Last year, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and Wisconsin’s Republican legislature approved a law making it illegal for Wisconsin’s cities to require that businesses provide their workers with paid sick days. Milwaukee had crafted a law mandating paid sick leave for workers within the city, but Walker and Wisconsin GOP nullified it. A judge, in ruling that the state had the ability to preempt Milwaukee’s law, said “I don’t feel real good about how this happened politically.”

Louisiana’s legislature is now considering a similar bill to preempt local efforts at requiring paid leave for workers, as Half in Ten and the National Partnership for Women and Families noted:

S.B. 521, legislation that would take away Louisianans’ right to enact local paid sick days policies, is about to be voted on by the House — one of the last steps to enactment. Currently, more than 600,000 workers in Louisiana don’t have paid sick days, and if this bill becomes law, cities and parishes would lose the chance ever to put common-sense paid sick days standards in place…Louisiana already prohibits municipalities from setting their own minimum wage and can’t afford another anti-worker policy.

Just a few cities in the country — Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle — along with the state of Connecticut require that workers receive paid sick leave. The United States is all alone in the industrialized world in not requiring some form of paid leave as a matter of national policy. Each year, the U.S. economy loses $180 billion in productivity due to sick employees attending work and infecting other workers.

Last month, Bank of America foreclosed on a Los Angeles woman and her disabled daughter. Dima Rodriguez had spent thousands of dollars retrofitting her home to accommodate her daughter — who has cerebral palsy — and fell behind on her loan payments. Bank of America gave her a loan modification, and even though Rodriguez had made her trial modification payments for a year, the bank sold her house at auction, right out from under her.

However, Rodriguez and her daughter will get to stay in their home, thanks to some help from Occupy Wall Street protestors:

Desperate, Rodriguez contacted several community groups including Occupy Fights Foreclosures — the battle to save the Rodriguez home began. Suzanne O’Keeffe, with Occupy Fights Forclosures, says the bank didn’t treat the Rodriguez family right. She charged they not only didn’t fill out the proper paperwork to foreclose, they waited too long. [...]

Now, [Rodriguez] is determined not to look back. “It’s time to look forward,” Rodriguez said. “Thank God the bank listened.”

As ThinkProgress reported back in December, Bank of America is taking the Occupy movement’s foreclosure prevention actions seriously, warning employees to be prepared should Occupy make an appearance. Occupy protesters have successfully prevented foreclosures across the country, from Rochester to Minneapolis to Los Angeles.

Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Over the past two weeks, a couple of charts — one from yours truly and one from Rex Nutting at MarketWatch — have really riled up conservatives and confused a fair number of DC establishment media types. For the past three years, it has been an article of faith among those folks that President Obama went on some kind of spending binge. And a casual glance at yearly spending figures does appear to support that charge. But what my chart and Rex’s chart show is that, once you account for the fact that most of the increase in spending from fiscal year 2008 to 2009 happened before President Obama even took office, then the “binge” utterly vanishes.

And this is the key point. The only way to show that spending has gone up dramatically under President Obama is to pretend like he had complete control over what was spent in fiscal year 2009. And that notion is utterly false.

First of all, recall that President Obama took office nearly four months into fiscal year 2009. That simple fact, all by itself, is enough to discount any “analysis” that merely compares fiscal year 2008 spending to fiscal year 2009, and tries to attribute the entire difference to President Obama.

But it actually goes beyond that. By the time President Obama took office, nearly all the dramatic increase in spending had already been baked into the cake. How do we know that? Well, in January 2009, before President Obama had even taken office, the Congressional Budget Office projected that federal spending would exceed $3.5 trillion for fiscal year 2009, half a trillion more than the government spent in 2008. Again, that was BEFORE President Obama event took office. It’s reasonable to use that number as our best guess at what spending would have been in FY2009 under ANY president. That’s what my chart from last week did.

Of course, the CBO’s projections aren’t perfect. They change as the economy changes and as laws change. Fortunately, CBO also tells us in subsequent reports how and why its previous estimates have changed. We can use that to understand how much of the total federal spending in fiscal year 2009 was attributable to legislative changes that occurred AFTER President Obama took office.

The answer is that out of a total of $3.5 trillion actually spent in FY09, only $165 billion, less than 5 percent, was the result of policy changes signed into law by President Obama.

Read more

During an interview with Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin, 2012 presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney admitted that drastic spending cuts will hurt the economy, creating a “recession or depression“:

HALPERIN: You have a plan, as you said, over a number of years, to reduce spending dramatically. Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?

ROMNEY: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course. What you do is you make adjustments on a basis that show, in the first year, actions that over time get you to a balanced budget.

This, of course, is the point that progressives have been making in response to the House Republican budget, which Romney supports. According to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute, the cuts in the House GOP budget — authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — would cost the economy 4.1 million jobs over the next two years due to the $400 billion in spending cuts for which it calls. As Esquire’s Charles Pierce, who flagged this particular exchange in the interview, wrote, “didn’t Romney, in saying that, pretty much blow up the entire rationale for over 30 years of Republican economics right there? Cutting government spending will throw us into a recession or depression?”

Europe is already struggling under the weight of austerity, with its economy contracting at the fastest pace in three years. Romney seems to understand the effect that cutting the budget indiscriminately in the short-term will have, yet he’s backing a budget that fails to acknowledge it.

The average CEO made $9.6 million in 2011, even as workers’ wages remained stagnant and unemployment hovered nationally around 8 percent. Chief Executive Officers are being paid at the highest-ever rate since the AP started tracking the figure in 2006, according to a new report from the news organization.

But while CEOs may be reaping the rewards of higher profits and a growing stock market, very little of that achievement spreads as far as the average worker — or even the company’s stockholders:

Profit at companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index rose 16 percent last year, remarkable in an economy that grew more slowly than expected.

CEOs managed to sell more, and squeeze more profit from each sale, despite problems ranging from a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating to an economic slowdown in China and Europe’s neverending debt crisis.

Still, there wasn’t much immediate benefit for the shareholders. The S&P 500 ended the year unchanged from where it started. Including dividends, the index returned a slender 2 percent.

As the AP noted, “the typical American worker would have to labor for 244 years to make what the typical boss of a big public company makes in one.”

Growing CEO pay is contributing to the larger trend of increasing income inequality — CEO pay increased 127 times faster than the average worker pay over the last 30 years, and the average Fortune 500 CEO made 380 times what the average worker did last year. Fortune 500 companies made a record $824 billion in 2011.