This afternoon, President Bush announced amendments to Executive Order 12866 on Regulatory Planning and Review. EO 12866, originally issued by President Clinton, places the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) squarely in the middle of agencies' rulemaking process. President Bush's amendments go even further in allowing the White House to force its own agenda on agencies. The most notable of the new amendments:

• Impose a market failure criterion where agencies had previously been able to regulate based upon identification of threats to public welfare.

In his blog below, my colleague Craig casts a favorable light on the offsets Sen. Max Baucus uses to bring his $8 billion small business tax cut into PAYGO compliance, calling them "progressive" in net affect.

The latest EPI Snapshot presents yet more data points on the trend in rising inequality. Lawrence Marshall and Jared Bernstein describe two notable measures of inequality growth: (1) The share of corporate income going to the owners of capital The most recent data (third quarter of 2006) reveal that owners of capital received 23.0% of all corporate income, the highest share since 1966. That means that the compensation of employees was at the lowest share in over 25 years. and (2) the share of capital income going to the top 1% of the income scale

S. 1 (text), the Senate ethics and lobbying bill (now in its second week on the floor), lies in a state of legislative limbo following the failure of a cloture vote, 51-46, late last night. Because S. 1 contains Senate rules changes, a two-thirds vote is required for cloture, rather than the usual 60 votes.