A group of House Democrats recently proposed legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour, roughly where it would have to be to match the peak buying power the wage reached in 1968. Cities and states across the country are taking action on their own, raising their minimum wages in an effort to help low-income workers.

Opponents of minimum wage increases contest that raising the minimum wage will be costly for businesses and have a negative effect on job growth and employment. An analysis by the Center for American Progress’ Nick Bunker, David Madland, and the University of North Carolina’s T. William Lester, however, found five recent studies showing that increasing the minimum wage — even during periods of high unemployment — does not have a negative effect on job growth:

A significant body of academic research has found that raising the minimum wage does not result in job losses even during hard economic times. There are at least five different academic studies focusing on increases to the minimum wage—including increases ranging from 7 percent to 12.3 percent made during periods of high unemployment—that find an increase in the minimum wage has no significant effect on employment levels. The results are likely because the boost in demand and reduction in turnover provided by a minimum wage counteracts the higher wage costs.

Similarly, a simple analysis of increases to the minimum wage on the state level, even during periods of state unemployment rates above 8 percent, shows that the minimum wage does not kill jobs. Indeed the states in our simple analysis had job growth slightly above the national average. [...]

All the studies came to the same conclusion—that raising the minimum wage had no effect on employment.

While increasing the minimum wage likely has no effect on job creation, it does have a tangible benefit for workers. Eight states increased their minimum wage at the beginning of 2012, providing extra benefits to 1.4 million workers. More than half of the workers directly affected by a minimum wage increase, as well as more than half who would be indirectly affected, are women, meaning increasing the wage provides help to a segment of the population that already faces significant disadvantages in the workplace.

According to a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice, the Republican approach to the Bush tax cuts — which is simply to extend all of them into perpetuity — would, of course, involve the rich paying lower taxes than President Obama’s plan, which is to allow the cuts to expire for the richest two percent of Americans. However, under the Republican approach, low-income Americans would also pay more than they would under Obama’s plan, because of expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit that the GOP would not extend.

Here’s the breakdown of how much each income group would receive in tax cuts under the respective plans. The GOP plan would give millionaires an additional $50,000 annually, while taxing the lowest-income Americans $150 more than Obama’s plan:

Under the GOP plan, nearly one-third of the total benefit goes to the richest 1 percent, while just 11 percent of the benefit of Obama’s plan does:

Of course, both of these plans entail spending huge amounts of money to extend tax cuts that didn’t deliver on their economic promise. But under the GOP plan, an even larger percentage of that money would be dumped straight into the hands of those at the top of the income scale.

The Nuns On A Bus Tour, a protest against spending cuts mandated by the House GOP budget, stopped yesterday outside the district offices of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the budget’s author. The stop, the second of 10 that the nine-state tour will make, followed an event at Rep. Steve King’s (R) Iowa office on Monday.

The nuns were greeted by “a couple hundred” people, according to the Huffington Post. Sister Simone Campbell, who organized the tour, called Ryan’s budget “irresponsible” for cutting food assistance and other safety net programs. Here are photos from the stop outside Ryan’s Janesville, Wisconsin office:

Ryan issued a brief statement in response to the protest but, like King, did not mention the nuns. Instead, Ryan returned to his standard line about the budget, saying it sought to solve “growing dependency on government assistance” and a looming “debt crisis.”

Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), a libertarian hero, last year said that allowing Social Security to exist is akin to permitting slavery. But during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today, Paul admitted to the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein that he collects Social Security checks anyway:

STEIN: A bit of a personal question then, are you on Social Security? Do you get Social Security checks?

PAUL: I do.

STEIN: Well, I mean, is there — you just told younger generations that they should ween themselves off this social contract.

PAUL: That is true.

STEIN: But you haven’t done it yourself…Don’t you think you chould have set a good example for the future generations. You’re not the wealthiest man in congress, I know that, but you have enough means to take care of yourself in retirement…Couldn’t you have set an example?

PAUL: No. I think the programs are so designed, just as I use the post office too, I use government highways, I do that too, I use the banks, the federal reserve system, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t work to remove this in the same way on Social Security.

Watch it:

Paul is, of course, not the only conservative to benefit from government programs that he or she opposes. But his crankish view of the Constitution has brought him to the conclusion that Social Security is altogether unconstitutional, which also hasn’t stopped him from collecting benefits.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A tax on high-frequency financial transactions would be good for American markets and the economy despite what its naysayers claim, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) said yesterday at the Take Back The American Dream Conference. DeFazio, who along with Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced legislation that would institute a financial transactions tax, told ThinkProgress that such a tax could drastically combat the deficit and bolster the overall economy, but Wall Street influence has stifled any hopes of enacting the measure:

DEFAZIO: So it would dampen some of the volatility of Wall Street, it would drive some of these hedge fund speculators out of the market, so therefore it would benefit all investors. It would give us a longer term financial term horizon in this country, and it would raise about $35 billion a year, which we could invest in putting people back to work, or we could use in the future to defray our deficit. In one way or another it would be beneficial. [...]

These people are getting filthy rich by driving up the price of commodities, creating volatility, and they don’t want to see that go away. They don’t care what happens to the rest of the economy. They don’t care how they affect the real economy. They don’t care if they drive up the price of oil. They’re just there to trade something 1,000 times a minute with super-computers. [...]

Point-zero-three percent. We had a tax of 0.4 — that is more than 10 times larger — during the Great Depression to help rebuild the real economy. And for 50 years we had a tax that was about seven times larger than this when the country was seeing the greatest growth in its history, post-World War II. So we’ve proven this will not have a detrimental impact on growth. In fact, it perhaps is beneficial to growth. It’s not necessarily beneficial to salaries of hedge fund managers on Wall Street.

Watch it:

To put things in perspective, Americans paid an average combined sales tax of 9.64 percent in 2010. DeFazio’s proposal of a .03 percent rate is 321 times smaller than what Americans would pay when they buy toothpaste. What’s more, the FTT would raise tens of billions of dollars a year, combat risky market speculation, and increase productive investments. By reducing high-frequency trading, the tax would reduce the market volatility and sudden crashes that come with trading for trading’s sake.

Since the global financial crisis, countries like France and Germany have pushed to institute a financial transactions tax. In America, however, this isn’t the first time that Wall Street has attempted to squash measures specifically geared toward preventing another financial crisis. The financial industry lobbied heavily against the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and it has continued to lobby heavily against the Volcker Rule, a provision meant to prevent banks from participating in risky trading with federally backed funds.

– Steven Perlberg

According to a study prepared by the congressional Joint Economic Committee and verified by independent experts, the House Republican budget authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) would raise taxes on families making less than $200,000, even while it gives millionaires a tax cut:

So although households earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year would save about $7,000 from the lower tax rates in the GOP plan, those savings would be swamped by eliminating major deductions, according to the report by the Democratically controlled congressional Joint Economic Committee.

The net result: Married couples in that income range would pay an additional $2,700 annually to the Internal Revenue Service, on top of the tax increases that are scheduled to hit every American household when the George W. Bush-era cuts expire at the end of the year.

Households earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.

“Ryan seems to want to have his cake and eat it, too, and this report shows that you can’t,” added Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY). “If you want to cut taxes on the rich and not raise the deficit, you’re going to have to basically clobber the middle class.”

According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, the Republican budget would also slam those making less than $30,000 per year, because it doesn’t extend some of the tax cuts for low-income Americans that President Obama has signed into law:

Republicans, meanwhile, contend that these analyses are unfair because they have yet to lay out their entire plan, including exactly which tax deductions and loopholes they plan to do away with. But as the Tax Policy Center’s Roberton Williams said, “unless [Republicans] go after the tax preferences that benefit the wealthy, it’s really hard to undo the regressivity of the rate changes. You’ll be shifting the burden of the tax code toward the middle class.”