The box office smash The Avengers has officially made more than $1 billion worldwide, after setting the record for largest opening in film history. This revenue dwarfs the film’s $220 million budget, and makes one wonder why the state of New Mexico felt the need to subsidize the movie to the tune of $22 million:

Marvel’s The Avengers has already raked in $1 billion worldwide, but News 13 has learned the state shelled out some serious cash to shoot the movie in New Mexico.

According to the Taxation and Revenue Department, the state paid $22,413,469 in credits to Marvel Worldwide, Inc., the company that produced The Avengers.

“This was spent on a movie production project that is now gone. It was here temporarily,” said New Mexico state Rep. Dennis Kintigh (R). “We could have spent that $22 million on all kinds of things like education for our children, we could have spent it on roads.”

New Mexico is far from the only state that provides film and television subsidies, but as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, they are wasteful and ineffective, subsidizing activity that would have happened anyway:

State film subsidies are a wasteful, ineffective, and unfair instrument of economic development. While they appear to be a “quick fix” that provides jobs and business to state residents with only a short lag, in reality they benefit mostly non-residents, especially well-paid non-resident film and TV professionals. Some residents benefit from these subsidies, but most end up paying for them in the form of fewer services — such as education, healthcare, and police and fire protection — or higher taxes elsewhere. The benefits to the few are highly visible; the costs to the majority are hidden because they are spread so widely and detached from the subsidies.

43 states currently subsidize film and television production, to the tune of $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2010. Meanwhile, “the revenue generated by economic activity induced by film subsidies falls far short of the subsidies’ direct costs to the state.”

Reuters’ Chrystia Freelend today rounded up the economic evidence that equal rights, including equal pay for women and laws against discrimination, help boost the overall economy. One study by four economists even found that expanding opportunities for women and African Americans over the last 50 years has offered a serious boost to U.S. productivity growth:

Fairness, they contend, has made the economy more productive. Chang-Tai Hsieh, Erik Hurst, Charles Jones and Peter Klenow argue that as much as 20 percent of the growth in productivity in the United States over the past 50 years can be attributed to expanded opportunities for women and blacks.

“Changes in things that have affected women or blacks specifically have yielded a sizable impact on overall U.S. earnings growth,” Hurst told me. “That is a big effect.”

Of course, the U.S. still has a long way to go in terms of equality, but the evidence suggests that more equality would be economically beneficial to everyone.

In a paper released yesterday, Center for American Progress economists Heather Boushey and Adam Hersh laid out the economic case for reducing income inequality, noting that a strong middle class is a necessary component of economic growth. In the last 30 years, however, the middle class has been eroding, as the richest Americans take a larger and larger share of the national income, hurting not only economic growth but economic mobility.

Last August, debt ceiling negotiations between House Republicans and Senate Democrats came to an end when President Obama signed into law the Budget Control Act, a not-so-grand bargain that created a legislative super committee tasked with finding spending cuts to offset the debt ceiling increase. If the super committee failed, automatic cuts from the defense budget and discretionary spending levels would offset the cost.

The deal was an end to three tumultuous months of wrangling over the debt ceiling that brought the government to the brink of default and, thanks to the GOP’s intransigence on new tax revenues, led to the first credit downgrade in the nation’s history. House Republicans have repeatedly threatened to renege on the deal, and this morning, they made it official, adding an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that officially replaced spending cuts from the defense sequestration with cuts from the House reconciliation package.

In less than 10 minutes, the House officially unwound a budget deal that took an entire summer to craft, the New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman reports:

Without discussion, the House just voted to scrap the defense sequester, 220-201. 21 Republicans voted no. Oh well, there goes that.

— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) May 18, 2012

After rendering last year’s negotiations completely pointless, House Republicans are poised to pull the exact same charade this year. Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) “will insist that any increase in the debt limit be accompanied by spending ‘cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase,’” putting the economic recovery in jeopardy once again. Last year, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that the spending cuts Republicans required to raise the debt ceiling cost the economy 1.8 million jobs. And yet the GOP insists on recreating the same disastrous scenario all over again.

2012 presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney this week defended JP Morgan Chase’s $3 billion trading debacle as just “the way America works.” He denied that the episode makes the case for stronger regulations to rein in banks’ risky trading.

Overall, of course, Romney has shown little interest in diagnosing or addressing the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, and the role of the nation’s biggest banks in nearly sinking the global economy. And the banks surely appreciate it, considering that employees of the biggest financial firms are his top donors, as the Boston Globe noted today:

When the head of JPMorgan Chase met with shareholders to answer for a trading loss of more than $2 billion Tuesday, it was against an evolving political backdrop: Donors from big banks are betting on Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama and repeal new restraints on risky, large-scale investments. [...]

The top five donor groups in Romney’s campaign are individuals and political action committees associated with large financial institutions, led by Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, according to information compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign donations.

The Globe actually got it a bit wrong: the top six donors to Romney come from the biggest banks — Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Citigroup. And the finance/insurance/real estate industry is far and away the largest donor to Romney’s campaign, giving him $18 million. Of course, banks also throw money at the Democrats, but in this cycle, they’ve clearly favored the GOP.

Romney is surely not the only Republican lawmaker getting JP Morgan’s back, as House Financial Services Committee Spencer Bachus (R-Al) also defended the bank. Bachus, though, is also bankrolled by the financial industry.