Debunking 'job-killing regulations'

A new study shows that, when it comes to the economy, the modern Republican party has one leg less to stand on. 

To wit, we have proof that "job-killing regulations" are just a myth propagated by companies and their lobbyists who want to pass on the real economic costs of their pollution, dangerous operations, and unfair business practices to society at large. 

Ironically, as this study debunking "job-killing regulations" is coming out, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (a glorified wing of the Republican Party) is pledging a "war" on "the vast regulatory state" and an "unprecedented flow of regulations" because, says the Chamber's President, "We must lift the veil of uncertainty hanging over every business and investor if we want to revive our economy."

Another leg of the GOP fell off long ago: tax cuts on the rich (aka trickle-down, voodoo economics and Reaganomics) have never proven effective in growing the economy, jobs and incomes, as even Pope Francis recently noted. 

So now that those two legs of the GOP's three-legged economic stool are gone, what's left? Cutting entitlements. That's right: "Work or Starve." (Official 2014 GOP campaign motto). Well, Republicans have gone ahead and cut food stamps and other forms of "welfare," and we'll have plenty of time to see how badly that works out for Americans and the economy before next November.  

Methinks by then the GOP will be sitting on the floor.

(Now to get a bit wonkish. The true cost of regulations may be hard to calculate; nevertheless, we can compare the U.S. to other countries. After all, everything is relative and businesses can't re-locate to Mars. The World Bank's annual Doing Business survey compares countries on a range of indicators, like ease of starting a business and ease of paying taxes. In 2013, even in the dark depths of the Obama Regime, the U.S. ranks 4th in the world out of 189 countries. As in past years, we are topped only by tiny islands Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand. So the United States is still the place to do business, with the best climate for investment and the biggest consumer market in the world. Anybody who says otherwise is a crank or a charlatan.)

UPDATE (06.12.2013): Right on cue, our fair & balanced friends at FOX gave us this big headline: "Regulation Nation: Gov't regs estimated to pound private sector with $1.8 T in costs." On FOX's home page they rounded that estimate, courtesy of the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute, up to $2 trillion. (What's $200 billion nowadays anyway? Just rounding.)  FOX doesn't offer any dissenting opinions on that estimate, or even information how it was derived; it's just presented as fact. Nor does FOX mention that CEI is a libertarian think tank that has defended Big Tobacco, opposed fuel efficiency standards, and disputed global warming science. It's all in day's work shilling for corporate interests.

Right-wing garbage debunked: No, regulation doesn’t kill jobs

By Sean McElwee

December 2, 2013 | Salon 

It’s one of the oldest right-wing claims: “Excessive” regulation will harm job creators and kill the economy. But is it based on sound economics?

One new study, which examines this particular argument, finds it absurd on its face. Taylor Lincoln, who authored the report for Public Citizen, tells Salon the goal was to “point out hypocrisy and contradictions and the chasms between rhetoric and reality.” To that end, the report cites one Heritage Foundation study which asserted that a more efficient regulatory system could create 9.6 million jobs. The problem, as Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein noted: “there are only 7 million unemployed Americans.”

Heritage isn’t the only one making this argument. A Phoenix Foundation study claimed that, “a 5 percent reduction in the federal regulatory budget would yield 5.9 million new jobs over five years.” But the Public Citizen report points out that this leads to a ludicrous conclusion: “a 16 percent decrease (a figure the authors chose to parallel the amount by which they say federal spending had exceeded revenue since 2000) would result in the creation of 18.8 million new jobs over five years. In contrast, there are only about 11.3 million unemployed Americans.”

Dr. Thomas McGarity, a University of Texas professor who has studied regulation for decades, finds the right-wing argument wanting. As to whether cutting regulation could increase economic growth, he tells Salon, “it’s a silly argument. The impact of regulation, particularly in this era when it’s so darn hard to write a regulation, is nothing compared to what the Fed does each meeting.” His most recent book, Freedom to Harm, details how a decade-long assault on regulation threatens workers and the environment.

In fact, the OMB estimates that regulations provide huge economic benefits. They find that major regulations benefit the economy between $193 billion and $800 billion a year at a cost of $57 to $84 billion. McGarity confirms this, telling Salon, “The thing that is most troubling to me is, when the right-wing think-tanks or the government estimates the cost of regulation, they never go back and see how much it did cost. The few retrospective studies that have been done have shown uniformly that the cost estimates have been higher, much higher than the actual cost of the regulation. The reason is that once the regulations are in place companies are able to adapt to them very quickly.”

The irony is that Republicans always hail the ability of businesses to innovate and adapt, but their anti-regulatory stance is premised on the idea the businesses cannot adapt to new regulation.

Both McGarity and Lincoln noted that Nixon, Ford and H.W. Bush were all very pro-regulation. McGarity tells Salon that “there used to be strong environmentally conscious Republicans in the House and Senate, [but] you can’t point to one Republican now who is a strong environmental advocate.” Lincoln says the anti-regulatory impulse is tied to the economy. When the economy is strong, businesses quickly adapt to regulation, but in hard times, regulation appears as a scapegoat for the weak economy. Both feared that the Republican party is now ruled largely by business interests unconcerned with the common good.

But it’s not just right-wing think tanks and demagogues claiming that cutting regulation will somehow magically create jobs. The Economist claimed this year: “But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively.” The article concludes that regulation may “crush the life out of America’s economy.”

In the New York Times earlier this month, Tyler Cowen wrote:

We don’t really know the total regulatory burden in our economy today, in part because there are too many rules and side effects to add up all the costs. Nonetheless, we are continually increasing the obstacles to doing business. America has lost the robust productivity growth of much of the postwar era, and the share of start-ups in the economy has been falling each decade since the 1980s. Although overregulation is hardly the only culprit, it is very likely contributing to the problem.

When arguing to gut America’s regulatory regime, one doesn’t need data or statistics, just a general feeling that regulation is probably harming economic growth.

Opponents of regulation often suggest that regulations create uncertainty and therefore stymie growth, but in truth they do the opposite. To understand why, imagine a world without regulation, one in which railroad track gauges are divergent, food and drugs are released without trials and buildings are built on a whim.  Americans who visit countries with a weak governance are often surprised to find that the stairs aren’t of equal height. By establishing a minimum standard for environmental degradation, customer safety and worker treatment, regulation can change entire industries.

The auto industry is a quintessential example. Today’s advertisements focus on fuel efficiency and safety, and we take air bags and seat belts for granted, but cars were once death traps. Lincoln explains, “Their market research showed that adding seat belts didn’t help and they’re not seeing profit it it, they’re not seeing dollar signs.” All of that began to change with Ralph Nader’s famous “Unsafe at Any Speed.” Customers didn’t know that cars could be safer and more fuel-efficient until the government began enforcing the regulations. Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Consumers are naturally conservative and they are heavily influenced by advertising. George McGovern, echoing the arguments of J. K. Galbraith, said that advertising can “brainwash the consumer” because “no one was ever born with the taste for huge automobiles.” Companies were stuck on producing slick fancy cars, not safe cars. Regulation upended the industry and entirely changed the way that customers and society viewed the car: not a luxury toy, but a utilitarian mode of transportation. This changed the way customers thought about safety and companies thought about advertising.

The report shows how regulations we now take for granted — catalytic converters, unleaded gasoline, fuel efficiency standards, worker safety protection, minimum wages, environmental protections — were once denounced by industry shills as “job killing” or “economy strangling.” Industry experts predicted that worker safety regulations would destroy jobs and tank industries. The day before the bills would pass they would shout Cassandra-like warnings and hold up Mayan calendars. But the next day the air was cleaner, workers were safer and the economy chugged along.

Even Tom Donohue, the President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is forced to concede, “I think we need a strong public sector. We have about a $1.7 trillion a year regulatory bill. Seventy-five, 80 percent of that is very useful. You’ve got to have air traffic control. You’ve got to have food safety.”

Today, the same absurd claims once raised about now banal regulations are being tossed about again. Already industry experts have predicted 12.9 million job losses from Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Care Act and Obama’s GHG regulation proposals. Lincoln’s goal is simple: “We are trying to lay down a record of what they’re saying now, because they are going to be wrong again.”

GOP's alternative: Un-Affordable Care Act?

I hesitate to post this because of the author's conclusion: give single-payer (aka "Medicare for all") a second look.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer single-payer. But as I said recently, many Obamacare critics illogically believe the conspiracy theory that Obama has intended all along for the Affordable Care Act to fail, ushering in "socialized medicine" to save the day.    

Even single-payer is not socialized medicine; it's socialized payment for medicine. There are plenty of private doctors and hospitals today that make a fine living off Medicare patients, and nobody accuses them of communist sympathies.

Affordable Care Act ... as compared to what?

By Caroline Poplin

November 14, 2013 | McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Republicans can hardly believe their good luck. The Obama administration has once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. After successfully holding off Republican efforts to destroy Obamacare by shutting down the government and threatening default, the administration badly bungled the rollout of the crown jewel of health reform: the insurance exchanges. (No surprise to those of us who wrestle with computers daily.) Somehow administration leaders also failed to anticipate the predictable response of insurance companies to a perfect opportunity to raise premiums wholesale, while blaming someone else.

Nevertheless, we need to keep in mind that even as they gleefully tear into the ACA, Republicans have not offered an alternative.

On reflection, however, this is no surprise. Republicans don't see a problem with health care in America. Insurers can sell what they chose to whom they chose; people can select policies they like and can afford, or save their money for other things. This is how markets work. The only change Republicans would make is deregulation, so insurers and good prospects can find one another more easily across state lines.

As Ronald Reagan said: "Government is not the solution to the problem, government (in this case, the ACA) is the problem."

For conservatives, health insurance and health care are ordinary commodities to be traded in the marketplace, just like automobile insurance and automobiles.

But health care is not just another item in the shopping cart. As the African-American spiritual observed, "If living were something that money could buy, the rich would live and the poor would die."

And that is where we are in the 21st century. Health care is a matter of life and death. Our medicine is highly effective. Today, we can cure, or treat, diseases that were once fatal - heart attacks, many cancers, even HIV. That is, if you have the money. Today rich Americans live, on average, five years longer than poor citizens.

Nor is health insurance an ordinary insurance product.

Illness today is not evenly distributed across the population. Some 10 percent of people are responsible for 60 percent of health-care costs in the United States. Because most illness continues for many years after diagnosis, these people are easy to identify: patients with multiple sclerosis, congestive heart failure, lymphoma.

No one wants to pay for the sick people - not the insurance companies (particularly if they cannot recover their costs by charging the sick higher premiums), and not healthy customers. We hear this now, as single men and older people complain that to comply with the ACA, they have to pay for maternity benefits that they will never use.

A free market with lots of choices among multiple insurers, risk pools, policies with all sorts of benefits and price structures, allows insurers and healthy individuals to avoid the sick. The less affluent healthy can gamble on inexpensive policies with spotty coverage (useless to the chronically ill): since most people are healthy most of the time, few of them will ever need to test their insurance. (Or they can join large groups of other healthy people working for large employers who provide insurance.) Insurers can charge sick people thousands of dollars a month to cover the cost of their claims, and then some.

The result? The people who need health care the most have the most difficulty getting insurance that covers it. Doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of the exercise?

That, however, is the Republican alternative to the ACA. And remember, even before the ACA, things were not stable, but deteriorating: as health costs rose, premiums, co-pays and deductibles were going up, employers were cutting back. Without the ACA, those trends will continue.

The ACA was an effort to preserve a private health insurance market, using regulation to achieve a better result. As we see, this is very complicated.

There is a third option. If everyone is in the same, large, pool, everything medically necessary is covered, insurers are paid merely to process claims, and premiums are scaled to income, there is enough money to cover everyone at reasonable cost without elaborate, expensive, error-prone computer programs and geniuses to run them. People will be able to choose their doctors and hospitals. (And the rich can always buy more if they want.)

A crazy, wild-eyed socialist nightmare? No, this is Medicare, a familiar, popular, competently-run public insurance system that everyone's parents or grandparents rely on. Person-for-person, disease-for-disease, Medicare is the cheapest, most efficient health insurance program in the country. (There is virtue in simplicity.) Medicare already controls health care costs better than private insurers, and with a few tweaks, could do much more, forcing prices down to the level citizens of every other advanced democracy pay, with no sacrifice in quality.

Given the alternatives, maybe Medicare-for-all deserves a second look.

Eskrow: Where did U.S. wages go?

Here's Eskrow's key observation, one that you cannot even make nowadays in America without being accused of a socialist bent [emphasis mine]:

We don't have a problem of inadequate wealth. The problem is inadequate wealth distribution. For 99 percent of Americans, wage growth has lagged significantly behind increases in productivity. As the authors [of the briefing paper "A Decade of Flat Wages"] note, this is true "regardless of occupation, gender, race/ethnicity, or education level." Since the Great Recession productivity has grown by 7.7 percent, while wages have actually fallen for the bottom 70 percent of earners.

[...] Between 2001 and 2012 productivity grew by 22.2 percent, while wages grew only 0.8 percent. 

My Republican friends, take special note of the phrase, "...regardless of occupation, gender, race/ethnicity or education level."  This phrase should stifle your knee-jerk reactions to blame those other people for America's economic woes.

So the facts are indisputable.  The question is: what are the causes? Eskrow points out a few:

A companion report from EPI, The State of Working America, 12th Edition, identifies some of the causes: Growing inequality. Policy inaction which eroded the value of the minimum wage. The weakening of employees' rights. Tax policy. Wall Street deregulation.

Other factors are left unmentioned, including problems in corporate governance and the distorting effect of changing executive compensation on corporate management practices.

Eskrow also blames another cause: "centrist" Democrats, aka 1990s-era Republicans who today call themselves Democrats: 

The word "centrist" is placed in quotation marks because polls show that their economic views are to the right of the American mainstream. On issues such as corporate taxation, Social Security benefits, and free trade, they stand to the right of most Americans -- and sometimes to the right of most registered Republicans.

Forget Republicans in Congress, they're nuts.  We need Democrats to be Democrats again, grow a spine, or get out of office.

Where Have America's Wages Gone?

By Richard (RJ) Eskrow

August 28, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1ds6Asl

Have historians been unfair to Dubya?

Prof. Stephen Knott argues that Dubya has been treated unfairly by historians making their Best & Worst Presidents lists.  (As if their lists matter to anybody, but let's forget that for now....)

There are two ways to evaluate the success of a U.S. president: by what the evaluator thinks a president did right or wrong; or by how effectively a president got what he wanted; furthermore, one could evaluate how enduring were the gains a president won.

By the first measure, many people, including many Republicans, think Bush was a failure. But partisanship, ideology and ego affect our judgment, so it's one of those things best left to argue over beers. By the second measure, however, I'd argue that Bush was pretty darn successful, unfortunately. And his "achievements" endure.

Why do I say "unfortunately"? We had a recent example. Last night, when noting the nation's reaction to the apprehension of the Boston bombers and their alleged Islamist beliefs, I posted: "It's still Dubya's America and we're just living in it... including President Obama."

That is, I meant that Dubya and his team (including his team at FOX News and Clear Channel) have been extremely successful in framing our view of Muslims, so successful that even President Obama seems prisoner to our prejudices.  The Left is silent while Obama is under constant pressure by the Right to link the entire religion of Islam to terrorism.

Here's the latest bulletin from the conservative GWOT Language Police: "The language of terror," by Charles Krauthammer.  You have to read through a lot of nothing to get to Krauthammer's point at the very end:

Obama has performed admirably during the Boston crisis, speaking both reassuringly and with determination. But he continues to be linguistically uneasy. His wavering over the word terrorism is telling, though in this case unimportant. The real test will come when we learn the motive for the attack.

As of this writing, we don’t know. It could be Islamist, white supremacist, anarchist, anything. What words will Obama use? It is a measure of the emptiness of Obama’s preferred description — “violent extremists” — that, even as we know nothing, it can already be applied to the Boston bomber(s). Which means, the designation is meaningless.

You see, it makes all the difference in the world that the Boston bombers' alleged motivation was Islamist beliefs, and that our President says so. Why? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Because it's ammunition for those who want to categorize all Muslims, including legal U.S. residents and citizens, as suspected terrorists. There's no other reason for the Right to police this language issue so severely. 

And as George Orwell warned us, language controls our thoughts. Control our language, control our thoughts. That is just one "achievement" of the successful George W. Bush "imperial" presidency, but it's a mighty one.

How about some more?  Bush's Great War on Terra (GWOT) continues and even escalates: with drone attacks, G'itmo, sanctioned rendition and torture, domestic spying and Internet surveillance, prosecuting government whistle blowers, and assassinating U.S. citizens when they are overseas. Obama continues Bush's extra-constitutional practice of presidential signing statements. Bush's occupations of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq are inexorable; Obama cannot or will not get out of them. Deregulated Wall Street banks may still gamble, legally, with depositors' and taxpayers' free money and are now Too Bigger To Fail. Deregulated for-profit colleges that live on government-backed student loans still hold the majority of student debt, now at $1 trillion. The budget of Bush's Department of Homeland Security now rivals the Pentagon's. Bush's unfunded Medicare Advantage entitlement is still wildly popular even among seniors in the Tea Parties... yet to put Medicare's finances back in order requires cutting or reforming Medicare Advantage, giving Republicans the opportunity to accuse Democrats of "cutting Medicare." Clinton's federal assault-weapons ban was allowed to expire in 2004; meanwhile right-to-carry and concealed-carry laws were passed in most states with Bush's encouragement, even as mass shootings increased.  And speaking of guns, Obama ironically got blamed for Bush's "Fast and Furious" "gunwalking"/drug-interdiction program by the ATF. And finally, Bush's unaffordable tax cuts on the very wealthy are now sacrosanct even among Democrats who once fought them, even in the worst economic climate since the Great Depression, with the two aforementioned wars still on the nation's credit card, unpaid for.  

As a result of all this and more, Bush increased our national debt 91 percent ($5.9 trillion), and yet somehow escapes blame for it; meanwhile spineless Democrats are ready to apologize for Obama's deficits (totaling $4.9 trillion or a 41 percent increase over FY 2009) caused by Bush's Great Recession and two unfinished wars. For that political magic act, we are compelled to acknowledge that Dubya was a brilliant politician. Obama is a dunderhead by comparison.

I haven't read Knott's book, but based on its title, Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics, it probably highlights Bush's achievements in fighting terrorism.  If that's so, then Knott has an excellent case to make that Bush got everything he wanted and more, i.e. he was pretty darn successful. Too bad for us. 

UPDATE (04.24.2013): Ralph Nader repeats a lot of what I've said in his op-ed: "Obama Is Comfortable With Bush's Inferno." 

UPDATE (04.26.2013):  Here's an acerbic take on Dubya's strategy of "Keep Quiet and Hope They Forget" by Alexandra Petri: "George W. Bush was the greatest president of all time, ever."  It's working.  Dumbo has outsmarted us again.  [Facepalm.]

George W. Bush is victim of a rush to judgment

By Stephen F. Knott

April 20, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/17y2whL

'Weed whack' EPA regulations? Not so fast

'Weed whacker'?! What a terrible analogy! Everybody knows no-string lawn trimmers are superior. Romney obviously doesn't know his way around a man's yard.

Ironically, many of the U.S. environmental regulations that the GOP says are "strangling business" stretch back to Richard Nixon and George Bush, Sr.  

Anyway, if elected, could Romney fulfill his promise to take a "weed whacker" to President Obama's newer regulations on coal and other industries?  Not so fast:

But even if he's elected, Romney couldn't just snap his fingers and get rid of those regulations. His EPA appointees would have to propose rule changes, give the public time to comment on them, and present detailed scientific and legal justifications to prove that undoing or weakening the rules make sense.

"I think that will certainly be done. But it's not something that can be done overnight," says Jeff Holmstead, an industry lawyer who headed EPA's air pollution programs under the second President Bush.

Even if Romney were to undo the regulations, there would be another hurdle: Environmental groups surely would sue. Lawsuits from environmental groups effectively blocked the second President Bush's EPA from weakening some clean air rules.

"If you take a hard right turn on an environmental rule — or for that matter, a hard left turn — you've got strict constructionist judges who are going to say no, and they're on the federal courts today," says Kevin Book, director of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based energy consulting firm.

Book says the federal judges who oversee EPA rules most likely would prevent big changes, regardless of who wins the election.

So if Romney can't keep his campaign promise then what could he do?  The classic GOP approach to regulatory (non-)enforcement:

"A President Romney could starve the agencies of money needed to enforce existing public health safeguards — in effect, take the environmental cop off the beat," says Dan Weiss, a volunteer adviser to the Obama campaign and a fellow at the action fund for the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Voila, problem solved, right?  Well, it means firms would still be breaking the law, they just wouldn't get caught.  But that's all that matters to Big Business and Republicans, I suppose.

On The Campaign Trail, Regulations Dominate The Environmental Debate

By Elizabeth Shogren

October 14, 2012 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/Qi2JQ7

About that 'Are you better off?' line...

Meanwhile, nobody cares whether the QQ Percent are better off.

Actually some Americans are much better off compared to four years ago.  Corporate profits are at an all-time high.  (Romney: "Corporations are people, my friend.")  CEO pay and stock awards increased 5 and 10.7 percent, respectively, in 2011.  And the One Percent captured 93 percent of the income gains in 2010, the first year of post-recession recovery.  

Nevertheless, Romney's top priority is to cut these po' folks taxes and deregulate their industries.

What's Romney gonna do for the shrinking middle class?  Zilch.  (Look at his website if you don't believe me: Romney made specific Issues statements on Israel, Iran, Russia and attracting more immigrants to the U.S., but nothing on the American middle class. Go figure.)  

In fact, Romney will have to raise taxes on the middle class if he wants to keep his promise to make his tax cuts on the wealthy revenue-neutral.

Decline of middle class not Obama's fault

By LZ Granderson

September 5, 2012 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/04/opinion/granderson-middle-class/index.html?hpt=hp_bn4

Reagan judge: Deregulating banks was 'fundamental mistake'

Said Judge Richard Posner:

I was an advocate of the deregulation movement and I made -- along with a lot of other smart people -- a fundamental mistake, which is that deregulation works fine in industries which do not pervade the economy. The financial industry undergirded the entire economy and if it is made riskier by deregulation and collapses in widespread bankruptcies as what happened in 2008, the entire economy freezes because it runs on credit.

I just want to remind you what Mitt Romney proposes to do on bank regulation: "Repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework."  In fact he's been reticent to discuss exactly what that means.  But it is telling that Romney's advised lawmakers "not to rush" to pass new legislation after bailed-out mega-bank JPMorgan lost at least $2 billion on risky gambling.

Reagan-Appointed Judge: Deregulation Movement Made 'A Fundamental Mistake'

August 24, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/PMYz38

Romney's economic 'plan' is madness

Sorry, but voting for Romney simply because he's "not Obama" is irresponsible.  If Romney's advisers' vague economic "plan" can be taken at face value, then it's a promise of short-term austerity measures to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

In the current economy this would be reckless madness.  EU examples show that austerity doesn't work to lower national borrowing costs or attract investment.  And its effects on ordinary citizens ain't pretty.  

Romney's other keystone campaign promise is to repeal Dodd-Frank.  Really?!?  That's the best he could come up with?  This is not something anybody is clamoring for right now, even the bizarro Tea Parties.  There is not a shred of evidence or economic theory to argue that decreased financial regulation would lead to job growth.  (And don't forget how we narrowly avoided financial Armageddon and could not be so lucky next time if we let Wall Street regulate itself....)

To me, this all goes to show that Romney supports exactly what his richest backers are for.  The man has no core beliefs.  He just wants to be President, period.  Heck, even Obama, who is also accused of having no core, campaigned on a ballsy promise to reform healthcare -- and he did it, suffering extreme political damage to this day as thanks.    

Where is Romney's big-picture idea to turn around the economy, or at least improve the average American's quality of life?  What issue does Romney believe in so fervently that he would suffer political damage to support it?  What in the world does this empty suit stand for besides himself?  

Romney's "Recovery Plan" Could Bring On Another Recession

By John Cassidy

August 2, 2012 | New Yorker

URL://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/08/romneys-recovery-plan-could-bring-on-another-recession.html#ixzz22hJmKPtt

Inventor of TBTF banks: It's time to end TBTF

Sandy Weill, In Stunning Reversal, Tells CNBC It's Time To Break Up The Banks

By Bonnie Kavoussi

July 25, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/OCUp9C

Brain science: Why big bankers behave badly

Like most things in life, science can explain why big bankers are sleazeballs.  It's 30+ years of deregulation and financial bubbles that put at least two generations of bankers in permanent "kill" mode, focused on power, conquest and reward, while they're oblivious to risks and downsides.

It's evolution and brain science, folks.  It's incontrovertible.  And if you don't buy it then you're an ideologue.  These sleazeballs need a hard slap of negative reinforcement -- regulation, prosecutions, and jail time -- to re-wire their reptilian brains.

Bankers and the neuroscience of greed

The unconstrained power of bankers acts like a drug on their brains' reward systems, creating insatiable appetites

By Ian Robertson

July 2, 2012 | Guardian

URL:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/bankers-greed-brain-changes

Krugman: GOP's jobs plan is to pollute more

Unfortunately, as Krugman noted elsewhere: "Today's American right doesn't believe in [negative] externalities, or correcting market failures; it believes that there are no market failures, that capitalism unregulated is always right. Faced with evidence that market prices are in fact wrong, they simply attack the science."

Oh, and the eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney is flip-flopping once again.

Party of Pollution

By Paul Krugman

October 20, 2011 | New York Times

Last month President Obama finally unveiled a serious economic stimulus plan — far short of what I'd like to see, but a step in the right direction. Republicans, predictably, have blocked it. But the new plan, combined with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, seems to have shifted the national conversation. We are, suddenly, focused on what we should have been talking about all along: jobs.

So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker.

Now it would be wrong to say that all Republicans see increased pollution as the answer to unemployment. Herman Cain says that the unemployed are responsible for their own plight — a claim that, at Tuesday's presidential debate, was met with wild applause.

Both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have, however, put weakened environmental protection at the core of their economic proposals, as have Senate Republicans. Mr. Perry has put out a specific number — 1.2 million jobs — that appears to be based on a study released by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association, claiming favorable employment effects from removing restrictions on oil and gas extraction. The same study lies behind the claims of Senate Republicans.

But does this oil-industry-backed study actually make a serious case for weaker environmental protection as a job-creation strategy? No.

Part of the problem is that the study relies heavily on an assumed "multiplier" effect, in which every new job in energy leads indirectly to the creation of 2.5 jobs elsewhere. Republicans, you may recall, were scornful of claims that government aid that helps avoid layoffs of schoolteachers also indirectly helps save jobs in the private sector. But I guess the laws of economics change when it's an oil company rather than a school district doing the hiring.

Moreover, even if you take the study's claims at face value, it offers little reason to believe that dirtier air and water can solve our current employment crisis. All the big numbers in the report are projections for late this decade. The report predicts fewer than 200,000 jobs next year, and fewer than 700,000 even by 2015.

You might want to compare these numbers with a couple of other numbers: the 14 million Americans currently unemployed, and the one million to two million jobs that independent estimates suggest the Obama plan would create, not in the distant future, but in 2012.

More pollution, then, isn't the route to full employment. But is there a longer-term economic case for less environmental protection? No. Serious economic analysis actually says that we need more protection, not less.

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn't based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

And policy makers should take that damage into account. We need more politicians like the courageous governor who supported environmental controls on a coal-fired power plant, despite warnings that the plant might be closed, because "I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people."

Actually, that was Mitt Romney, back in 2003 — the same politician who now demands that we use more coal.

How big are these damages? A new study by researchers at Yale and Middlebury College brings together data from a variety of sources to put a dollar value on the environmental damage various industries inflict. The estimates are far from comprehensive, since they only consider air pollution, and they make no effort to address longer-term issues such as climate change. Even so, the results are stunning.

For it turns out that there are a number of industries inflicting environmental damage that's worth more than the sum of the wages they pay and the profits they earn — which means, in effect, that they destroy value rather than create it. High on the list, by the way, is coal-fired electricity generation, which the Mitt Romney-that-was used to stand up to.

As the study's authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn't necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down. What it means, instead, is that "the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high." That is, environmental regulations aren't strict enough.

Republicans, of course, have strong incentives to claim otherwise: the big value-destroying industries are concentrated in the energy and natural resources sector, which overwhelmingly donates to the G.O.P. But the reality is that more pollution wouldn't solve our jobs problem. All it would do is make us poorer and sicker.