John Wasik

Two women are fending off a vicious man-handling of investor protection.

As Congress pettily wrangles over the debt limit and the next budget, Mary Schapiro and Elizabeth Warren are fighting to protect you against the ravages of Wall Street.

Wall Street and its Republican allies would like to make the Dodd-Frank financial reforms disappear. The money trust has been pouring millions into lobbying to eviscerate the budget of the Securities and Exchange Commission and blocking the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Mary Schapiro, who chairs the SEC, said she can’t kick start the myriad pro-investor rules of Dodd-Frank without adequate funding. Republicans, lead by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, want to “starve the beast” in their fiscal year 2012 proposal.

Ryan’s new budget proposal wants to cut off the SEC budget at its knees by giving the SEC $112 million for fiscal year 2012. That effectively freezes the top securities regulator’s funding at 2008 levels. The current budget deal gives the agency a slight increase in funding.

Remember what happened to Wall Street in 2008? The Obama Administration wants $308 million for the SEC to prevent another year like that from happening. The money trust has deliberate amnesia.

Does the prospect of inflation, higher oil prices and double-dip housing recession keep you up at night? Long-short or market-neutral funds seem ideal for nervous nellies. They attempt to blunt your downside risk by “shorting” stocks while giving you a piece of the upside.

Brokers are aggressively hawking these funds — sometimes referred to as “alternative investments” — to conservative investors as a way to blunt market risk.

Yet they don’t always work the way you hope they will. While these hedge-like funds are certainly a bulwark in awful markets, you’re almost always better off in a broad-based global stock index fund like the Vanguard Total World Stock ETF in bullish times.

Now that federal government shutdown has been averted, it’s a good time to examine what’s at stake for most of America in the crucial next round of budget talks.

Not doing anything to reduce the size of government debt will be catastrophic. Not much quibble there. But acting hastily and cutting the wrong things can be even more costly to social and economic welfare.

Neither the Republican nor the Democrat’s budget plans for 2012 will meet the major challenge of sustaining social programs while cutting the most egregious waste.

Two words of advice for the majority of U.S. home sellers: Get real. In most places, the market won’t come back for a long time, if ever. American housing in the worst markets is a damaged good that may remain so for a generation.

There are exceptions, of course. You can expect to see a sales and price bounceback in a handful of places that combine robust job growth with favorable supply-and-demand numbers.

According to the Local Market Monitor,which tracks real estate trends, there’s been strong job growth in Bethesda, Dallas, Raleigh, Washington, Milwaukee, San Jose and Houston. Most of these cities weren’t hit particularly hard by the bubble.

More taxes are coming, more taxes are coming! During the American Revolution, we could have substituted “more taxes” with “the British.”

We can’t blame old King George for our fiscal misery anymore. There are more taxes on the way as most states grapple with huge budget and pension deficits.

Residents of the most budget-busted states shouldn’t be in denial anymore. Public services will be cut further and you can expect to see more taxes on every level. Taxes are still headed higher to offset shortfalls from property valuations and slack consumer spending, which may not return to normal for years.

If you or your child is hoping to enter college in the fall, it’s a good time to be looking for a scholarship. Take the Ivy leap now.

Scholarship and grants form the bedrock of my college financing philosophy: Get as much of a discount upfront on college bills before you step inside those ivy-covered walls.

I’ve always disliked loans, which can hobble young adults for years. Grants don’t have to be paid back and should be your first financing option. There’s a method to the Ivy leap that takes a great deal of diligence. Scholarships don’t magically appear in the mail, and you’ll need to fill out a lot of forms.

If you’re an investor, how should you regard the Japanese crisis? Should you be shorting Japanese stocks? Should you bet heavily on Korean companies to pick up the slack? What about American-based companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard that are dependent upon the Japanese supply chain?

There are no clear-cut answers as supply chains are often as complex as the products whose parts depend on them. You need to look beyond Japan and the current headlines to explore a number of scenarios.

Japan will be hurt in the short-term. Although eventually Japanese engineers and crisis planners will get things moving again, in the interim the island nation is short of electricity. Unlike oil and other commodities, they can’t easily pipe in more electrons from a ship or plane. A weakened grid means lower or no productivity in factories and brownouts in office buildings. Parts are not being shipped out for everything from cellphones to autos.

This defies the conventional wisdom, but some tax preparation is easy and actually makes sense — if anything can in the murky U.S. tax code.

Some of my favorite write-offs are “above the line.” That means they are relatively simple to declare and you can put them right on the first page of your 1040 tax form.

While most of the tax code is maddening — just try to figure out your alternative minimum tax liability without software or a tax planner — there are certain deductions that often fly under the radar. If you have a small business, for example, did you know that one-half of self-employment taxes are deductible?

The Japanese tsunami and nuclear disaster has triggered a lot of serious thinking about personal disaster planning.

While my hopes and prayers are with the Japanese people as they attend to their needs and recover, it’s an ongoing reminder that we have to consider and plan for worst-case scenarios in our own lives.

Protecting against a disaster requires financial triage. Most of us never think about the need to do this until faced with a life-changing event. The single-best “first responder” safeguard against all kinds of catastrophes is a combination of adequate savings and insurance.

With crude oil prices once again shooting above $100 a barrel, getting a fill-up at the gas pump is getting pricey again. I just spent $60 to fill up my minivan over the weekend.

Even if the numerous Middle Eastern fights for freedom are resolved soon — unlikely at this point — we will still be hostage to foreign oil producers. Each increase in the price of oil is a direct energy tax on our transportation budgets.

Since conservatives in Congress appear unwilling to greenlight a comprehensive federal policy that will boost alternative energy, renewable electricity or green buildings, you’ll have to jumpstart your own conservation plan.