Hours after new Duke Energy CEO Bill Johnson assumed his new position following the Duke/Progress Energy merger this week, he resigned his post. But Johnson can still qualify for up to $44.4 million for his time and effort:

Despite his short-lived tenure, Mr. Johnson will receive exit payments worth as much as $44.4 million, according to Duke. That includes $7.4 million in severance, a nearly $1.4 million cash bonus, a special lump-sum payment worth up to $1.5 million and accelerated vesting of his stock awards, according to a Duke regulatory filing Tuesday night. Mr. Johnson gets the lump-sum payment as long as he cooperates with Duke and doesn’t disparage his former employer, the filing said.

Under his exit package, Mr. Johnson also will receive approximately $30,000 to reimburse him for relocation expenses.

The Duke board voted for Johnson’s resignation, and since Johnson was eligible for severance if he quit for “good reason,” he is able to collect his $44 million. Grist calculates that Johnson’s pay package comes out to $5.5 million per hour, if he actually put in a full 8-hour day.

Johnson’s golden parachute after his one day of work is emblematic of the disconnect between worker pay and CEO pay that has occurred over the last few decades. Average CEO pay is now 380 times the pay of the average worker, and CEO pay has grown 127 times faster than worker pay over the last 30 years.

The House of Representatives’ latest version of the farm bill — crafted as a “compromise” between House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) and Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-MN) — would cut $35 billion in spending, including $16.5 billion from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program — known as SNAP or, informally, food stamps.

45 percent of the proposed cuts in the bill come from SNAP, mostly through eliminating what is known as “categorical eligibility.” Categorical eligibility kicks in when a family’s assets (such as a car) push it barely above the line to qualify for assistance, but it is still living on poverty-level disposable income. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities projects that the cuts will kick between two and three million people off of food assistance:

The bill would terminate SNAP eligibility to several million people. By eliminating categorical eligibility, which over 40 states have adopted, the bill would cut 2 to 3 million low-income people off food assistance.

Several hundred thousand low-income children would lose access to free school meals. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 280,000 children in low-income families whose eligibility for free school meals is tied to their receipt of SNAP would lose free meals when their families lost SNAP benefits.

Some working families would lose access to SNAP because they own a modest car, which they often need to commute to their jobs. Eliminating categorical eligibility would cause some low-income working households to lose benefits simply because of the value of a modest car they own. These families would be forced to choose between owning a reliable car and receiving food assistance to help feed their families.

In 2010, only 1.5 percent of SNAP recipients qualified under the categorical eligibility. While Republicans have done their best to frame food assistance as wasteful spending, it is not at all — at its very highest, the program was only .52 percent of the United States’ GDP. Plus, accessibility of food stamps affects peoples’ lives. Food stamps kept five million people out of poverty in 2010, and the program reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty by half.

Women have been disproportionately affected by the public sector layoffs that have become an unfortunate mainstay of the sluggish economic recovery, according to the National Women’s Law Center. The public sector has shed some 700,000 jobs in the last three years — which are the three worst years for public employment on record — and women have born the brunt of those cuts, while not seeing a large share of private sector job gains:

Since the start of the recovery three years ago, women have gained 908,000 net private sector jobs — and lost 396,000 net public sector jobs. Men have gained 2,304,000 net private sector jobs — and lost 231,000 net public sector jobs. In the last three years, women have a net gain of 512,000 jobs; men have a net gain of 2,073,000 jobs.

Men have gained enough jobs in the last three years to equalize the unemployment rate between the sexes. As Bryce Covert explained at Forbes, “Some of this is making up for the disproportionate number of jobs that men lost during the recession itself as construction and manufacturing collapsed. But given that men have experienced over four times the job gains made by women, that can’t account for all of it.”

Public sector layoffs have also disproportionately affected African-Americans. If public employment had simply grown at the historic rate during the recession, instead of shrinking dramatically, the unemployment rate would be a full percentage point lower.

The last three years have been the worst on record for public sector job losses, and the fact that more than 600,000 public employees have been laid off is holding back the nation’s economic recovery. In the last 12 months, local governments have lost more than 130,000 teaching jobs alone, according to monthly jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today.

In June 2011, local governments employed more than 7.9 million teachers. A year later, that number has dropped to 7.8 million, as Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal notes. Since June 2008, when local governments employed 8.1 million teachers, they have shed more than 300,000 teaching jobs, as this Federal Reserve Economic Data chart shows:

Such cuts obviously have perilous effects for the nation’s education system and long-term economic health, but it hurts the economy in the short-term too. Teachers are disproportionately women, so the cuts affect a subset of worker that already faces significant disadvantages in the American workplace, and these losses no doubt played a role in the recession’s out-sized impact on female workers.

What is worse, though, is that congressional Republicans blocked Democratic efforts to extend aid to state and local governments that would have protected teaching and public safety jobs multiple times over the last two years. Keeping teachers and other public sector employees in the workforce would boost demand to help the economy, so much so that growing the public sector at normal rates (instead of shrinking it at a record pace) would knock a full point off the unemployment rate.

New numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the economy added a mere 80,000 jobs in June. That’s down from an average of 150,000 jobs a month for the first part of the year, and far too little to keep up with population growth.

Republican intransigence on economic policy has been a key contributor to the sluggish recovery. As early as 2009, Republican fear-mongering over spending and their readiness to filibuster in the Senate helped convince the White House economic team that an $800 billion stimulus was the most they could hope to get through Congress. Reporting has since revealed that the team thought the country actually needed a stimulus on the order of $1.2 to $1.8 trillion. The economy’s path over the next three years proved them right. Here are the top five ways the Republicans have sabotaged the economic recovery since:

1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.

There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP have passed proposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, those policies — the payroll tax cut, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and discretionary spending for low-income Americans — have the highest multipliers, meaning more job boosting potential per dollar.

When Mitt Romney criticizes the job creation record of the Obama administration, he contributes job losses to Obama that took place in January 2009, immediately after the President was inaugurated. As the New York Times explained, “By counting from January 2009, Mr. Romney paints the bleak portrait of a country that despite a modest recovery still has fewer jobs than it did when Mr. Obama took office.”

However, when he was Governor of Massachusetts, Romney called that sort of accounting “silly.” In a video uncovered by American Bridge, Romney explicitly rejected attributing job losses from the beginning of his term to his own total, which is exactly what he has been doing to slam Obama:

ROMNEY: You guys are bright enough to look at the numbers. I came in and the jobs had been just, like falling off a cliff. And I came in and they kept falling for eleven months. And then we turned around and we’re coming back. And that’s progress. And if you’re going to suggest to me that somehow the day I got elected, somehow jobs should immediately turn around, well that would be silly. It takes a while to get things turned around. We were in a recession…There will be some people who try to say, ‘well governor, net-net you’ve only added a few thousand jobs since you’ve been in.’ Yeah, but I helped stop — I didn’t do it alone, the economy’s a big part of that, the private sector is what drives that, up and down — but we were in free-fall for three years.

Watch it:

Here is the Obama administration’s record when it comes to private sector job creation, with a free-fall due to the Great Recession at the beginning and a slow but steady turnaround, courtesy of Maddowblog:

And of course, the unemployment rate would be a full percentage point lower than it is today if severe budget cuts had not been adopted at the state and local level, which have caused massive public sector job losses.