of opponents of the bill is that employers will have the power to coerce employees into taking comp time instead of having to pay them overtime wages. When confronted with this possibility, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Martha Roby (R-AL), told the Sirius radio show The Morning Briefing with Tim Farley that employees will be able to turn to existing worker protections against coercion under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA):

The employee absolutely can pick up the phone and call the Department of Labor and report their employer because that is not allowed. The anti-coercion and discrimination provisions in this bill are very clear, that an employer cannot not use compensatory time in any way to coerce or discriminate or force an employee to take compensatory time… All of the protections that are currently under the Fair Labor Standards Act exist under this bill as well for the employee to make sure the employer does not take advantage of the employee.

But workers may not be as well protected as Roby indicated. While the bill does give workers the right to sue, George Zornick reports at The Nation that they are denied the use of a faster and cheaper avenue through the Department of Labor. On top of this, it doesn’t give the Department of Labor any extra funds to investigate or enforce the anti-coercion provisions. This means that workers who experience intimidation may have to hire their own lawyer and shell out lots of money to bring a case.

Meanwhile, the balance of power often rests with employers. Workers are fighting wage theft, or employers violating FLSA overtime laws, at huge rates. A 2009 survey reported that two-thirds of low-income employees had experienced a wage law violation in the previous week alone. The problem has been on the rise, with actions filed in federal court alleging wage and hour violations increasing by 400% between 2000 and 2011. Many employers are already failing to follow the FLSA’s rules.

Opponents have other concerns with the legislation. The FLSA requires overtime pay for work over 40 hours a week, which provides a big disincentive to ask employees to work long hours. That could diminish if employers can offer comp time instead. Employers may also be able to deny requests to use the comp time if they can claim it “unduly disrupts the operations of the employer” or that the request didn’t come in “within a reasonable period.”

In the radio interview, Roby also pointed to the fact that public sector workers have had this arrangement since 1985. But as Alex Seitz-Wald reports at Salon, “that move was to cut costs for government, not provide workers with more freedom,” plus government employees generally have a union to help them fight employer violations.

In fact, this is an old idea that has had trouble gaining traction over the years. Seitz-Wald points out that Republicans introduced similar legislation in 1996, 1997, and 2003. If Republicans are looking for policies that can help today’s working families, they could consider paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, and protections for workers who request flexible working conditions.

In response to the outcry from business travelers, the airline industry, and others affected by growing flight delays, Congress stepped in last week to provide the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with “flexibility” to move funding around within the agency to avert scheduled furloughs of air-traffic controllers necessitated by the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration. Congress remained unmoved as meals on wheels went undelivered, cancer clinics turned away patients, domestic violence programs were slashed, and children were dropped from Head Start programs across the country.

Flight delays highlighted just one of the problems with sequestration due to the unique situation of the FAA. Unlike other agencies, the FAA has a relatively large amount of funding set aside for long-term construction and maintenance projects. This funding is not spare cash, but a large pot of money not currently being spent on high-priority short-term needs. Replacing air traffic controller furloughs with cuts to these funds was impossible under sequestration, so Congress had to pass a law to give the FAA the flexibility to make the tough choices itself.

This approach is only a Band-Aid for the FAA, which will now pay air traffic controllers at the expense of long-term priorities Congress had already approved. For other agencies to which Congress may be tempted to give the same flexibility, however, it is completely unworkable. Most agencies do not have large capital accounts like the FAA. Their funding is instead spent on staffing, projects, and grants this year, and their programs have already been cut to the bone, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains:

Take, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Many have decried cuts in the National Institutes of Health, Head Start, and seniors programs (such as meals on wheels and other supports that help frail seniors live in the community), all of which are within HHS.

These three areas together comprise half of all discretionary funding within HHS. Suppose Congress gave HHS the flexibility to shift funds to undo sequestration in these areas. If HHS used that authority to shield these areas from reductions, the cuts in all other HHS programs would have to roughly double, on average.

That means doubling the cuts in areas such as food and drug safety, disease prevention, child care and energy assistance for low-income families, mental health and substance abuse treatment, the Indian Health Service, community health centers, and HIV/AIDS treatment.

“Flexibility” would not create a magic new source of funding for all the crucial programs within HHS, and there is no extra funding floating around without a purpose. HHS cannot shelter one key program without deepening the cuts to another. Most agencies look like HHS, not the FAA. The Department of Justice cannot protect the grants administered by the Office on Violence Against Women without increasing cuts to other key DOJ priorities or furloughing the attorneys who administer them.

This highlights the main problem with sequestration: domestic programs have already been cut to the bone, and any further spending reductions are extremely damaging. In fact, Congress’s newfound desire to grant the president more “flexibility” is a direct result of the harshness of these cuts – congressional Republicans insist on a cuts-only approach but are unable to identify cuts that would not be equally damaging to national priorities.

By closing loopholes and limiting deductions that benefit America’s wealthiest citizens, Congress could completely replace sequestration, restoring services to the poor, children, and the elderly, reinvesting in priorities like scientific research, food and drug safety, and HIV/AIDS treatment, and bringing balance back to a deficit-reduction approach that has relied disproportionately on spending cuts instead of revenue increases. Congress should act to fix the problem it has created, not play games to shift political blame while the economy and vital public programs suffer.

Our guest blogger is Kitty Richards, the Associate Director for Tax Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The factory collapse in Bangladesh has now claimed upward of 700 lives, making it the worst industrial disaster in Bangladesh and the most deadly one in the history of the garment industry. As has been widely reported, workers were hesitant to enter the building on the day of the collapse due to visible cracks in the building.

Since the disaster, many have urged large retail corporations to upgrade the working conditions in the factories from which they source their products. Three hundred large companies had previously refused to sign a pledge to do so before the collapse, citing costs. The need for low prices and fast production is driven in large part by American demand for cheap clothing. So how much would clothing prices rise for the average consumer if all of the costs of upgrading Bangladesh factories were passed on to them?

According to an estimate provided by the Worker Rights Consortium, it could be as little as 10 cents per article of clothing. The group comes to this figure by estimating that building renovation, safety equipment installation, and other related costs would come to about $3 billion, which is says is a high estimate that assumes virtually all factory buildings need major renovations, as some may not. Spreading that cost over five years, it comes to $600 million each year, and tacking 10 cents on to each of the roughly 7 billion garments exported from the country each year would easily cover that cost. After the initial investment in renovations, the group says the costs of maintenance will drop significantly.

Even without these large-scale renovations, there are precautions that could be taken immediately that would cost little. As Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and an expert in international trade policy, told Dylan Matthews of Wonkblog, factories could install fire extinguishers, unlock doors, and take other measures that don’t add much to costs but improve workers’ safety.

But it may not be as simple as companies investing more in building renovations and fire extinguishers. As Pietra Rivoli, a professor of international business at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told ThinkProgress, one of the biggest barriers to safe working conditions is a political infrastructure in Bangladesh that can properly monitor workers and their employers. “In the U.S. we have things like building codes and occupancy permits,” she pointed out. “What’s missing in Bangladesh is that local political infrastructure.” There is also a problem with widespread political corruption. It may therefore be difficult for large corporations to substitute for regulatory bodies.

The response from many large retailers so far has been to pull production from the country altogether. The Walt Disney Company has already announced that it will end production in Bangladesh, and other retailers may follow suit. That could devastate the country’s economy and make life even more difficult for its garment workers. Other Western retailers have indicated that they will instead invest in operations in Bangladesh and look at new plans for factory safety, but so far most of the money pledged will be for relief efforts and few have committed to upgrading factories or tougher inspections.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) slammed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) for being a “schoolyard bully” on the Senate floor Monday, after Cruz blocked an effort to move forward on budget negotiations Republicans in the House and Senate have demanded for the past four years. The GOP, which spent those years blaming Senate Democrats for America’s supposed “runaway spending” because they hadn’t passed a budget, attached a provision to fiscal cliff negotiations requiring the passage of a budget plan.

But now that Senate Democrats have followed through and passed a budget, Republicans in both the House and Senate have rebuked efforts to form a budget conference meant to hammer out the differences between the Senate budget and the plan passed by House Republicans. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) blocked Senate efforts to form a conference last month; Monday, it was Cruz who blocked Reid’s effort to go to conference because he wanted to first ensure that the committee would neither consider new revenues nor a debt ceiling increase.

“The senator from Texas was on the losing side. He had his view, and it lost. But now he wants us to agree by consent to adopt the losing side’s view or else he’s not going to let us go to conference,” Reid said, adding that Cruz was “like a schoolyard bully” who “pushes everybody around” when he is losing. “Why are my Republican colleagues so afraid?” Reid asked. “We have our differences but Democrats aren’t afraid to work out those differences.”

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, have both said they wouldn’t enter conference until both sides agreed on a “framework” for those negotiations. But Cruz made it clear what that framework meant: the GOP will again demand that a final budget document includes only spending reductions and no new revenue, the same demand they have made — and that Democrats have met more than once — in previous negotiations over deficits and debt. Any new deal, in fact, would have to find 90 percent of its deficit reduction from revenue to bring balance to overall reduction efforts since President Obama took office.

So after spending four years demanding a budget, Republican intransigence on revenues is now causing them to block negotiations that could actually lead to one.

The United States Senate voted Monday evening to pass the Marketplace Fairness Act, bipartisan legislation that would close what is known as the “Amazon loophole” by giving states the authority to collect sales taxes on online purchases even when internet retailers aren’t based within their borders. That loophole gives online sellers an advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers that have to collect sales taxes on most purchases.

The legislation passed 69-27.

The new rules would apply to all retailers with sales exceeding $1 million a year should it pass the House of Representatives, where it is expected to face opposition. Amazon, the largest online retailer, now supports it, but eBay and other online outlets are opposed. eBay sent 40 million emails to its users in April protesting the legislation.

“The contentious debate in the Senate shows that a lot more work needs to be done to get the Internet sales tax issue right, including ensuring that small businesses using the Internet are protected from new burdens that harm their ability to compete and grow,” Brian Bieron, eBay’s Senior Director of Global Public Policy, said in a statement. “eBay will continue to focus on bringing greater balance to the legislation by protecting small businesses with less than $10 million in sales or fewer than 50 employees.”

Despite those concerns, the closure of the loophole will have big benefits for states and taxpayers. States have lost billions of dollars to the loophole at a time when tight budgets have forced them to cut back on education and other programs. Low-income taxpayers, meanwhile, will benefit because closing the loophole will make state sales taxes slightly less regressive. However, raising the exemption, as eBay wants to do, would significantly reduce those benefits, which have been sought by governors, including Republicans, across the country in recent years.