The ten Republicans in question have collected about $6.7 million in federal farm money dating back to the 1990s, according to analysis by the Environmental Working Group. Over the years, they’ve also justified cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) with a variety of smears against recipients and misrepresentations of the program’s nature and performance. Rep. Stephen Fincher’s (R-TN) erroneous biblical argument for cuts that would knock two million Americans off of food aid drew attention last month given that he’s gotten nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies over the years. But some of his colleagues deserve similar scrutiny for their apparent hypocrisy with regard to the House farm bill.

Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD), who’s gotten over $500,000 in subsidy payments since 1995, is a particularly interesting case. While Noem is diplomatic in most public statements on food stamps, she endorses a common smear of the program when away from cameras. In a constituent letter obtained by ThinkProgress, Noem wrote that “loopholes and fraud in the current program have lead to federal spending on SNAP to increase [sic] by 270 percent over the past ten years.” Rep. Vicki Hartzler (R-MO) offers to same rationale for the cuts, and has taken $500,000 in farm subsidies as well.

In fact, the jump in food stamp enrollment is due almost entirely to the catastrophic economic collapse and ensuing Great Recession. Even amid that heightened strain on the program’s staff, “SNAP achieved its lowest error rates on record in fiscal year 2011,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Outright fraud is down to just one percent.

Waste, fraud, and abuse are more common in the farm subsidies programs that have sent over a million taxpayer dollars to the Hartzler and Noem households over the years than in food stamps. Crop insurance alone has a 4.7 percent error rate, compared to 3.8 percent for SNAP.

Other common rationales from this group of would-be SNAP cutters fare no better under scrutiny. Many conservatives believe charities and individuals can better serve the hungry. But as ThinkProgress has noted, food charities say they are already beyond their capacity and cannot step into the breach the House bill would leave. Conservative objections to policies that expand SNAP eligibility to families just above the program’s cutoff level of 130 percent of the poverty line look less righteous when you consider that 8 in 10 hungry American children live in households with income up to 185 percent of the poverty line.

And while Rep. Marlin Stutzman’s (R-IN) suggestion that America’s poor amount to budget fat in need of trimming is a philosophical question, the question of dependency he raised in a 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing food stamps has no basis in fact.

ThinkProgress intern Kumar Ramanathan contributed research to this post.

(Credit: AP)

Have conservatives learned their lesson from the 47 percent debacle? A new paper from arguably the most influential conservative economist in the country, titled “In Defense Of The One Percent,” suggests no. Even worse, the paper shows how dividing America into Randian producers and naturally subordinate moochers is the only way to resolve a central contradiction in modern conservative economic thinking — meaning that the GOP will be stuck making a losing argument until it conducts a total rethink of its economic philosophy.

Harvard Economics Professor N. Gregory Mankiw, the author of “In Defense,” was the chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and counseled Mitt Romney on economic issues in 2006 and 2012. Despite his occasional heresies (Mankiw famously supports a carbon tax to fight global warming), Mankiw is one of the most-respected and most-representative conservative economist active in public life today.

Mankiw’s defense of the one percent proceeds from a fairly conventional script. He argues that structural transformations in the economy, principally caused by the advent of new technology like computers, “have allowed a small number of highly educated and exceptionally talented individuals to command superstar incomes in ways that were not possible a generation ago.” The recent spike in inequality, for Mankiw, is then largely caused by the smart and talented being able to express their talents freely. Much of Mankiw’s paper is devoted to arguing that punishing these talented individuals through more progressive taxation would be unfair because they earned it fair and square.*

This argument doesn’t work if you think, like many Americans, the economic game is rigged in favor of the already-rich. As Mankiw concedes, the evidence that inequality persists over generations — that is, people with rich parents tend to end up rich too — is overwhelming. If this reflected structural disadvantage like unequal access to health care and education, then it would be hard to argue that the best and brightest, rather than richest and whitest, were being rewarded by rising inequality.

Instead of trying to argue away the facts on inequality, Mankiw attempts to reexplain them. He proceeds in part by personal anecdote: “I do not see my children as having significantly better opportunities than I had at their age,” he writes, despite growing up wealthier than their middle-class father. Recognizing this impression to not be enough, Mankiw turns to the somewhat more surprising crutch of genetics. “Parents and children share genes,” which in Mankiw’s telling explains “intergenerational persistence in income even in a world of equal opportunities.” Though he disavows “genetic determinism,” Mankiw nevertheless thinks genetic transmission of things like IQ (a common conservative trope) make it “implausible to interpret generational persistence in income as simply a failure of society to provide equal opportunities.”

Even setting aside the obvious strawmanning here (nobody thinks persistent inequality is only caused by lack of opportunity), Mankiw’s analysis is unpersuasive. It can’t explain, for instance, why the United States has one of the lowest rates of intergenerational mobility in the developed world. Presumably, if genetics overwhelmed the effects of family inequality, more egalitarian distributions of wealth wouldn’t correlate with higher rates of mobility, but evidence from the developed world suggest they do.

But more fundamentally, follow Mankiw’s logic to its conclusion. He believes both that 1) the fact that the rich tend to stay rich, and the middle class tend not to become rich, are consequences of the natural distribution of talents and that 2) the most talented, morally speaking, deserve to keep what they earn.

In essence, Mankiw is arguing that a partly genetically determined upper class deserves most of society’s wealth and deserves to pass it on to their kids. It’s an argument that we’re living in a natural American hierarchy.

Needless to say, this is an unpopular message. Poll after poll after poll of Americans suggests overwhelming, almost consensus belief in the idea that American society should be about opportunities for mobility — the up-by-your bootstraps, Horatio Alger ideal that’s always characterized the American Dream. Both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan made the idea of equal opportunity central to their economic arguments. Widely read conservative wonk Avik Roy argues that “For many of today’s conservative reformers, equality of opportunity — especially for the poor — is the highest moral and political priority.” Arguing that the middle class (unlike the poor!) already has equal opportunity, and that’s why they’re not getting richer, isn’t exactly a winning campaign strategy for a reeling political organization.

To his credit, Mankiw recognizes that the poor really do face “a variety of socio-economic maladies” that limit their equal opportunity, and hence can’t manifest their genetic talents in the market. However, the logical implication of that position is government policy of some sort, be it either liberal-supported remedies like Obamacare or conservative proposals like school vouchers. Whichever you prefer, that money has to come from somewhere, which means taxes. Given that one wouldn’t want to drive the middle classes down into the lower income levels through confiscatory tax policy, that probably means taxes on the wealthy or super-wealthy.

Since Mankiw and the GOP oppose higher taxes on the rich on moral grounds, however, this creates an insuperable conflict between equality of opportunity and the moral principle, which Mankiw calls “just deserts,” that the rich should keep what they produce. But there’s a tempting way out of this solution, one conservatives have been pursuing for quite some time: the poor really are getting what they deserve. They’re coddled by government programs, but also non-producers who simply don’t deserve help overcoming structural barriers like crumbling schools and inadequate health care.

Or, in one man’s famous words, “My job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

So until the Republicans resolve the conflict between belief in the moral sanctity of wealth accumulation and equality of opportunity Mankiw’s paper exposes, they’ll never develop a coherent economic message, let alone a winning one.

*Mankiw’s argument for this moral position is entirely deficient. He never explains in any depth why being lucky enough to be born with intelligence or the desire to work hard entitles one to keep your own wealth, a standard criticism in the political philosophy literature. He appeals to shared moral intuitions (including, at one point, those of small children) that people deserve what they get without explaining how and why basic feelings matter, but rejects the contrary intuition that the rich can afford to be taxed more as “unjust.” He also assumes that John Rawls’ famous “veil of ignorance” argument is only about redistribution, when in reality it’s also an argument for a complex series of rights protections that would obviate Mankiw’s absurd claim that Rawls’ position entails forced kidney donation.

Her answer was completely coherent and accurate:

So this is not okay. It needs to be equal pay for equal work. And it’s hard enough already to earn a living and it shouldn’t be harder just because you’re a woman.

Powell is absolutely right to point out that women don’t earn equal pay for equal work. On average they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes and among the 600 occupations tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they make less than men in all but seven. Factors such as what industry or job women choose, whether they take time off or go part-time to have children, their race, and their marital status still can’t explain the gap. Even after stripping those factors away, they make 80 percent of men’s income.

It is in fact tough to make a living, as wages for the average worker have been on a downward trajectory. Wages as a percent of overall economic output fell to an all-time low in December and have continued falling since. Yet at the same time, corporate profits have soared, growing by about 20 percent a year since the end of 2008 and reaching record highs. This means the growing share of families that rely on women’s income face a double whammy.

The question remains as to why a women who earns her money as a singer and actress is also expected to be an expert on economic policy, but when given the time to adequately prepare she was able to discuss the issue as well as anyone else.

Photo Credit: AP

The proposal asserts that the funding gap for Detroit’s pension obligations is five times wider than previously thought, at $3.5 billion rather than the $644 million estimated in 2011. Reuters reporter Cate Long dug into the numbers and came up skeptical: “Orr is going to have to show math that demonstrates the pension funds are so massively underfunded,” Long wrote, calling the pensions “reasonably well-funded according to national standards.”

But regardless of the validity of Orr’s numbers, the proposal appears designed to facilitate a bankruptcy filing. Once in bankruptcy court, Orr would no longer need public workers’ unions to sign off on a plan to renege on pension promises. Michael VanOverbeke, a lawyer for the pension fund, explained the basic unfairness of prioritizing investors over retirees: Where bond investments carry “a certain amount of risk,” he told the New York Times, “[p]lanning for retirement and working for employers was not an investment in the market. These are people who are on a fixed income…they can’t go back to work and start all over again.”

Elsewhere, Orr’s report summarizes the barely-functioning state of the Motor City: 40 percent of its street lights are dark, two-thirds of its ambulances are out of service, and 78,000 buildings stand empty. How did Detroit get here? The fundamentals of the city’s economy declined along with the U.S. auto industry, but ill-considered debt schemes and manipulation by big international banks exacerbated the problem. Convicted former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick oversaw huge loans that went bad, including billions of dollars in the interest rate gambles known as “swaps.” But banks were rigging the rates that determine who wins and who loses on interest rate swaps like Detroit’s, as last year’s LIBOR scandal revealed. The city paid nearly half a billion dollars in fees to Wall Street firms for engineering the swaps and other financing schemes that only deepened Detroit’s debt hole.

The combination of local corruption and bank manipulation, which leaves the public holding the bag, is something of a common feature for troubled American cities these days. But the far-reaching powers Orr has to resolve things in Detroit set it apart.

In 2011, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R) signed a law expanding the powers of emergency managers like Orr, who can tear up collective bargaining agreements and sell public holdings. But because the state’s constitution protects public employee pensions, Orr will need either union consent or the help of a federal bankruptcy judge to impose the cuts on Detroit’s 30,000 current and former employees.

The Common Core – a set of K-12 national education standards – were conceived of by governors, designed by consultants, and have the support of teachers across the country. Yet Republicans are standing in the way in states like Michigan and Indiana. Michigan’s State Senate passed a budget measure preventing the Michigan Department of Education from spending any money on implementing the Common Core. Similarly, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed a bill postponing Common Core implementation.

Many Republicans are mistakenly claiming the Common Core represents a federal takeover of education even though 75% of teachers support the Common Core. In fact, this kind of support for education policies is common among the country’s teachers. A report released today by the Center for American Progress documents the prominent teacher voice organizations –- like VIVA Teachers, Teach Plus, and Educators for Excellence –- and analyzes the wide-array of policies that influence work in the classroom around issues like the Common Core.

The report finds that teacher voice organizations have diverse memberships, operate under the premise that teacher voice is not monolithic, and are working to professionalize the teaching profession. These grassroots organizations began forming at a time when teachers decided they were no longer satisfied with the status quo and began expressing great interest in embracing new leadership opportunities.

Teachers are often depicted as standing in the way of change in the classroom. Yet the increase in organizations that involve teachers directly in policy paints a different picture. Teacher voice groups opened up a new outlet for teachers to express their views on pertinent education policy issues like the Common Core and many teachers are taking advantage of these groups. In fact, almost 2,700 Teach Plus teachers have attended events on the Common Core and another 400 attended webinars on the same topic.

While Tea Partiers are rallying together against the Common Core, it’s important to note that the politicians aren’t the ones whose work will be most affected by them. Maybe we should ask the teachers themselves about whether the standards matter and will improve education for all students. In a Center for American Progress video highlighting teachers’ views on education policy released today, Amelia Herbert of VIVA Teachers says, “I am really interested and concerned with the Common Core and its implementation because I believe that it can really level the playing field for students despite what neighborhood they are coming from.”

It’s time to start listening to teachers’ voices on the Common Core and other important education policy issues that directly impact their work.

Credit: New York Magazine

A California district court gave preliminary approval to the national class action settlement in the case, Cogdell v. Wet Seal, which alleged that Wet Seal “had a policy of denying equal pay and promotion opportunities and firing African-American store management employees” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The plaintiffs were represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and two other law firms. The court will decide in November, after a review of the claims process, whether to grant final approval.

If the settlement, which the two parties reached May 8, is approved, at least $5.58 million of the $7.5 million in monetary relief will be paid in damages to current and former managers of Wet Seal outlets who are black or African-American. The company will also take several non-monetary steps, including expanding its human resources department and tracking job applications to ensure diversity in hiring and applications.

A three-year investigation by the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into the store wrapped up last year. The EEOC concluded that the store had knowingly discriminated in its hiring decisions, the Los Angeles Times reported:

In a three-year investigation, the commission found evidence that Wet Seal corporate managers openly stated that to be profitable the retailer had to retain workers with “the Armani look” — meaning thin, blond and blue-eyed.

One high-level executive sent an email to underlings in 2009 pointing out that the dominance of African American workers was a “huge issue.”

“Managers were instructed to make employment decisions based on race,” the agency said in documents made public Monday.

The case is the latest reminder of the difficulties African-Americans face in the job market. The black unemployment rate is still more than double that for white people, and last week the EEOC filed two suits against separate companies alleging they unfairly used background checks to discriminate in hiring decisions.

The World Cup has become a symbol of corruption and overspending in the country. Brazil, originally slated to spend less than $1 billion in private funding on soccer stadiums, has already spent more than $3 billion, most of which has come from public funds. Meanwhile, schools and hospitals are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, infrastructure is crumbling, and income inequality is rising as Brazil’s minimum wage remains low. The money spent on the World Cup, the protesters say, would be better spent on efforts to help ordinary Brazilians.

Though there were small pockets of violence during demonstrations in some cities, the vast majority of the protests remained peaceful, according to local news reports. Here are pictures from Monday’s protests:

An estimated 100,000 protested in Rio de Janeiro. (Credit: AP)

An estimated 30,000 Brazilians flood the streets of São Paulo. (Credit: AFP)

Brazilians protest for spending on hospitals and schools instead of the World Cup. (Credit: @AnonNewsDE)

Protesters amass in front of Brazil's National Congress in Brasilia. Sign reads: "Cup for whom?" (Credit: AP)

A Brazilian police officer pepper sprays a protester in Rio de Janeiro. (Credit: AP)

Brazilian protesters in the streets of São Paulo. (Credit: Globo News)

Protesters dance on the top of the Brazilian National Congress in Brasilia. (Credit: Globo News)

Credit: WPTV

The explosion occurred in a section of the plant that had been shut down for maintenance when workers are thought to have pumped too much nitrogen into a vessel, causing it to rupture. The company has said that there was no fire or chemical release and there is no threat or hazard posed to the community near the plant.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is now conducting one of three investigations at the plant to uncover the exact cause, running plant officials through emergency drills. CF Industries Holdings is conducting its own investigation and has also hired a third party to investigate the causes of the accident.

OSHA issued a six-figure fine against the plant in 2000 after an explosion in an ammonia unit killed three workers and injured eight, according to WBRZ. The plant in Geismar hadn’t been inspected by OSHA in at least two decades, according to OSHA’s online database. The Geismar plant experienced another accident in 2009 when 60 pounds of flammable mixture was released, causing a fire that didn’t lead to injuries. Louisiana has experienced at least two other explosions in chemical facilities in the last two years.

Last week’s blasts came months after the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas that killed 15 people and injured more than 160. The West plant hadn’t been inspected by OSHA since 1985.

OSHA inspections are few and far between thanks to a perennial lack of funding and difficulty retaining staff. The average workplace only gets a visit from inspectors every 99 years. Sequestration will make things worse, with cuts to the agency’s budget likely resulting in 1,200 fewer workplace inspections.

Yet thousands of people die in workplace accidents every year. In just 2007, there were 5,600 fatal workplace injuries and 53,000 fatal illnesses, plus 8,559,000 nonfatal injuries and 427,000 nonfatal illnesses. These accidents cost society huge sums thanks to medical and indirect expenses: $250 billion for the injuries and illnesses in 2007 alone.

Meanwhile, thousands of chemical plants across the country pose risks to big populations. Nearly 7,000 facilities report that a worst-case scenario would pose a risk to populations over 1,000 people and 90 plants could impact more than 1 million.

(Credit: TheNotebook.org)

The reductions come after Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and the legislature slashed the K-12 education budget by 12 percent, or $961 million. The district is currently operating under a $304 million budget deficit and the superintendent is asking teachers to accept salary cuts of between 5 and 13 percent.

“I care about my daughter and grandson,” hunger striker and parent Earlene Bly in a statement first reported by MSNBC. “I am making this sacrifice to make sure they have safe schools. I am fasting to show my family and the city how serious this situation is.” The union Unite Here Local 634, which represents school food aides in Philadelphia, is coordinating with the hunger strikers.

Parents and school officials fear that low-income, special needs and bilingual students who rely heavily on school counsels will suffer most from the cuts. The Philadelphia Coalition Advocating for Public Schools filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in October alleging that the schools closed by the district in 2012 also had “a higher population of minority students than the district average.”

Philadelphia has experienced a decrease in public school enrollment in recent years, as students are increasingly attending private charter schools. In the 2011-2012 school year, “the proportion of students attending charter schools jumped to 23 percent,” up from from 12 percent in 2004-2005.

Photo Credit: Philly.com

Mt. Holly bought up all but 70 of the homes in a predominantly black and latino neighborhood called Mount Holly Gardens and began razing parts of the neighborhood to clear it for redevelopment. The plan would have replaced homes the town bought for $30,000-$50,000 with homes valued at $200,000-$250,000.

In February, the Obama administration officially made the theory of “disparate impact” the determining factor for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) role as arbiter of housing discrimination. Disparate impact arguments allow the government to bypass the question of intent. Discriminatory intent is far more difficult to prove than discriminatory impact, which is simply a matter of statistics.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld the disparate impact claim from displaced Mount Holly Gardens citizens last June, opening the door for the top court to take the case. As Pro Publica explained in February, scholars believe Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts, are seeking to strike down disparate impact in housing law, and the decision will hinge on Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

Housing discrimination has gone underground since laws banning outright discrimination took effect, as a recent HUD-funded study and numerous other examinations of the housing market have shown. In the words of HUD enforcement chief Sara Pratt, “Landlords, housing professionals, zoning and planning boards, have learned to stop talking about it. What they haven’t learned is to stop doing it.” That makes the ability to combat discrimination with quantitative impact findings, rather than telepathic intent findings, especially crucial.

The discrimination lawsuit Wells Fargo settled in early June was premised on such statistical proofs of discriminatory treatment of foreclosed properties depending on the racial makeup of the surrounding neighborhoods. Notorious subprime lender Countrywide paid a $335 million settlement after the government demonstrated in court filings that the firm systematically overcharged 200,000 minority borrowers. The standard is frequently applied in other areas of anti-discrimination law as well, such as in the recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints against Dollar General stores and BMW factories.

The high court attempted to address the use of disparate impact in housing law in its previous term, but then-Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez convinced the city of St. Paul, MN, to withdraw its appeal. Perez’s actions in keeping that case from reaching the bench were the rallying point for opposition to his nomination to head the Department of Labor. As Ian Millhiser previously explained in ThinkProgress, the GOP attempt to paint Perez’s role in preserving a key pillar of housing fairness law as a “quid pro quo” swindle can’t be reconciled with the facts. Now that anti-discrimination pillar is once again headed to the bench.

(Credit: Shutterstock)

Late last week, the city’s Metro Council approved a measure to fund one-way bus tickets for homeless people. Officials originally named it the “Clean Sweep” program; after they realized that comparing homeless people to trash on the street wasn’t a great public relations move, they changed the name to “HOPE,” or Homeless Outreach Prevent Efforts. Just $5,000 was appropriated in the trial program, enough for around 30 one-way bus tickets, but funding could be expanded later if officials consider the move a success.

HOPE is a seemingly benevolent program where homeless people who have family or a job lined up somewhere outside Baton Rouge can use the program to get a free bus ticket to their destination. In theory, the job or family member is supposed to be verified by the city before putting a homeless person on a bus.

The issue is that these programs frequently fall short of their ideal and can even result in homeless people being shipped out of town against their will. A number of other cities around the country already have programs to give their homeless residents one-way tickets, including New York City, San Francisco, and Fort Lauderdale, and they have proven highly problematic.

It can be good “if it’s done for the right reasons and it’s voluntary and people are not being given a choice, ‘go to jail or we can give you a bus ticket,’” Michael Stoops, Director of Community Organizing at the National Coalition for the Homeless, told ThinkProgress. In addition, though one-way bus ticket programs are typically sold as a way to reunite homeless persons with their families, such programs have historically served a far more nefarious goal: ridding downtown of homeless people.

Problems arise, however, when a city’s police department, instead of a homeless agency, is in charge of administering these programs. There is often little oversight or follow-up to ensure that a homeless person isn’t just being shuttled out of the city and then forgotten. “Police departments should be the last people handling this,” Stoops said.

However, as The Advocate, a local newspaper, notes, “the program is being overseen by the Baton Rouge Police Deaprtment.” Though it claims it will work in conjunction with homeless organizations, local advocacy groups said they had no knowledge of the matter.

As a result, advocates would be excused for worrying that HOPE is a thinly-veiled guise for getting rid of Baton Rouge’s homeless population, especially considering comments made by the sponsoring councilmember. Councilman John Delgado, the driving force behind HOPE, said homeless people are a blight on downtown Baton Rouge. “At the end of the day we did not spend millions of tax payer dollars on refurbishing downtown to make it as nice as it is just to have it flooded with homeless people,” said Delgado, hinting that family reunification may not be his primary goal.

Indeed, one can imagine Delgado’s next priority being a statue to be placed on the road into Baton Rouge that reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, so that I may give them one-way bus tickets out of town and they can be someone else’s problem.”

Credit: FoxNews.com

Sunday evening was the annual Miss USA beauty pageant, where Erin Brady, Miss Connecticut, took the crown. But what everyone seems to be talking about the morning after is not Brady but an answer Miss Utah gave during the pageant. A judge asked Marissa Powell, “A recent report shows that in 40 percent of American families with children, women are the primary earners yet they continue to earn less than men. What does this say about society?”

Her answer was admittedly rambling:

I think we can relate this back to education and how we are continuing to try to strive to (pause) figure out how to create jobs right now. That is the biggest problem and I think, especially the men, are um, seen as the leaders of this and so we need to try and figure out how to create education better so we can solve this problem.

But why we expect women competing in a beauty pageant to all be experts in economics too is unclear. And those mocking Miss Utah may be surprised to hear that there were glimmers of truth in her answer: men’s wages and education are much discussed factors in the gender wage gap.

In married couples where women make more, men’s declining wages may be at least in part to blame. Men’s wages have been on a relatively steady decline since the late 1970s except for the strong labor market of the late 1990s. This trend can in fact account for a quarter of the narrowing gender wage gap over that time. “Men are the leaders of this” is almost accurate.

Talking about education in this context is not far-fetched. Some in fact look to education to solve this problem, as Powell haltingly indicated, as men are completing fewer higher degrees than women. But more education isn’t the answer. For men with a high school degree, real wages have fallen by more than 14 percent since the 1970s. Yet wages have remained depressed across the board, even for those with a college degree.

Education did help narrow the gender wage gap from the 1970s to the 2000s. Yet women’s wages have recently started dropping even as they gain even more higher education than men. And the wage gap is stubbornly persistent despite how much education women take on. The gap appears the moment men and women graduate, with young female graduates earning 82 percent of what their male counterparts earn. It follows them at every level of education as men with the same degree earn more.

The question was also poorly framed. The Pew report that the judge referred to actually shows that while 40 percent of families are relying on women’s wages, that demographic is really split into two groups: women who make more than their husbands and single mothers. In fact, single moms account for two-thirds of women who are the main income support for their families. Single mothers don’t just earn less than men. They earn a lot less than married couples: households headed by single mothers earn less than half of those with a married couple. Both the wage gap and the way U.S. policy fails to adequately support single parents are to blame.

In general, though, the model in which a husband makes more than his wife is still going strong: three-quarters of married couples follow this dynamic.

If the U.S. wants to close the gender wage gap, as the Miss USA judge seemed to be trying to discuss, it will have to confront many causes, one of the strongest of which may be the penalty working mothers face, particularly worrisome to breadwinning women. While men and women see similar wage growth through age 30, women’s slows right at the age when they typically begin having children and all but halts by age 39. Mothers earn 5 percent less per hour per child than childless women. Paid family leave could help change this equation, as it helps boost wages for mothers. Helping women to pay for childcare could also go a long way as it helps them stay in jobs and experience higher pay.

Other policy changes could help close the gap. Ending salary secrecy would make it easier for women to root out and address discrimination. Raising the minimum wage would give that female-dominated workforce a big lift.

Should Miss Utah have given a full overview of the causes and potential policy solutions to the gender wage gap? That seems a lot to ask of someone on the spot.

The latest of many civil suits over Bank of America’s handling of foreclosures and mortgage modifications has produced affidavits from six former employees alleging the bank actively and systematically deceived homeowners and sought foreclosures over modifications that would have kept borrowers in their homes. A seventh signed statement from a man who worked for one of the bank’s contractors reinforces the picture of a company-wide culture of putting profits over customers, even in defiance of facts.

The documents, first reported by Kimberly Miller of the Palm Beach Post, are part of a lawsuit over the bank’s handling of trial loan modifications under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) created by the Obama administration. The employees, whose work for the bank ranged from loan origination to collections to reviewing internal loan databases, swear that Bank of America used a variety of internal policies to discourage loan modifications and encourage foreclosures, even when loan documents visible to the employees showed the bank’s rationale for foreclosing was untrue. Those policies include:

• ‘Blitzing’: According to William Wilson, the bank conducted a “blitz” twice a month, instructing case managers to deny any HAMP application more than 60 days old, including “files [in] which the homeowner had provided all required financial documents and fully complied with the terms of a Trial Period Plan.”

• $500 bonuses for filling foreclosure quotas: According to Simone Gordon, an employee “who placed ten or more accounts into foreclosure in a given month received a $500 bonus. Bank of America also gave employees gift cards to retail stores like Target or Bed Bath and Beyond as rewards for placing accounts into foreclosure.”

• Lying to clients about documentation: Gordon’s affidavit says it was bank policy to sit on financial documents borrowers submitted for 30 days, then label them “stale” and require the homeowner to re-apply. Bert Sheeks, the contract employee, was instructed “to find any pretext” to justify closing outstanding loan modification applications, “even in cases where we knew the borrower had, in fact, responded with complete documents.” Erika Brown “was instructed to inform every homeowner who called in that their file was ‘under review’” even when she could see no one had looked at the documents in question. Brown says she personally saw more than a hundred instances in which a bank official cancelled a loan modification due to “non payment” when the file showed all payments had been received on time.

The sum of the allegations is that the bank routinely falsified documents and knowingly foreclosed on borrowers who were in full compliance with modification plans. The program, which was the biggest federal initiative intended to alleviate the foreclosure crisis, should have helped 800,000 more homeowners than it did, according to a 2012 report.

Bank of America spokespeople say the allegations are false. The company has already “spent more than $45 billion to settle claims tied to its 2008 takeover of Countrywide Financial Corp,” the Boston Globe notes, and the top-to-bottom malfeasance alleged in this suit echoes allegations from 2011 that the bank paid to settle. Bank of America is far from alone in that regard, as many of the largest banks in the country have paid to settle allegations of abusive practices such as “robosigning.”

Despite such settlements, the government has prosecuted more protesters than it has banks involved in the foreclosure crisis, and abuses have continued.

Bank of America and other large banks that were supposed to harness HAMP funds to help resolve the foreclosure crisis were instead quite effective at using the program to boost their own balance sheets. The manipulation of the program depicted in these affidavits is more evidence that direct principal reduction would be a more effective use of federal housing funds than HAMP’s attempted partnership with banks.

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Led by Columbia University’s Dr. Peter Muennig, a team of researchers tracked Floridians on welfare over nearly two decades. The researchers were interested in examining health outcomes in the time period after former President Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill — which hoped to shrink welfare rolls by tying benefits to employment, spurring low-income recipients to take steps to improve their financial standing — was signed into law. And they found that death rates were a half percent higher among welfare recipients who were pushed to find employment or face losing their benefits, as compared to those who received unrestricted benefits regardless of their employment status.

Muenning told Reuters Health that while some of the study’s participants may have successfully found employment and begun to earn more money, “others lost their lifeline and had to fall back on already poor family members and friends to eat and get shelter.”

Among the group that faced a time limit on their benefits unless they secured employment, significantly more people did get jobs. But Muenning and his colleagues found that few of those people actually made more money at their jobs than the total income that the other, unrestricted group received from their welfare benefits and other supplements. And half of the people in the time-limited group couldn’t find a job during much of the program.

The study’s authors noted that there needs to be more research in this area in order to draw strong conclusions about the health impacts of welfare reforms. But their findings align with other studies that have found that even though the 1990s-era reforms successfully shrunk the welfare rolls, they also led to a huge spike in extreme poverty. As the economic downturn has made the job market sluggish, the number of low-income Americans who need federal assistance has increased even as the availability of those benefits has shrunk.

Researchers have documented the serious health effects of other economic policies, too. Stringent austerity policies in Europe and the United States are literally killing people by limiting medical resources, pushing more people into homelessness, curtailing access to health care, and causing an uptick in alcoholism and depression. And the recent sequester cuts are already hampering cancer care, preventing federal agencies from conducting food inspections, and slowing medical research.

In signing the bill, Scott sided with big business interests including Disney World, Darden Restaurants (owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster), and the Florida Chamber of Commerce. The bill is part of a national effort to pass so-called “preemption bills” that would block paid sick leave legislation that is backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that coordinates conservative laws across states. The state’s House Majority Leader, Steve Precourt (R), who was instrumental in putting forward the preemption bill, is an active ALEC member.

The bill has made moot a 2014 referendum in Orange County that would have decided whether to require paid sick leave. More than 50,000 voters had tried to get the measure on the November 6 ballot but the County Commission voted it off. It made it on the ballot in 2014 thanks to a three-judge panel.

Florida follows a rash of preemption bills in the states, which cropped up in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Mississippi. These bills are part of ALEC’s efforts to weaken wage and labor standards: Since 2011, 67 such ALEC-affiliated bills have been introduced in state legislatures, 11 of which had been signed into law before Scott signed this bill.

Big business stood in opposition to the Orange County effort on paid sick leave because it claimed such a bill would drive up costs. Yet a study of San Francisco, which enacted a paid sick leave policy in 2007, showed that a majority of businesses saw either no impact or a positive one on profitability. Other research has shown such policies to be good for business and job growth.

Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) vetoed a bill on Friday that would have allowed women suffering wage discrimination to take legal action, alleging that the measure “duplicates federal law, which already allows employees…to file a claim with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.” On average, women earn 77 cents of every dollar a man makes, though the disparity is even greater for African American and Hispanic women.

HB 950 builds on the federal Lilly Ledbetter Act, which strengthened women’s ability to challenge pay discrimination. Supporters argued that the state legislation would “provide uniformity between state and federal anti-discrimination laws” and “allow parties to proceed in a nearby state court, while at the same time avoid the increased expense of having to proceed in a federal court which may be far away.” Lilly Ledbetter protections also “do not apply to state cases absent action by the legislature.”

Forty-two states have passed sate-based equal pay laws, recognizing that Lilly Ledbetter was not enough.

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Middle-class men who take on greater caregiving roles at home are more penalized at work than men who offload that work to their wives. Women, on the other hand, are treated worse for not having children or having nontraditional caregiving arrangements.

Mothers’ and fathers’ roles at home have been changing in the past half-century. The Pew Research Center found that fathers have nearly tripled the time they spend with their children since 1965 (although there is still a large gender gap, as mothers spend twice as much).

As men have taken on greater caring roles, they have also experienced greater discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has reported a rise in discrimination claims against caregivers, with a growing share brought by men. The number of family responsibility discrimination cases brought by male plaintiffs rose 300 percent between 2006 and 2010.

Meanwhile, family policies often leave them out. While men are equally entitled to time off to take care of a child under the Family and Medical Leave Act, that leave is unpaid. Fourteen states include new fathers in laws that go beyond the federal floor to offer better policies, the remaining 36 either help new mothers or do nothing at all. Thus while about 85 percent of fathers take time off for the birth of a child, the vast majority take just a week or two. By contrast, offering paid leave in California nearly tripled the amount of time fathers took off, from an average of three weeks to eight.

The U.S. by and large stands alone in not offering paid paternity leave, as at least 66 other countries ensure paid time off for new fathers. Meanwhile it is just one of three countries among 178 that doesn’t offer maternity leave.

The IMF notes that the wound is self-inflicted and offers three specific suggestions for salving it:

• Repeal the sequester and adopt a more balanced and gradual pace of fiscal consolidation. […]
• Raise the debt ceiling to avoid a severe shock to the United States and the global economy.
• Adopt a comprehensive and back-loaded set of measures to restore long-run fiscal sustainability. […] New revenues could be raised through a reduction in tax exemptions and deductions, as well as though the introduction of a carbon tax and a value added tax. Spending measures would need to curb the growth in public health care and pension outlays.

The report also notes that sequestration’s damage will carry on past the near future and warns that its “arbitrary reductions in education, science, and infrastructure spending could also reduce medium-term potential growth.” Without sequestration, economic growth could have surpassed 3 percent for the year. But the fund no longer expects the economy to reach that level of growth until 2015. That means austerity is keeping growth below the level needed to begin closing the nearly trillion-dollar “output gap” –- the shortfall between potential growth and actual growth.

In other words, the immediate deficit reduction fiscal conservatives in the U.S. celebrate as a good start is in fact preventing the ongoing economic expansion from leading to an actual economic recovery. After over three years of a slow, steady expansion in jobs and GDP growth, the economy still isn’t hitting the escape velocity required to get to where it ought to be. There is already much evidence that the growth promised by pro-austerity politicians is not materializing, and now the IMF’s number crunchers are confirming that U.S. fiscal policy is harmful.

Yesterday the Center for American Progress released a wide-ranging, long-term plan to grow our economy by strengthening and growing America’s middle class. Josh Barro at Business Insider took issue with some of it.

Let’s start with where we agree. We’ve identified some important structural problems holding back the economy: stagnant wage growth, inequality, etc. Barro doesn’t disagree with any of that. In housing, we call for just the solution he proposes: aggressive mortgage modification programs, including reducing principal for underwater borrowers. He wants a more progressive tax system. Our plan has one. The report includes a reprise of the progressive, efficiency-enhancing tax reform plan that we released last November with Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Roger Altman, Neera Tanden, John Podesta and others.

But there are some areas where we’ll have to agree to disagree, like on raising workplace standards. The United States is the only country in the developed world without paid sick days. That increases turnover, unemployment, and inequality, and has a disproportionate effect on women in the workforce who can far too often be put in the position of jeopardizing their job to care for a sick child or ailing parent. It’s also bad for business.

Barro disagrees with some of the investments we want to make. For example, he doesn’t like our call for expanding early childhood education. He cites international data about U.S. spending in K-12, but ignores the fact that when it comes to 4-year-old preschool enrollment, we rank 26^th among developed countries. Human capital can account for up to two-thirds of economic growth, and according to Nobel prizewinning economist James Heckman, investments in early childhood have the highest rates of return of any educational spending. In an era of tight budgets, the imperative is even greater that government seeks the highest return on taxpayer dollars. Starting with our next generation of workers makes good economic sense.

Barro objects to our plan for investing in infrastructure. But U.S. infrastructure gets a D+ grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and falling behind in infrastructure hurts productivity and constrains growth. Not only that, as leading economist Laura Tyson and the president’s Jobs Council have pointed out, infrastructure represents a great “two-fer” in which each dollar invested lays the groundwork for future growth as well increasing employment today – often good, middle-class employment. Barro says that we should make sure that we aren’t paying too much for what we build. We agree: Investment and reform aren’t mutually exclusive; they go hand in hand.

The fact is that federal investments in future economic growth are currently on track to dwindle to the lowest share of our total economic output in 50 years. The government owes it to all of us to make smart public investment decisions. This is why we also seek investments with high rates of return and dovetails with efforts to support private sector job creation.

It’s hard to understand Barro’s objection to more streamlined government. Consider that a student applying to college can submit a single common application to universities around the country. But a business applying for government support has to file things many times and in many places. Why not organize our business and trade agencies to be more efficient, improving the speed of decision-making that he calls for?

We agree that the private sector is best placed to adapt to changing economic circumstances. We also agree that interventions can occasionally be justified as Barro suggests – the auto rescue he cites is a good example. We favor the government being more transparent about when it is supporting industries and how. Right now there are a host of ways government plays a role in supporting the private sector – from procurement to tax law to convenings. It’s better to be up front about what we’re doing and to let taxpayers know what’s happening. And at a time when we are facing increased competition from around the world, having a clear strategy for which type of interventions are helpful and when makes good sense, rather than continuing with opaque, ad hoc interventions.

There are several other areas where Barro raises objections, but he is mostly attacking straw men. For example, nowhere in our report do we argue that there is shame in renting. We do think it’s a problem that 25 percent of renters pay more than half their income in rent, which is why we propose policies to make housing more affordable.

Despite these disagreements, we welcome the discussion. After three years where the predominant debate in Washington has been about deficits and cutting government, it’s important to have a conversation about jobs and growth. That’s the conversation America’s almost 12 million unemployed workers need us to have. That’s the conversation America’s businesses – large and small – need us to have. And that’s the conversation the Center for American Progress is determined to contribute to.

Creationists have cried foul, and one state representative distrusts education standards as a whole because he viewed them as a form of federal overreach. At a school board meeting that discussed Common Core reading and math and Next Generation Science Standards, state Rep. Allan Rothlisberg compared these education benchmarks to the IRS, which is under scrutiny for targeting Tea Party groups.

“We’ve seen in the news lately, obviously with the IRS spying on us,” Rothlisberg told the Lawrence Journal-World. “Why on Earth would we expect the (U.S.) Department of Education — which is not constitutionally authorized — to look out for our children? That’s our responsibility.” Rothlisberg serves on the House Education Budget committee.

While the board approved the standards by a firm majority, 8-2, Kansas lawmakers have worked to move science backward in the state. Even though Article 6 of the Kansas Constitution says the state board has authority over public education, the Kansas Senate passed a bill last month to block funding for both Common Core standards and Next Generation Science Standards, which ended in a narrow defeat in the House. If it had passed, it would have resulted in a lengthy lawsuit to determine which branch had authority. This spring, the Kansas House Education Committee also introduced a bill that eventually died in committee mandating that teachers question the scientific basis of global warming in the classroom.

More states are moving ahead with approval, even as elected climate deniers and creationists threaten they may respond with anti-science legislation.

So many people have been seeking beds at shelters in central Britain that some homeless people have been forced to live in caves on the outskirts of town.

Britain’s economy continues to reel from the austerity policies enacted by the conservative government, and it is having a tragic human impact in places like Stockport. As the Telegraph reports, in the last year alone, there has been a 42 percent increase in homelessness. Shelters have tried to accommodate the surge in demand, but some are seeing twice as many people in need as in the past few years.

As a result, a number of homeless individuals, including an Estonian man who identified himself as “KP,” have been forced to take up residence in a network of caves originally used as bomb shelters in World War II.

The Daily Mail has more:

According to homelessness charity Wellspring, Stockport’s sandstone caverns now hold up to four occupants at any one time. [...]

He said some rough sleepers had fallen into the river or been targeted by arsonists.

“Nobody wants to see people living in a cave,” he said. The caves were reputedly dug by hand in the 17th century.

Parts were used as air raid shelters for up to 6,500 people during the Second World War and were recently reopened as a tourist attraction.

A resident said: “We used to play in them as kids, but they’re lethal. It’s shocking to think people are living in them in 2013.”

The economic downturn that began five years ago has been exacerbated by the Tory government’s policies of massive budget cuts. It has pushed Britain’s economy toward a triple-dip recession — a prospect that was narrowly avoided thanks in part to increased government spending. It’s stifled economic growth and prolonged the resultant human suffering. And it’s all been for naught, as austerity policies have actually made it harder to reduce the deficit.

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This is an economic imperative, according to Clinton. “Why is it that China is committed to providing 70 percent of its children with three years of preschool by 2020?” she asked the audience. “Here in the United States, only half of our children receive early childhood education. Some of it, very honestly, is not of high quality.”

In calling for investment in early childhood, she noted that the government will play a big role but that the U.S. can’t leave out the private sector. “There is also a responsibility that has to be met by parents and families, by businesses and communities who are at the center of this challenge,” she noted.

She specifically praised a recently announced investment by Goldman Sachs in a Utah preschool program. The $4.6 million “social impact bond” Goldman issued will only profit the firm if the program meets its goals of reducing the need for remedial education, meaning taxpayers will only end up paying for it if it works. The idea of social impact bonds from for-profit financiers has its critics, and its proponents acknowledge it’s a brand new idea without proven results, but Clinton’s embrace of the idea is part of a larger effort to cajole the private sector into sharing the responsibility for childhood development.

Clinton’s effort comes with some clever branding that plays off of the financial sector’s recent legacy of wreaking havoc on the middle-class economy. Her speech complements the rollout of a new organization called Too Small To Fail, a joint effort of Next Generation and the Clinton Foundation (formerly the Clinton Global Initiative) to bolster research into brain development, inform and encourage parents to employ the findings of such research with their kids, and lobby businesses to improve conditions for working parents.

Business leaders have called on the government to expand preschool funding, and the complementary efforts Clinton is asking of those leaders should help create a positive feedback loop of benefits for kids. Each dollar committed to early childhood development yields $7 in future savings, a statistic Clinton referenced in her speech. America lags much of the developed world in early education and substantial public-private partnerships can play an important role in closing that gap.

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The right-to-request law would not mandate that employers provide all workers with the schedules they desire, but it would require that employers set up a process to discuss and negotiate workplace flexibility. An employee could petition his employer to adjust his start time, work part-time, or maybe tele-commute one day a week. The employer wouldn’t have to approve the request if it caused it an “undue hardship,” but if it couldn’t come up with a compelling business reason to deny the request, it would have to agree to it. The hardship could include an increase in costs or a “detrimental effect on the ability to meet customer or client demands,” so it does give employers a lot of wiggle room.

Even with these limitations, this kind of policy has been found to be effective in meeting demand from workers to gain some control over their schedules. The United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia have implemented similar policies and found they worked. In the U.K., for example, lawmakers implemented right-to-request legislation in 2002. Since then, this “soft touch” legislation has been effective in increasing the number of workers with flexible schedules. Even though employers had fairly broad discretion to deny the requests, only 10 percent of requests have been turned down since the law was enacted.

Further, while initially the U.K. law covered only workers with young children under age six, workers with disabled children under age 18, and workers caring for an adult relative, Parliament passed legislation in 2009 to cover all workers with children under the age of 16. More recently, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)—the world’s largest chartered HR and development professional body—has urged the U.K. government to extend the right to request flexibility to all employees. The organization cites “Flexible Working: Provision and Uptake,” a study that found that 70 percent of employers surveyed said flexibility helped recruit better workers and kept employees engaged and motivated. Moreover, less than 5 percent of businesses surveyed reported problems complying with the current right-to-request flexibility law.

Taking a step forward for workers and families is not new for San Francisco. In 2007, it became the first city to guarantee paid sick days for all of its employees. Despite initial resistance and warnings that this policy would hurt local businesses, the city’s economy continued to grow and outpace the surrounding region, demonstrating yet again how worker friendly policies like paid leave, paid sick days, and workplace flexibility need not be at odds with thriving business and economic growth.

Right to request would be an improvement over the current situation in the United States, where an employee can be disciplined for even asking about flexibility or predictability. And this isn’t the first time policymakers have tried to start this conversation — Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) introduced similar legislation, the Working Families’ Flexibility Act, most recently in early 2012 as H.R. 4106 — but let’s hope that this time, the policy is seriously debated and put to the test in the American context.

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A petrochemical plant in Geismar, Louisiana that exploded on Thursday, killing one person and injuring 73, has not been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the past two decades, according to an analysis by ThinkProgress. The Williams Olefins plant, which produces about 1.3 billion pounds of ethylene and 90 million pounds of polymer grade propylene, according to the company’s website, does not have any recorded inspections for plants producing either substance in OSHA’s database since 1993.

The explosion, fueled by propylene, started at 8:37 a.m. and burned for more than three hours. Three hundred workers were evacuated and residents within a two-mile radius were told by authorities to remain in their homes.

The same plant also had an accident in 2009, according to Reuters. At that time, 60 pounds of flammable mixture was released, causing a fire that did not lead to injuries. Louisiana has experienced at least two other explosions in petrochemical facilities in the last two years: an explosion at the Westlake Chemicals vinyl plant in Geismar that “sent a cloud of toxic vinyl chloride and hydrochloric acid over the town” in 2012 and another at a Multi-Chem Group plan in New Iberia in 2011. Neither resulted in injuries, Reuters reports.

Thursday’s blast comes just months after about 30 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas in April. That accident killed 15 people and injured more than 160. The West plant hadn’t been inspected by OSHA since 1985 and also slipped by six other regulatory agencies.

While the surrounding population near the Williams plant seems to be small, thousands of chemical plants across the country pose risks to large populations. Nearly 7,000 have reported that a worst-case scenario would impact populations greater than 1,000 people, and 90 plants would impact more than 1 million people.

Due to low funding and staffing issues, OSHA inspections have become very rare. The average workplace only gets a visit from an inspector every 99 years. Yet budget cuts may make things even worse: sequestration will force the agency to cut its budget by 8.2 percent, which could mean 1,200 fewer workplace inspections.

Pressure has been mounting on the petrochemical industry to improve safety after a blast in 2005 at BP refinery in Texas killed 15 people and injured 170, one of the worst industrial accidents in decades. Reuters reports that these plants operate massive equipment under intense pressure and high heat, which makes them prone to fires and explosions.

Here are five of the report’s suggestions for policy innovation to target middle-class growth:

1. Implement high-quality preschool for every three- and four-year-old in America, K-12 funding reforms, and funding for innovation in local school districts. America’s education system is failing students: Just a third of eighth graders are attaining proficiency in key areas. The U.S. ranks 22nd in high school graduation rates among 27 industrial nations. Because of these failures, millions of American adults are “waiters who could be chefs, teacher’s aides who could be teachers, computer techs who could be techfirm CEOs, and prisoners who could be doctors,” the report says. These failures can be addressed not just through increased funding for pre-K and K-12 education, but reforming how that money gets allocated.

2. Wipe the slate clean on housing and replace Fannie and Freddie. When the housing bubble evaporated, it took $7 trillion in wealth with it. Five years later, nearly 10 million homeowners remain underwater by a combined $700 billion, and private capital has almost entirely ceded the business of housing finance to the government. The report would commit the government to sweeping principal reduction and refinancing initiatives for underwater homeowners to help the market once again be a buoy rather than a drag on the middle class and the larger economy. That proposal would also require outright forgiveness of the underwater portion of loans in instances where such forgiveness would be worth more to investors than foreclosure. It further proposes to replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “with government-chartered, privately funded entities” along lines laid out in a 2011 report.

3. Restore and revive federal and private funding for scientific research and development. For every dollar of economic growth America has produced since World War II, roughly 50 cents traces back to scientific and technological advances. Yet the U.S. government and private sector currently invest less as a percentage of the economy in research and development than do Japan or South Korea. CAP would double funding for three federal research agencies, revamp research tax credits, and set aside $100 million in annual “Frontier Prizes” for innovations that solve specific research problems connected to economic growth.

4. Create automatic mechanisms to protect middle-class jobs from trade manipulation by other countries. The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter (good) and the world’s largest importer (bad). In 2012, the balance of trade came to a deficit of more than half a trillion dollars, which endangers the nearly 10 million jobs supported by U.S. export activity. Our increasing trade deficits are driven in large part by currency manipulation by trading partners, which is hard to combat without sparking harmful trade wars. CAP proposes “a currency misalignment trigger” that would automatically initiate a 90-day countdown to imposing trade tariffs against countries that manipulate their currencies to the detriment of U.S. exporters and in violation of trade agreements.

5. Consolidate the various federal business agencies into a Department of Competitiveness to streamline business’ access to government services. The government already does a great deal of work to support and occasionally intervene in American business with an eye toward fostering growth. But the complex web of agencies and the ad-hoc approach to market interventions represents wasted opportunities for efficiency, analysis, and innovation. CAP suggests restructuring the 300 plus “assistance programs for businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs” into a single federal department with a common application system for entrepreneurs and businesses. That department would also partner directly with firms to support emerging business sectors that will aid sustainable job growth.

These are just some of the report’s many proposals for long-term sustainable growth from the middle out. Read the full report here.