Yesterday President Obama introduced a rule that would finally extend federal minimum wage and overtime protections to two million workers who provide home-based care to the elderly and people with disabilities. For 37 years a loophole that puts home health care workers in the same “companion” category as babysitters has prevented those workers from receiving these key labor rights.

The administration’s action rectifies a longstanding injustice by simply ensuring home care workers are covered by the same protections other workers get under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But Congressional Republicans and their corporate allies are speaking out against the move:

Republican lawmakers and business groups criticized the proposed rules, which might be modified after a 60-day public comment period. Industry officials said the proposals would push up costs and might cause home care agencies to reduce the hours of aides who work more than 40 hours a week and instead hire more aides.

“The president’s goal is commendable, but the likely result of this new rule is reduced hours for home care workers and higher costs for taxpayers,” said John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who is chairman of the House Education and the Work Force Committee, and Tim Walberg, a Minnesota Republican who heads the panel’s subcommittee on work force protections…

Predictably, Republicans and businesses that are reluctant to part with their profits have resorted to fearmongering, claiming that adequately compensating home care workers will increase costs for taxpayers and the elderly. But Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said any increased costs would be modest.

More importantly, these workers provide an indispensable service for a growing number of Americans and deserve fair pay. Six million Americans over 65 years old need some form of daily assistance to live outside a nursing home, and that number is expected to double by 2030 as Baby Boomers age.

According to the White House, 92 percent of home health care workers are women, nearly 30 percent are African-American and 12 percent are Hispanic. Nearly 40 percent rely on public benefits like Medicaid and food stamps. The new rules will be a big help for workers and their families who are struggling to get by.

Texas’s longest-serving Governor, Rick Perry (R), is retiring at the end of his term in 2015, promising to walk away from his $150,000 annual salary. But by “officially” retiring early, the Texas Tribune reports that the 61-year-old has been taking home not only that salary, but also “lucrative pension benefits” that, altogether, ad up to a 60 percent boost in compensation:

Perry officially retired in January so he could start collecting his lucrative pension benefits early, but he still gets to collect his salary — and has in turn dramatically boosted his take-home pay.

Perry makes a $150,000 annual gross salary as Texas govenor. Now, thanks to his early retirement, Perry, 61, gets a monthly retirement annuity of $7,698 before taxes, or $6,588 net. That raises his gross annual salary to more than $240,000.

The GOP candidate who demanded sweeping changes to the “Ponzi scheme” that is Social Security and slammed public workers for their special “perks” is also eligible for Social Security and “lifetime, state-provided health care.” Perry’s windfall is “consistent with Texas state law and Employee Retirement System rules,” said Perry’s spokesman Ray Sullivan. The Texas Tribune’s Jay Root discovered this “early retirement manuever” via new ethics disclosures from the Federal Election Commission which requires candidates to detail exactly how they make their money.

Congress may have come to an agreement on a $1 trillion bill to keep the government funded beyond midnight (when the current round of funding runs out), but there is significantly less common ground on extending the soon-to-expire payroll tax cut. Democrats, in an attempt to prevent a tax increase on working Americans come year end, have dropped their demand that the extension be paid for via a tiny surtax on income in excess of $1 million.

So does that mean Republicans have dropped their demand that an extension be tied to the approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline? Of course not:

House Speaker John A. Boehner said Friday that his chamber will not sign off on an extension of the payroll tax cut sought by President Obama without including a provision to speed construction of an oil pipeline, which Obama has opposed…“If that bill comes over to us, we will make changes to it, and I will guarantee you that the Keystone pipeline will be in there when it goes back to the United States Senate,” Boehner said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) joined in, saying, “Frankly, I will not be able to support a package that doesn’t include the pipeline.” Republicans claim that the oil pipeline will be a job creator, but the only independent analysis into the pipeline found that just 500 to 1400 temporary construction jobs will be created, “with a negative long-term economic impact.”

In order to attain its beloved pipeline, the GOP is willing to raise taxes on 113 million households next year, costing the average family $1000. At the same time, the GOP adamantly refused to consider a surtax on the very wealthiest Americans. This has become the standard operating procedure for the GOP this year: exploit expiring provisions (or the imminent expiration of U.S. credit) to force through a conservative agenda. In this instance, it’s middle-class taxpayers or the environment that suffers if Republicans get their way.

One of 2012 GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s favorite claims is that, when he was Speaker of the House in the 1990s, he helped balance the budget four times. In the Fox News debate last night, he said, “as Speaker, one of the reasons some people aren’t happy with some of my leadership is, I actually worked things out with Bill Clinton to get welfare reform, a tax cut, and four balanced budgets signed.”

This is a point that Gingrich drills home in interviews all the time. “If you look at my record, the only Speaker in your lifetime to get to four balanced budgets,” he said during a Fox interview. Watch a compilation:

However, this talking point is much more fiction than fact. For starters, as USA Today noted, “Gingrich was in office for only two of those budget years (fiscal 1998 and 1999). But he continues to claim credit for two balanced budgets that were passed after he left office (fiscal 2000 and 2001).” Furthermore, as Citizens for Tax Justice’s Bob McIntyre wrote, it was actually the 1993 budget, which all Republicans opposed, that laid the groundwork for the balanced budgets that occurred under President Bill Clinton:

Gingrich’s argument comes down to this: In August 1997, Congress passed a bill called the “Balanced Budget Act,” which promised to balance the federal budget five years later, in fiscal 2002. Soon after the bill was signed, the budget was balanced. Therefore, the balanced budget act balanced the budget. But that’s demonstrably false.

In fact, the budget surpluses that we enjoyed from 1998 to 2001 had nothing to do with the balanced budget act. Instead, the surpluses stemmed from a dramatic surge in federal revenues, mainly personal income taxes. Here’s what really happened.

In 1993, Bill Clinton undid some of the Reagan tax cuts for the wealthy, in a bill that every Republican in Congress opposed…Clinton’s 1993 increase in tax rates on high earners applied to a new wave of taxable income from corporate executives cashing in their lucrative stock options (which are taxed as wages). In fiscal 2000, the surplus peaked at $237 billion, and it remained a robust $128 billion in fiscal 2001 (Clinton’s last budget year).

All of these surpluses would have occurred if the Balanced Budget Act had never been enacted.

Gingrich told anyone who would listen that Clinton’s 1993 tax increase would destroy the economy, but just the opposite happened.

Center for American Progress Director for Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden has actually found that legislation passed by Gingrich’s House Republicans made the budget picture worse in the 90s, not better. “Gingrich and his Republican Congress had nothing at all to do with balancing the budget in 1998. In fact, the net effect of their efforts was to make the fiscal situation slightly worse,” Linden noted. But that hasn’t stopped Gingrich from trotting out the fact that budgets were balanced while he was Speaker in an attempt to bolster his fiscal bona fides.

Poverty in America is only getting worse, with data showing rising income inequality and the startling fact that half of all Americans are now either in poverty or considered low-income. Were it not for the government programs that comprise the social safety net, those numbers would be even worse. More than a quarter would live in poverty without the safety net, according to one study, and Social Security alone kept 14 million out of poverty last year. Despite that, Congress — and particularly Republicans in Congress — have made cuts to various programs meant to aid the poorest Americans.

Congress reached a deal Thursday to avert a shutdown that would have begun at midnight tonight, and in doing so, Republicans found another low-income program to target, cutting funding for subsidies that help the poor stay warm during the winter by nearly 25 percent. At the same time, however, the Pentagon’s budget is getting a 1 percent boost, as the Associated Press noted:

Highlights of the $1 trillion-plus 2012 spending legislation in Congress:

—$518 billion for the Pentagon’s core budget, a 1 percent boost, excluding military operations overseas. [...]

—$3.5 billion for low-income heating and utility subsidies, a cut of about 25 percent.

The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) has become increasingly vital for American families affected by the recession, and it is utilized more and more by military families. One of every five families using LIHEAP is a military family, a 156 percent increase from 2008. Congress, however, decided to cut that program to give a boost to a budget that already makes up 20 percent of the country’s total budget and has been spared in multiple spending agreements this year (the super committee trigger a notable exception).

Plenty of evidence exists that Congress should be focused on investing into programs that boost economic growth and job creation, rather than chasing fiscal austerity toward another recession. If it insists on cutting spending to deal with the deficit now, however, the least it could do is not take the knife to each and every program that helps the poor.

Congressional leaders last night agreed to a $1 trillion bill to fund the government, averting a shutdown that would have started at midnight tonight. The bill reportedly dropped many of the unrelated policy riders that House Republicans had tried to insert into it.

However, the bill does include a cut to the Pell Grant program that could affect up to 100,000 low-income students. Republicans have been pushing for months to slash the Pell Grant program — which provides low-income students with money for higher education — and to limit it’s eligibility requirements. Though the maximum grant will be preserved under the spending deal, students on the edges of eligibility will be out of luck next year:

The bill, HR 3671, draws from ideas put forward in Republican and Democratic spending plans earlier this year: it would preserve the maximum Pell Grant at $5,550, but change the program’s eligibility criteria, making as many as 100,000 of its 9 million recipients ineligible. The grants could be used for a total of 12 semesters, not 18, as in the past — a change that would affect an estimated 62,000 beneficiaries and take effect July 1, 2012. Higher education lobbyists said the limit would apply to any semesters a student was enrolled, rather than only those in which he or she attended full-time, as they had originally thought.

The maximum amount families could earn and automatically contribute nothing toward an undergraduate education would decrease from $30,000 to $23,000.

The plan also retroactively limits the number of semesters that a student can use grants, meaning some students a semester or two away from graduation could see their grants dry up. The Institute for College Access and Success said that these changes “would disproportionately affect black students and transfer students.” The education reform organization Education Trust also criticized the cuts, saying that they “will hit some of America’s most disadvantaged college students the hardest.”

At the same time that Republicans so adamantly opposed a surtax on income in excess of $1 million that Democrats ultimately dropped it from the negotiations, it’s disheartening that one of the few things the two parties could agree on was cutting a program that is key to America’s education competitiveness.