Former MA Governor Mitt Romney campaigns through swing states, seen here in June with Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA)

In a Monday night interview with a Fox affiliate in Denver, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney announced he would limit tax deductions up to $17,000. That's all well and good, but did he pick that number out of thin air? The former Massachusetts governor didn't specify in his quoted comments:

“As an option you could say everybody’s going to get up to a $17,000 deduction; and you could use your charitable deduction, your home mortgage deduction, or others — your healthcare deduction, and you can fill that bucket, if you will, that $17,000 bucket that way. And higher income people might have a lower number.

“Or you could do it by the same method that Bowles-Simpson did it where you could limit certain deductions, but that’s the sort of thing you do with Congress.”

While we wait to find out why Romney chose that $17,000 number or if he will adjust it, the proposal appears as close to a politically neutral one as possible in the world of taxes. It increases federal revenue while avoiding targeting any one particular exemption, deduction, or group of people that might lead to an outcry. Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) proposed limiting the value of deductions in July, but he offered no specific number in his plan to reduce the deficit.

Hopefully, in the 45 minutes allotted to discussing the economy in tonight's debate, moderator Jim Lehrer can offer some pointed questions to elicit more specifics about Romney's vague tax plan.

Video of Romney's interview with the Fox affiliate is embedded below.

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, left, and Stanley Fischer, right, Governor of the Bank of Israel, talk together outside the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium on Friday.

When Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke spoke on Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, it seemed he had given up all hope of Congress listening to the warning he made in July. 

At that time, Bernanke said U.S. economic policies were on an unsustainable path and the "recovery could be endangered by the confluence of tax increases and spending reductions that will take effect early next year if no legislative action is taken." 

Since Congress has yet to pass a budget and prevent compulsory cuts from going into effect at the beginning of 2013, which Bernanke warned could lead to 1.25 million fewer jobs being created that year, the Chairman sighed, made no mention of Congress, and acknowledged the Fed can do more. But what exactly, he left to be desired.

In his defense of unconventional monetary policies, Bernanke hinted that the Fed may employ a third round of quantitative easing (QE). That would mean a third round of bond purchases intended to fight unemployment by encouraging more borrowing and spending as well as even lower long-term interest rates.

Caroline Baum of Bloomberg View has a prediction:

That means another kick in the pants is likely. While Bernanke said the "hurdle" for non-traditional policies may be high, the bar for additional action seems to be set quite low. The minutes from the Fed's July 31-Aug. 1 meeting state that additional steps "would likely be warranted pretty soon" absent a "substantial and sustainable" improvement in the economy.

What might that mean for the election?

There are only two more meetings before the November election: Sept. 12-13 and Oct. 23-24. The Fed would probably prefer to stay out of the headlines in late October, which means September would be the most logical time to announce something beyond the existing maturity-extension program.

The big question is, if (or when) the historically unpopular Congress again fails to pass a budget, how much more can Bernanke and the Fed do? How much will they do?

AP Photo/Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, File

Bei Bei Shuai's 2011 police photo.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) this week has held up the re-authorization of the National Flood Insurance Program, which insures 5.6 million flood-prone homes. He says he wants a vote on legislation that declares life begins at conception.  What does this have to do with Bei Bei Shuai, a Chinese immigrant in Indiana who stands accused of murdering her daughter and attempted feticide?

Both events indicate the growing legal trend of states' increasingly delineating rights to the fetus, separate from the mother bearing it. 33 weeks into her pregnancy, Shuai's boyfriend announced he planned to leave her and their unborn child. Shuai, devastated, swallowed rat poison in an effort to take her own life, but her dose was not lethal and she drove to a friend's house who then rushed her to the hospital for treatment.

A week later, she gave birth to her daughter Angel through emergency C-section, but complications ensued and her daughter died three days later. Shuai then spent a month in the hospital's psychiatric unit recuperating. Soon after, the state of Indiana charged her with the counts she now faces, which could send her away to prison for life.

Senator Paul's amendment, the Life at Conception Act, would "ensure equal protection for right to life of each born and preborn human person." Paul introduced the amendment on Monday, but the act originally surfaced in January, 2011. The Act "declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being beginning at the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual comes into being. Prohibits construing this Act to require the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has vowed to block Paul's amendment to the re-authorization bill, which would immediately overturn Roe. v. Wade. Bei Bei Shuai's case, which has led to hundreds of people signing a petition calling for Indiana to drop the charges, depicts the precarious legal and social situations pregnant women increasingly find themselves in -- suicide is the fifth leading cause of death among pregnant women.

If Shuai is convicted, her case sets a dangerous legal precedent concerning the behavior of expectant mothers. Slate's Libby Copeland sums it up well:

This is such a difficult case. You can sympathize with Shuai and her apparent mental illness while also being deeply disturbed by what she did. But her prosecution by Marion County prosecutor Terry Curry, a Democrat, seems entirely inappropriate, and speaks to the increasingly common notion of pregnant women as mere vessels for baby-making... Shuai’s story is yet another test case for a culture that too often frames the needs of mothers as at odds with those of their offspring.

At least 38 states have fetal homicide laws, including Indiana. At least 23 of these apply to the earliest stages of pregnancy, including "conception." Alabama has a "chemical endangerment" law under which at least 60 women have been arrested for doing drugs while pregnant. In Iowa, the state charged a pregnant woman with attempted feticide after she fell down a flight of stairs, initial police reports alleged she intentionally threw herself down them, but she denies any such intent. The charges were eventually dropped. (RH Reality Check hosted a call with the mother, Christine Taylor, about the Shuai case; you can read the transcript here.)

These examples illustrate the increasing trend of criminalizing behavior of expectant mothers who do endanger, consciously or not, their unborn child. While state legislatures initially passed these laws in an effort to protect pregnant women -- recognizing an additional crime when the life of the fetus was terminated in assaults or violent crimes -- the judicial practice has turned these laws more towards protecting the actual fetus than using them as additional protections for women.

National Registry of Exonerations

The National Registry of Exonerations, a brand-new joint project between Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, released its first report on Monday. To date, it has examined nearly 900 individual cases of prisoners exonerated in the United States from January, 1989 through February, 2012. 

The findings thus far? Nearly half of those were wrongfully convicted of murder, and 101 were wrongfully sentenced to death:

"The National Registry of Exonerations gives an unprecedented view of the scope of the problem of wrongful convictions in the United States," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. "It's a widespread problem."

In the criminal justice system, the police and the district attorneys, ostensibly, represent the people. But policemen and lawyers are all too human, susceptible to errors and mistakes that the report determines they had little incentive to acknowledge and correct. You'd think that their goal would be, primarily, accuracy -- to find and punish the guilty while vindicating and protecting the innocent. But for a prosecutor to challenge the evidence or confessions supplied by the police is to damage that relationship, and call into question the competency and authority of both institutions.

One wrongful conviction or execution is one too many, and the NRE's report demonstrates they happen fairly frequently. As such, it's worth calling many more convictions into question.

If there is anything that can capture how poorly the U.S. Senate handles its campaign financial record, S. 219 comes pretty close. Also known as the Senate Campaign Disclosure Act, the bill asks only that Senate candidates file designations, statements, and reports directly in electronic form -- something Presidential and House candidates already do...very, very slowly.

Now, Senate candidates must print out their campaigns' financial records, fill out the FEC report forms using a typewriter, bundle the hundreds of sheets and either walk them down or mail, not e-mail, them to the Office of the Secretary of the Senate. There the Senate candidates' (or rather their assistants') responsibilities end. 

The Secretary of the Senate then scans each page and emails it to the Federal Election Commission. From the FEC's inbox, the hundreds of thousands of pages are then printed and bound, boxed up and shipped to a government contractor in Virginia. There, workers manually re-enter all of the data in each of those reports, meaning weeks before voters can see where candidates' money comes from and where it goes. 

Once the FEC scans the reports, they are available to the public, but they are neither searchable nor viewable online. Earlier versions of this bill have died in the Senate since 2007, even earlier this year.

The cost of this arcane process? $450,000 every year, according to NPR. The price of the new bill? Virtually nothing. (Oh, and a better informed public is also free.)