Our guest blogger is Heather Boushey, Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Fair pay is an issue that “touches every family across this nation- each one of us,” said Lilly Ledbetter in a recent conversation with Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. She went on to say that equal pay is “not a gift,” it’s something we are “rightfully entitled to.” But, we have to work for that right.

Lilly was speaking the truth. For millions of American families — in fact, two thirds of families with children — mothers are breadwinners. If they aren’t paid fairly, not only they, but their whole family suffers.

Fair pay is also not just an issue about today’s paycheck, it’s a family’s economic well-being over a lifetime. When a colleague left Lilly Ledbetter an anonymous note that listed her salary and the higher salaries of three of her male colleagues, she told us how her first reaction was “letting it go.” But, then she thought about how she would be short-changing herself for the rest of her life.

Of course, Lilly Ledbetter’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court. She won, but the Court told her that she could not claim her nearly two decades of back pay because the statue of limitations had run out. Basically, she’d been discriminated against for too long.

Congress has fixed this with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but there is more to be done. Women who face inequity have to confront their employers. To do that, they need to know the score—they need to know if there is indeed lower than the man they stand next to on the assembly line or who sits in the cubicle next door. Markets only work when all the participants have full information.

The Paycheck Fairness Act prohibits employer from retaliating against employees who share salary information. This provision alone will not completely solve the gender pay gap, but it will allow employees to access the information they need to understand if their pay is at the market rate. Combined with the provision to give employees an opportunity to improve their salary negotiation skills, this could be a powerful step towards greater pay equity, especially among men and women in similar jobs within a single firm. Read more

Today, Forbes released its annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, which is topped by Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway head Warren Buffett. Overall, the total worth of the 400 “rose to an estimated $1.37 trillion in 2010, up 8% from 2009.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), though, doesn’t think that the very richest of the rich have made such gains. Inhofe wants to spend $830 billion over the next decade to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, and said that those who want to see the tax cuts for the rich expire are fudging the numbers, “making everybody think they are middle class and that the superrich are getting richer”:

“It’s a continuation of class warfare. Nothing’s changed,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe said. “They try to play to the numbers, making everybody think they are middle class and that the superrich are getting richer.” Inhofe specifically rejects claims that extending the tax cuts automatically would add to the deficit.

As the Forbes list makes clear, the superrich are, in fact, getting richer. And at the same time, their effective tax rate has been falling, all the way to 16.6 percent according to the latest data (as most of their income is subject to lower capital gains and dividends rates).

Now, obviously, allowing the high-end Bush tax cuts to expire would affect people making far, far less money than those on the Forbes 400 list. But those affected are still in the richest two percent of American households, and 80 percent of the cost of extending the cuts would go to millionaires. This year, the Bush tax cuts will give a millionaire more in tax breaks than 90 percent of Americans will earn in total income.

Income inequality is also the worst its been since 1928, as the richest one percent of the country has been reaping a bigger and bigger share of total income. According to the latest data, “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.” Between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent.”

Currently, the top one percent of households make nearly 25 percent of the total income in the country, after they made less than 10 percent in the 1970′s. And there’s even a stark divide within that one percent. The incomes of the top one-tenth of 1 percent (0.1 percent) has increased by 94 percent — or $3.5 million per household — since 2002. “The share of the nation’s income flowing to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of households increased from 7.3 percent of the total income in the nation in 2002 to 12.3 percent in 2007,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted.

Just 2.3 percent of Oklahomans (who live in a state where the median income is $42,000) would be affected if the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire. But I guess Inhofe is able to square all this by convincing himself that tax cuts don’t add to the deficit, and thus can be given to anyone whenever he wants, for free.

Today, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” a document styled after 1994′s Contract with America that the GOP claims is “an outline of the party’s targets in the final weeks of the legislative session.” We’ve already explained how the Pledge promises to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with portions of the Affordable Care Act and how it represents a blood oath to Big Oil, so let’s turn to another aspect: its effect on the deficit.

Of course, the Pledge includes a promise to extend all of the Bush tax cuts — including those for the richest two percent of Americans — for a total price tag of $4 trillion over the next decade, while laying out spending cuts that, even if the numbers are taken at face value, don’t come close to covering that cost. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the ranking member of the House Budget Committee — to explain how the GOP can square its desire for huge, regressive tax cuts with its supposed commitment to deficit reduction:

STEPHANOPOULOS: How are you going to pay for that $4 trillion, if you’re going to reduce spending?

RYAN: I brought a budget to the floor last year that cut $4.8 trillion in spending, which would have more than compensated for these tax cuts. [...]

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you do concede that you do not have a plan to balance the budget and you don’t pay for the tax cuts you’re extending?

RYAN: Well, we can pay for the tax cuts we’re extending. I have provided budgets that do that in the past.

Watch it:

Ryan went to great lengths to emphasize that he was not referring to his Roadmap for America’s Future, which is a long-term plan that purports to balance the budget by privatizing Social Security and Medicare, from which the GOP leadership has distanced itself. However, the budgets that Ryan actually brought to the floor are barely less radical.

Last year, Ryan’s released an “alternative budget” that would have privatized Medicare, cut Social Security benefits (in an admittedly unspecified manner) and implemented a five-year non-defense discretionary spending freeze that would have meant significant reductions in programs like Head Start and Pell Grants. Not only that, but it would have raised taxes on low-income families while cutting them for the very wealthy, as Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out:

Over a fourth of taxpayers, mostly low-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the President’s plan. The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $100,000 less, on average, under the House GOP plan than they would under the President’s plan.

The Pledge, as Ben Adler noted, “calculates how much spending cuts will save the government and how much tax cuts will save the taxpayer, but not how much their tax cuts or spending proposals will cost the government.” So are Republicans counting on using the Pledge as a way to backdoor in Ryan’s radical budgets, even when they publicly disavow Ryan’s ideas? (He didn’t even appear at the Pledge’s unveiling.)

The Pledge doesn’t have any specific proposals for dealing with the big drivers of the federal budget — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — but instead includes vague promises to “require accounting” and set “benchmarks” for the programs. So all we have to go on is Ryan’s assertion that he has a budget that can pay for all the tax cuts, which he clearly wants to accomplish by dismantling entitlements.