EPI is a small, respected economic policy think tank focusing on progressive economic issues. They do good work, so naturally, James O’Keefe tried to discredit them by conning them into a phony effort to pay for favorable findings — but EPI’s folks saw the ruse.

That giant sucking sound you hear today is the sound of jobs being outsourced as President Obama signs into law three free trade deals; South Korea, Colombia and Panama. According to the Economic Policy Institute, passing the Korea Free Trade deal will likely cost this country 159,000 jobs.

President Obama has been traveling the country championing his doomed America Jobs Act as his plan to address the jobs crisis. But during the same time Obama has been publicly flogging this dead show bill, his administration was actually implementing policies and pushing legislation through Congress that will destroy tens of thousand of jobs in this country.

The White House wants you to believe that the American Jobs Act is loaded up with bipartisan solutions once preferred by Republicans. And to some extent, that’s true. But there are a number of Easter eggs in here, policy ideas that originated with liberal policy groups. The White House may be touting the bipartisan bona fides on the top line. They may have frozen out the liberal policy shops for years. But when the time comes to save their bacon with jobs programs, they come back to the liberal wonks.

On an international level I would go so far as to say these three liberal health care plans are all significantly to the right of basically even center-right party in the rest of the industrialized world on health care. “Tort reform” gets more play than single payer. If these constitute the “left flank” of the political discussion around the pressing issue of health care costs in America, we as a country are screwed.

I’m surprised that my post, “Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name” has created a bit of a firestorm within what passes for the left wing political blogosphere. It has elicited responses from Andy Rich of the Roosevelt Institute, Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal, as well as two groups only mentioned in passing in the piece, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

In a blog post today [yesterday], Yves Smith stated that the Economic Policy Institute “supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts back in December,” and went on to criticize EPI and other progressive organizations for submitting a budget plan (and receiving funding for doing the work) at the 2011 Peterson Fiscal Summit. For the record, I also was on a panel at their first summit last year.

Responding to the Obama Administration’s apparent decision to cut Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funding, Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute says that progressives “are losing the argument at a higher level” about the budget in general, putting all programs and services at risk.

President Obama’s NAFTA-style Korea Free Trade will still cost the country 159,000 jobs, despite last-minute changes to the agreement.

If we do see a jobs bill from the Senate, the main component (accounting for 87% of the spending at this point) would be the Schumer-Hatch job creation tax credit. This would give businesses a break on their half of payroll taxes (6.2% of salary) for every worker they hire in 2010 who has been unemployed at least 60 days. It would also offer incentives – $1000, I believe – for every year the employee remains with the company beyond 2010. The projected cost is $13 billion dollars.