At the beginning of this year, San Francisco became the first city in the country to raise its minimum wage above $10 an hour, and eight states boosted their own respective minimum wages, providing new benefits to approximately 1.4 million workers. But even in those states, the minimum wage is hardly keeping up with the cost of living — we would need a $9.92-per-hour wage, more than $2 above the current federal minimum, to match the buying power of the minimum wage in 1968.

The minimum wage looks even more paltry when compared to health care costs and college tuition rates, two areas where costs are ballooning at extraordinary rates. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, it would take someone making the federal minimum wage a full year’s worth of work to afford a family health insurance policy, and slightly less than half of a full year’s work to afford tuition at the average public university. That’s far more work than was required by a minimum wage-earner in 1979:

Despite overwhelming evidence that the minimum wage is becoming increasingly insufficient, Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures across the country have opposed efforts to raise it. Instead, they have advocated for lowering the minimum wage or for abolishing it altogether.

2012 GOP presidential favorite Mitt Romney has been receiving the support of the Restore Our Future Super PAC. Restore Our Future has been using its millions of dollars to run misleading advertisements about Romney’s opponents.

NBC has noted that Restore Our Future is “by far the best-funded of the super PACs backing presidential candidates in the 2012 election.” And according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), nearly half of the Super PAC’s donations come from the financial industry:

Of the $43.2 million raised by the attack PAC, $20.5 million, or 48 percent, came from finance industry donors, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by the Center for Public Integrity.

At least $13.5 million came from private equity firms ($7 million) and hedge funds ($6.5 million) while most of the rest came from investment banks and other asset managers. So-called “non-bank lenders” that run storefront cash-for-title and payday lending operations gave the super PAC $437,500, according to the analysis.

A ThinkProgress analysis previously found that Mitt Romney is Goldman Sach’s favorite GOP candidate. And it seems that the rest of the financial industry is in the same camp.

The financial industry’s love for Romney makes sense, since Romney is both a former financial executive himself, and wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. He has also been non-committal with regard to closing the carried interest tax loophole, a pernicious tax break for money managers that helps Romney himself save millions of dollars. CPI noted that “the average contribution [to the Super PAC] was a little more than $83,000.”

President Obama today used a speech before the Associated Press Luncheon to deliver a defense of the social safety net and government investment, while laying out the empirical case against supply-side economics. “You would think that after the results of this experiment in trickle-down economics were made painfully clear, the proponents of this theory might moderate their views a bit,” Obama said. “But that’s exactly the opposite of what they’ve done.”

In that vein, he took a shot at the House Republican budget that was passed last week (with zero Democratic votes), calling it “thinly-veiled Social Darwinism”:

This Congressional Republican budget is something different altogether. It is a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plan, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly-veiled Social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it — a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training; research and development; our infrastructure — it is a prescription for decline.

Watch it:

“What drags down our entire economy is when there is an ever-widening chasm between the ultra rich and everybody else,” Obama added. The House Republican budget would give millionaires hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax cuts, while getting 62 percent of its spending cuts from programs that benefit low-income Americans.

The committees in the House of Representatives that oversee tax writing and regulation of the financial industry have provided huge boosts to their members’ campaign fundraising accounts over the last nine congresses, according to a new study from the Sunlight Foundation, a campaign finance watchdog.

Seats on the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax writing, added more than half a million dollars over mean fundraising totals, while assignments on the House Financial Services Committee add nearly $300,000 when donations from individuals and political action committees are combined, the Sunlight Foundation found in its analysis of the 103rd-111th Congresses:

Both committees have been major focal points recently. The Financial Services Committee led the way on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, which overhauled the nation’s financial regulatory laws. Ways and Means, meanwhile, has been at the center of tax reform, with Democrats pushing to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and close certain tax loopholes and Republicans fighting to lower corporate and personal income taxes and close loopholes of their own.

Under the newly-adopted House Republican budget, Ways and Means is back in the spotlight, charged with ending tax breaks to finance a massive tax cut for the wealthy. And with the GOP at the helm, Financial Services has led the fight to undermine and ultimately repeal Dodd-Frank. To put the fundraising clout that goes with assignments on those committees in context, a seat on on those committees is worth between three and five times more than a seat on the Appropriations Committee, once viewed as the most powerful committee in Congress.