Under the title of the “Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act of 2009,” Democrats in the House and Senate are introducing a bill today to raise $150 billion dollars annually through a small 0.25% tax on financial transactions. Reps. Peter DeFazio and Ed Perlmutter are the main sponsors in the [...]

In a couple days, the President will convene a jobs summit, amidst pervasive calls to deal with the budget deficit during a recession. Sadly, both the issue of jobs and the deficit are being dealt with in Congress through conservative frames, with policies like across-the-board, untargeted tax cuts for job creation, or “entitlement reform” commissions [...]

On a conference call this morning, Nancy Pelosi laid out a variety of strategies for job creation, and rejected the conventional wisdom that deficit reduction would be bigger goal at this time, saying, we’ll never have deficit reduction unless we have job creation.” “What I’ve told the members is that we have a lot of [...]

A huge statement tonight – Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and one of the chairs of the Populist Caucus in the House, just called for the firing of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, saying that Barack Obama’s economic team is failing him. He said that there’s a “growing sense” in the caucus that a [...]

Following up on yesterday’s item, House leaders continued to discuss a jobs bill. Reuters gave a list of potential programs to be targeted. Top lawmakers are looking at a variety of options, including road construction, tax breaks and assistance to hard-pressed state governments which could create jobs but also worsen budget deficits in the short [...]

The universe of people calling for a “second stimulus” just a few months ago was incredibly small. But continued bad job numbers and the crossing of the magic 10% threshold on the unemployment rate has rapidly changed minds in Washington, although the terminology has change to a “jobs bill.” It’s actually looking more likely than [...]

Over the weekend, the G-20 held a summit on the financial crisis, and several nations put forward the idea of a “Tobin tax,” a fractional tax on international financial transactions, to help pay for economic recovery and future bank failures. Germany, France and now Britain have all endorsed the idea. Timothy Geithner, speaking for the [...]