There’s no alternative but to resurrect Glass-Steagall as a whole. Even then, the biggest banks are still too big to fail or to regulate. We also need to heed the recent advice of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, and break them up.
At the same time, there’s no point to the “carried interest” loophole that allows private-equity managers like Mitt Romney to treat their incomes as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent, when they’ve risked no money of their own.
If private equity were good for America it wouldn’t need this or the other tax preference it depends on, elevating debt over equity. But the private equity industry has huge political clout, which is why these tax preferences remain.
Get it? Bain Capital and JPMorgan are parts of the same problem. The President should be leading the charge against both.
Robert Reich, Why Obama Should be Attacking Casino Capitalism — Both Romney’s Bain and JPMorgan.”
Conservative super-PACs are attempting to gin up disillusionment among President Obama’s supporters and keep their turnout low in November’s election, in part by highlighting his ties to Wall Street.
Within the past month, three separate ads — two from the American Future Fund and one from Crossroads GPS — have assailed Obama from broadly comparable perspectives. Especially striking are the American Future Fund ads which make the kind of anti-Wall Street argument heard largely on the left.
The outside groups’ message contrasts with the one being pushed by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, who has called the Obama’s “the most anti-business administration” since President Carter’s.
Super-PAC ads look to tie Obama to Wall Street, turn off his base
“Mitt Romney has a Latino problem,” House Democratic Caucus Vice-Chairman Xavier Becerra (Calif.) said in an interview with Jordan Fabian of Univision News. “And like those who are alcoholic and go to Alcoholics Anonymous when they’ve got a problem, Mitt Romney should go to a place where he could learn what his problem is and really try to change his ways.”
“You’re not going to get rid of that disease that infects you if you don’t treat it and you don’t believe it,” he added.
Becerra is the No. 5 Democrat in the House. His comments come as polls show Romney trailing President Obama among Hispanic voters by as much as a 45-percentage-point margin…
Romney’s ‘Latino problem’ similar to alcoholism, says Rep. Xavier Becerra
Mitt Romney got pretty specific about unemployment in an interview with Mark Halperin yesterday, arguing that his “policies” will “get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, perhaps a little lower.”
It was an odd sort of prediction. For one thing, earlier this month, Romney told voters any unemployment rate above 4 percent is a problem. For another, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget, if existing policies remain in place, the unemployment rate is already on track to reach 6% by 2016. (In other words, Romney is promising to deliver results we’re supposed to get anyway.)
A pass/fail test
[T]he threat to [Orrin] Hatch really isn’t [his Tea Party challenger Dan] Liljenquist and anything he might say and do; it’s an outside group or individual deciding to target the race and pour big money into the anti-Hatch effort. If this were to happen, it might not matter that Hatch has given his enemies little in the way of ammunition. With enough money, anyone can be made to look bad. And the one thing Hatch can’t run away from is his political longevity, which is a liability to today’s outsider/purity-obsessed GOP base.
Mahtesian notes that the Club for Growth seems unlikely to enter the fray, but in the super PAC era, a billionaire or millionaire could at any moment take a random interest in any race and alter the outcome with a hefty investment. The best illustration of this came Tuesday night in Kentucky, where Tom Massie won a GOP congressional primary after a rich 21-year-old Texas college student spent more than $500,000 on his behalf. A week before that, another plutocrat fueled the unexpected rise of Deb Fischer in a Nebraska Senate primary.
The pro-Fischer money didn’t come in until the final few days of that race. Which means that even though he’s in good shape now, Hatch still has a month of sweating ahead of him.
Orrin Hatch is not out of the woods yet
