These three reports show the Republican distortion machine in full effect

Wall Street firms have earned more in profits so far under President Obama than during all eight years of George W. Bush's presidency, according to The Washington Post.

The securities industry earned $82.52 billion in profits during the first two and a half years of Obama's presidency, compared to $77.17 billion total under President Bush, according to data compiled by The Washington Post, giving legs to the claim that even while Obama has publicly denounced "fat cat bankers on Wall Street," banks are now as profitable as ever.

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Nonetheless, major U.S. banks have struggled this year on the whole, with Goldman Sachs reporting its second loss ever as a public company and BofA's stock price plunging over the last ten months. The financial industry has already announced a slew of mass layoffs, and the New York comptroller recently estimated that Wall Street could lose 10,000 more jobs by the end of 2012.

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The Republican National Committee slammed the Obama administration following the Post's story, urging voters on its blog to "Occupy Obama" -- a reference to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which targets bank profitability at the expense of ordinary Americans, among other issues.

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Despite this evidence that banks haven’t suffered under Obama, Republicans and Wall Street traders and lobbyists are attempting to make Wall Street’s windfalls even larger. Industry analysts told the Post that the Dodd-Frank financial reform law will stabilize the future of the financial industry even as it has “crimped bank profits” slightly. But that hasn’t stopped lobbyists from spending millions of dollars to make its rules and regulations more Wall Street friendly, and it hasn’t stopped Republican presidential candidates from lining up to support the law’s wholesale repeal, even if they aren’t always quite sure what the law actually does.

Super Committee Republicans are floating a trial balloon that would produce new tax revenue, in apparent contravention of Grover Norquist’s taxpayer protection pledge, according to Wall Street Journal editorialist Stephen Moore.

But as Moore explains that the offer has a catch:


Neither Republican nor Democratic aides were immediately available to discuss the proposal. But if accurate as reported, it represents both a significant expansion of the growing rift between Norquist and the GOP, and a bad deal for Democrats.

For months, Republicans have insisted that any tax reforms they agree to be mathematically revenue neutral. If they somehow trigger a burst of economic growth, and thus increase revenue, that’s fine — but effective rate increases were verboten. Likewise, they tried to construe revenues collected in the form of higher fees, copays, etc. as “new revenue” but refused to use the tax code for the same purposes.

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