The Illinois state senate is preparing to vote on legislation that would boost the state’s minimum wage to $10 an hour, the first increase since an increase to $8.25, the current rate, was phased in over three years starting in 2006. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the increase would raise wages for more than a million workers, particularly women and minorities, who make up a disproportionate share of minimum wage-earners.

Business leaders, as is typical, oppose the increase, which they say will fall disproportionately on small businesses and cost the state jobs, the Decatur Herald-Review reports:

Mike Palmer, marketing and brand manager for the McLean County Chamber of Commerce, said increases in the minimum wage fall disproportionately on small-business owners, who he said are less able to absorb increases in their labor costs.

Despite claims that the increase would lead to job losses, studies of increases in both federal and state minimum wage increases haven’t shown that to be true. In fact, when states across the country boosted their minimum wages at the beginning of 2012, EPI estimated that the additional money in the economy would actually create 3,000 jobs.

Increasing the minimum wage to $10 would make Illinois one of the few states to make today’s minimum wage as strong as it when it was first implemented. While the current federal minimum is $7.25 an hour, it would take an hourly wage of $9.92 to match the minimum wage’s buying power in 1968.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) proposed a tax plan in January that he said would make the state’s tax code “fairer, flatter, simpler” by lowering tax rates for all Kansans. As ThinkProgress noted at the time, Brownback’s plan actually cut taxes for the state’s top 1 percent while raising them on the lower and middle classes.

Facing criticism from policy analysts and lawmakers, Brownback’s plan hung up in the state legislature, where lawmakers have been working to hammer out a compromise plan. Now, however, a group of 50 former Republican lawmakers is calling on Brownback to abandon the plan because it would blow a massive hole in the state budget, jeopardizing schools, roads, and other important programs, the Lawrence Journal-World reports:

Traditional Republicans for Common Sense said the tax bill, if enacted, would put the state in a budget hole that would result in cuts to essential services, such as schools, roads, and nursing home care. The group said it would also lead to increases in local property taxes.

“I think Kansas taxpayers need to be asking where the governor would make these cuts,” said Rochelle Chronister, former assistant majority leader in the House, and former chair of the Kansas Republican Party.

“More importantly, we need to be asking what cuts of this magnitude might look like for working families, retirees and Kansas children,” Chronister, of Neodesha, said.

Original analysis of Brownback’s plan found that it would cost the state $900 million by 2018. A new analysis, released recently, said it would cost only $160 million by 2018, though that plan is based on growth projections in state sales tax revenues that are largely unrealistic.

Brownback has not said how he would make up the lost revenue, instead adhering to the false Republican orthodoxy that the tax cuts wouldn’t affect the budget because they would create jobs and boost economic growth.

Activists from the 99 Percent Movement took to the streets across America to mark May Day on Tuesday, but their campaign against Wall Street is just beginning. In the month of May, activist groups and religious leaders will again turn their focus to urging customers to move their money from Wall Street banks.

Last week, religious leaders and activists targeted Wells Fargo’s annual meeting, where they protested the bank’s predatory and often discriminatory practices and its lack of accountability for its role in the financial crisis that crippled the American economy. Next week, protesters will target Bank of America’s annual meeting, attempting to call attention to the same problems. Throughout the month, a diverse group of activists will push customers to move their money from Wall Street to community banks and credit unions, according to a press release from New Bottom Line, an organizing group that has dubbed May “Move Our Money Month”:

On May 9, thousands of people associated with the 99% Power Movement — families facing foreclosure, clergy, students, seniors, environmentalists, and others — will descend on Bank of America’s shareholder meeting in Charlotte, NC to urge the bank to keep families in their homes, pay its fair share of taxes, and stop choking democracy through massive campaign contributions. If Bank of America does not enact new policies that are more responsive to the communities it serves, large numbers of customers are expected to close their accounts. [...]

“The 99 percent are making their voices heard by moving their money out of the big banks that wrecked the economy and are doing nothing to fix it. This spring, there will be more people attending bank shareholders meetings than at any point in history and we will see more people severing their relationships with the big banks in favor of smaller institutions that are responsive to community concerns,” said Ilana Berger, Co-Director of The New Bottom Line.

The 99 Percent Movement has successfully targeted Wall Street banks with “Move Your Money” campaigns since last fall, when hundreds of thousands of people switched from large banks to credit unions in October and 40,000 more joined on a single day — known as “Bank Transfer Day” — in early November. Churches and faith leaders joined the cause, targeting banks for dodging taxes and unfair mortgage practices. Churches moved $55 million from Wall Street before Thanksgiving, and San Francisco faith leaders moved another $10 million from Wells Fargo in February.

Such campaigns are expected to have profound impacts on Wall Street’s bottom lines. A Wall Street consulting firm reported in November that the nation’s 10 largest banks could lose as much as $185 billion in deposits over the next year thanks to customer defections, and Bank of America — the activists’ next target — is the most vulnerable among them. According to the report, it could lose 10 percent of its customers and $42 billion by the end of 2012.

Edward Conard, a top donor to the super PAC backing Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, is writing a book that calls for more income inequality in the United States. Conard’s book, “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You Know About The Economy Is Wrong,” takes various views that “aren’t shared by many analysts” or economists, the New York Times’ Adam Davidson notes.

But one of the economists that does, at least in part, share Conard’s views is working for the Romney campaign. Glenn Hubbard, an economist and top Romney economic adviser, takes Conard’s broad economic ideas “seriously,” the Times reports:

Glenn Hubbard, a prominent economist and one of Romney’s chief economic advisers, takes his ideas seriously. “He doesn’t have the blinders of a model-based view of the world, which is an advantage and a disadvantage,” Hubbard told me.

That Hubbard takes Conard’s economic ideas seriously shouldn’t be surprising. Throughout the campaign, Romney has proposed many of the same failed economic policies this type of worldview promotes, focusing on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that he insists will boost growth for the middle and lower classes, even if they have failed to do so before.

Romney shares Conard’s “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking” only on a broad level, Hubbard told the Times. That should be disturbing, though, given that Conard was arguing for more income inequality precisely to promote innovation and growth. Romney himself has shrugged off discussions about income inequality, saying he is “not concerned with the very poor” and that the topic should only be discussed in “quiet rooms.”

Income inequality surged onto the national political radar in 2011, as the 99 Percent Movement focused America on the fact that while the richest Americans’ incomes were skyrocketing, wages remained relatively stagnant for the lower and middle classes. American income inequality is now worse than it is in countries like Ivory Coast and Pakistan, and it may be even worse than it was in Ancient Rome.

That inequality has crushed the middle class and has perilous consequences for the American economy. It is also contributing to another problem: rising debt inequality. As income inequality has risen, the bottom 95 percent of Americans have fallen deeper into debt over the last three decades, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund. The top five percent, meanwhile, have seen their personal debt reduced, CNN Money reports:

In 1983, the bottom 95% had 62 cents of debt for every dollar they earned, according to research by two International Monetary Fund economists. But by 2007, the ratio had soared to $1.48 of debt for every $1 in earnings.

The bottom 95% had incomes of roughly $160,000 or less in 2007, including capital gains.

And then there’s the top 5%. Their debt-to-income level actually fell during the same period, from 76 cents of debt for every dollar earned in 1983, to just 64 cents in 2007.

The contributors to rising income and debt inequality are clear — for the richest Americans, incomes are rising rapidly while tax rates have fallen to historic lows. The rest, however, are increasingly burdened by student loan debt as the cost of college soars, mortgage debt as the prices on their homes have plummeted, and credit card debt as they’ve tried to keep their head above water despite stagnant wages and rising unemployment.

And just as rising income inequality has hampered economic growth, rising debt inequality will threaten the nation’s future, experts say. Both times America had similar levels of debt inequality — in the 1920s and 2000s — crippling financial crises followed. And though the amount of debt held by the bottom 95 percent has shrunk since the end of the recession, that’s largely due to foreclosure and bankruptcy and shouldn’t be taken as a positive sign. “We’re still in similar levels of vulnerability as we were in 2008,” Michael Kumhoff, the report’s author, told CNN.