Mitt Romney released his tax returns for 2010 and an estimate for 2011 today; he, or rather his accountant, is very good at taxes. Nobody suggests that anything on Romney’s tax form reflects any illegal activity. Rather, he’s working within the bounds of the law, taking advantage of the immense largesse and tax favorability our government bestows on rich people.

I have to agree with The Economist that this policy is trivial, even if you agree (as I do) with the component parts. “Our economy is riddled with a multitude of deeply-embedded structural flaws that allow the well-connected to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us, but nobody will do anything about it.” And yes, that was on the website of The Economist.

The biggest reason why you would want to use higher taxes on the rich and the nation’s largest corporations if you’re going to pay for stimulative job-creation measures is not just because these would be the least disruptive offsets for an economy waiting to heal. Just as high on the list is the fact that low taxes on the ultra-rich distorts the economy and makes future growth nearly impossible.

A perfect example of this comes from the Washington Post’s salutary article today on capital gains taxes. This is something that hardly even gets talked about anymore, but it’s at the heart of at least one of the pay-fors on the White House’s list, the carried interest loophole. The only reason that hedge fund managers are paying drastically lower tax rates is because the taxes on their capital gains, which they are calling their entire income, is drastically lower than the income tax. And this has produced massive inequality, pushed along by the rich contributors of politicians in both parties.

Well, this is a bit unexpected. OMB Director Jack Lew strolled into the White House briefing room and laid out the plan to pay for the American Jobs Act, and it’s entirely from ending tax breaks for rich people and corporations.

Following up on the Filibernie post from earlier today, the president is looking at revenue increases as he enters the debt reduction talks. Too bad he is not even close to the 1:1 cuts for revenue that Senator Sanders is demanding.

Thanks to many loopholes in our tax code–the carried interest loophole being the most important–the richest people in American are likely paying a lower tax rate than you are.

Social Security benefits are, on average, extremely low. They are not a sufficient replacement for prior earnings, and they aren’t really enough for subsistence living absent other sources of income. Cutting that meager benefit is simply the wrong path and will send many seniors into abject poverty.

The months and months of effort put into a bill that won’t create hardly anything in the way of jobs – more of a bill to stave off more disaster than anything – is a perfect model for a dysfunctional legislative system. To recap, the Senate passed a $154 billion package back in December that included a lot of the elements in this current jobs bill. The House broke it apart, passed a small piece of it (which did become law) and then passed another piece in March. The informal conference committee produced another bill which ballooned back up as high as $200 billion. Then Blue Dogs decided to strip out provisions that would maintain health care for the poor and the jobless and deliver aid to the states. Now, the Senate is putting them back in. And we’re nearly six months from that original vote, and the two chambers seem diametrically opposed on their priorities, with no end in sight.

With the strong anti-Wall Street mood in the country, it’s ludicrous that Senate Democrats are still behaving this way. They’ve lost their ability to shock me.

We have a $180 billion dollar jobs bill likely to get a vote this week. Very few people know about it. But labor has made it a litmus test.