David Dayen

This week marks the end of the public comment period on the Volcker rule. The usual suspects have all delivered their comments. The huge finance lobby delivered their mass of comments, in particular calls for multiple exemptions and waivers. But a new group, Occupy the SEC, a collection of experts in finance which sprung out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, delivered a 325 page letter to the SEC about the rule reminding the SEC about their obligations to the public.

Senate Democrats have a plan for the payroll tax cut legislation that House Republicans basically gave up on yesterday. They can add the Unemployment Insurance extension and “doc fix” to the payroll bill, along with offsets for the UI and “fix” that the GOP might buy, and force the whole package on the House as the deadline nears.

Dayen’s news roundup from February 13, 2011 with links to stories on the bank settlement, Obama’s budget, Rick/Mitt/Newt, Syria, Israel, Iran, Apple in China, the safety net, and much more.

As I mentioned on Sunday, the Greek Parliament agreed to a bailout deal that exchanges funds from Europe for new austerity measures that will sink the economy even further. The measures effectively destroy labor law and decimate wages.

We know that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has rejected the new compromise policy on birth control access, and that the Republican leadership agrees with them. But does that mean they have a chance to shift policy legislatively? The chances of that took a severe blow today, when Maine Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins came out in favor of the Obama Administration’s new rules.

We’re going to have to endure this misguided lines of argument from those savvy business reporters, and CNBC’s Diana Olick is at the head of the pack. So we might as well take on her poor arguments about the foreclosure fraud settlement directly.

In an impressive bit of caving, the House Republican leadership has given up on finding offsets for the payroll tax cut, proposing a bill that would extend the current cut to the end of the year without any funding. However, the other two pieces that were tied to the overall legislation at the end of last year, extended unemployment benefits and the “doc fix” to avoid a reset of Medicare reimbursement rates, would not be included.

The Obama budget is proposing to tax dividends for high-income taxpayers as ordinary income. This is not a change on capital gains, it’s on dividends, the money earned through corporate payouts of profits to shareholders. The capital gains tax rate would rise to 20% from 15% under the Obama proposal, consistent with prior years.

Lots of people were angered by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s announcement that he would use money gained from the foreclosure fraud settlement to plug his budget hole. I suspected that a lot of states with a budget gap would go this route. And that apparently includes Missouri, a state with a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Attorney General.

The FY 2013 budget that the Administration will release today is, in the long run, a meaningless document in substantive terms, so I don’t want to spend that much time on it. But I was a little surprised with the pushback I received about my assessment that it reflects a shift in tone rather than policy. It’s a simple fact that the Administration has wanted a deficit deal for some time, and that this budget will build in a deficit deal. They’re going about it in a smarter way with a higher bid in the negotiations.