Connecticut’s Republican Senate nominee Linda McMahon has been all over the place when it comes to the the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which bears the name of the senator she’s hoping to replace. “Linda supports financial reform,” her spokesman Ed Patru has said. “She believes the goals of this particular legislation are laudable and certain aspects of it are reasonable.” However, she said that she would have ultimately vote against Dodd-Frank, because “I think that this bill grows government more than it does anything else.”

McMahon has been particularly critical of attempts to place new restrictions on the risky practices of Wall Street, telling Connecticut Plus that “we have a fair amount of regulation in place now.” And during a campaign stop at Fairfield University yesterday, McMahon said that the government actually needs to roll back bank regulations, giving them freer rein:

McMahon said the government needs to “dial back” regulations on banks because the amount of money they need to have in reserve to loan out money was high enough to prevent them from loaning to people with good credit histories. “We have to really get people working in the private sector. It’s why I think it’s very important to send more business people and fewer career politicians to Washington,” McMahon said.

Businesses large and small are having trouble accessing loans because the economy is weak and banks are holding money against a variety of losses they feel might be coming their way. Lifting regulations is not going to suddenly make them feel that economic conditions merit making loans, but it would certainly free them up to go back to making risky bets and building the junk financial products that led to the economic meltdown in the first place.

But McMahon is hardly alone amongst Republican Senate candidates in wanting to do away with restrictions on the nation’s financial industry. In fact, Washington’s Republican Senate nominee Dino Rossi has explicitly called for repealing the entire Dodd-Frank law.

In addition, Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee have made it quite clear that they intend to take a hatchet to Dodd-Frank, and at the very least bury regulators who are attempting to implement it under a barrage of paperwork and hearing appearances. In the meantime, Wall Street banks are already back to their old tricks, engaging in risky trading and searching for loopholes to exploit.

Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment executive running who is Connecticut’s Republican senate nominee, is earning the respect of her state’s Tea Party, according to an article in the Connecticut Mirror today. And one of her chief selling points is her anti-government spending stance.

“Stop the spending, we can’t afford it,” she has said. “And that’s where I think the focus is in this country.” McMahon actually believes that the government should never, ever run a deficit, even when there is an economic downturn, which is a nutty idea that even a former staffer for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) calls “stupid.”

But as the Mirror noted, McMahon does not lay out any “specifics about what she would cut.” And when it comes to the big entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which amount to about forty percent of the federal budget — McMahon not only doesn’t offer specifics, but flat-out refuses to discuss them at all:

“I can certainly tell you I’m not adverse to talking in the right time or forum about what we need to do relative to our entitlements,” McMahon said in an interview. “I mean, Social Security is going to go bankrupt. Clearly, we have to strengthen that…I just don’t believe that the campaign trail is the right place to talk about that.“

It’s vital to know exactly what McMahon would do to “strengthen” Social Security, as she has expressed sympathy with “some of” Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap for America, which privatizes Social Security. (It also, of course, increases taxes on 90 percent of Americans while still losing a dramatic amount of revenue.)

When she was asked for specific spending cuts by the New York Times’ John Harwood, McMahon replied with the boilerplate GOP response of a spending freeze and cutting the public sector workforce, while failing to touch on the structural problems in the budget (health care spending, giant tax cuts, and defense spending). Like Florida’s Republican senate nominee Marco Rubio, she seems to advocate balancing the budget on pipe dreams, or she’s actually in favor of huge entitlement cuts but, knowing how unpopular that is, won’t say it.

Considering that a whole host of Republican senate nominees — including Pat Toomey (PA), Rand Paul (KY), Sharron Angle (NV) and Rubio — have suggested either privatizing or slashing Social Security, McMahon should have to lay out what she means by “sort of” embracing Ryan’s radical plan for Social Security. And if a campaign isn’t the appropriate time to do it, when is?

Linda McMahon, the Republican senate nominee in Connecticut, is selling herself as the consummate business woman, thanks to her years as an executive with World Wrestling Entertainment. But if her appearance last night on CNBC is any indication, McMahon is a little unclear about how much money the typical small business owner is earning.

CNBC’s supply-side devotee Larry Kudlow asked McMahon for her position on allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans to expire, and McMahon used the standard Republican argument that permitting the expiration would cause a tax increase on small businesses:

The fallacy Larry, and you know this as well as anyone, it’s not just that top marginal tax rate that’s going to affect the wealthy, it’s going to affect small businesses. I’ve started as a Subchapter S corporation, and so when you increase that top marginal tax rate, if it goes from 35 to 39.6 percent, you know, that’s going to be a big dig for small businesses. And as I talk to small businesses all over the state of Connecticut, they’re telling me, ‘look, I’m not going to grow. I’m not going to go over that level. I’ll lay somebody off, I won’t take that next job, I can’t work any harder, and I’m just not going to work any more for the government.’

Watch it:

Florida’s senate candidate Marco Rubio said the same thing last week — calling the very phrase “Bush tax cuts for the rich” a “misnomer” — but it hasn’t gotten any more true in the interim. The fact remains that fewer than two percent of small businesses and less than three percent of people with any business income whatsoever will see a tax increase if the top two income tax brackets reset to the 2001 level, as President Obama has proposed.

McMahon tried to make the case that S-corporations — which don’t pay the corporate income tax, but pass their earnings through to owners who then file the income on their personal returns — would be hammered by the tax increase. But IRS data shows that those who both claim S-corp income on their personal returns and would be affected by the tax cuts expiring “come disproportionately from the ranks of the super-rich.” 89 percent of people claiming $10 million or more on their personal income tax returns have some S-corp. income.

According to the latest survey of small businesses by the National Federation of Independent Business, which is totally in the tank for extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, nearly half of small businesses are not hiring due to economic conditions or sales prospects (so lack of customers), while just twelve percent cite “political conditions.” And handing more than $700 billion to the rich is not going to improve those sales prospects at all.

McMahon herself, who holds personal assets worth anywhere from $156 million to $400 million, would face higher tax rates if the tax cuts for the rich expire. The same can’t be said for the vast majority of small business owners.