Mitt Romney on Friday visited Louisiana in order to tour damage from Hurricane Isaac, one day after delivering his address to the Republican National Convention. The first day of that convention, of course, was dominated by the Republicans’ continued use of a dishonestly edited quote to claim that President Obama thinks small businesses owners had nothing to do with their business. (Taken in context, it’s painfully obvious that Obama was referring to roads, bridges, and the American education system when he said, “you didn’t build that.”)

As Romney tours the storm damage, it’s worth noting that government-funded levees prevented far greater damage from occurring in New Orleans, seven years after the city was battered (and the levees failed) during Hurricane Katrina:

Isaac’s whistling winds lashed this city and the storm dumped nearly a foot of rain on its desolate streets, but the system of levee pumps, walls and gates appeared to withstand one of the stiffest challenges yet…Isaac arrived seven years after Hurricane Katrina and passed slightly to the west of New Orleans, where the city’s fortified levee system easily handled the assault.

Meanwhile, Romney’s economic plan — which would require a nearly 30 percent reduction in all discretionary spending — would make America’s already precarious infrastructure situation worse. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the U.S. needs $2.2 trillion in investments to bring its infrastructure into adequate shape, including $100 billion to repair levees:

More than 85% of the nation’s estimated 100,000 miles of levees are locally owned and maintained. The reliability of many of these levees is unknown. Many are more than 50 years old and were originally built to protect crops from flooding. With an increase in development behind these levees, the risk to public health and safety from failure has increased. Rough estimates put the cost at more than $100 billion to repair and rehabilitate the nation’s levees. [...]

There is no definitive record of how many levees there are in the U.S., nor is there an assessment of the current condition and performance of those levees…As of February 2009, initial results from USACE’s inventory show that while more than half of all federally inspected levees do not have any deficiencies, 177, or about 9%, are expected to fail in a flood event.

By one estimate, more than half of Americans reside in counties “that contain levees or other kinds of flood control and protection systems.” And if Romney gets his way on the budget, those systems would be starved of funds and left to languish.

The majority of jobs added since the end of the Great Recession have been in low-wage occupations, according to a study from the National Employment Law Project. Those jobs have largely replaced middle-wage jobs, which made up a majority of those lost during and immediately after the recession.

Nearly three in five jobs added since the end of the recession pay less than $13.83 an hour, the report found:

Lower-wage occupations were 21 percent of recession losses, but 58 percent of recovery growth.

Mid-wage occupations were 60 percent of recession losses, but only 22 percent of recovery growth.

Higher-wage occupations were 19 percent of recession job losses, and 20 percent of recovery growth.

A recent study from the Economic Policy Institute found that more than a quarter of Americans — 28 percent — would work in low-wage jobs for the next decade. Those jobs pay less than $11.06 an hour, the necessary wage to reach the federal poverty level. Low-wage sectors, EPI found, are growing faster than the overall economy.

The growth of low-wage jobs has exacerbated inequality between employees and the executives who run their employers. At the 50 companies that employ the most low-wage workers, chief executives made an average of $9.4 million a year.

These studies come at a time when multiple states are considering minimum wage increases. Democratic members of Congress have introduced legislation to raise the federal minimum as well. To match the minimum wage’s peak buying power in 1968, today’s wage would need to be raised by more than $3 an hour.

During a speech Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke asserted that the extraordinary measures taken by the central bank during and after the Great Recession added millions of jobs to the economy. But he wouldn’t commit to doing anything more to boost the faltering recovery, even after admitting that high levels of unemployment “will wreak structural damage on our economy that could last for many years“:

Model simulations conducted at the Federal Reserve generally find that the securities purchase programs have provided significant help for the economy. For example, a study using the Board’s FRB/US model of the economy found that, as of 2012, the first two rounds of [large scale asset purchases] may have raised the level of output by almost 3 percent and increased private payroll employment by more than 2 million jobs, relative to what otherwise would have occurred. [...]

As we assess the benefits and costs of alternative policy approaches, though, we must not lose sight of the daunting economic challenges that confront our nation. The stagnation of the labor market in particular is a grave concern not only because of the enormous suffering and waste of human talent it entails, but also because persistently high levels of unemployment will wreak structural damage on our economy that could last for many years.

Over the past five years, the Federal Reserve has acted to support economic growth and foster job creation, and it is important to achieve further progress, particularly in the labor market. Taking due account of the uncertainties and limits of its policy tools, the Federal Reserve will provide additional policy accommodation as needed to promote a stronger economic recovery and sustained improvement in labor market conditions in a context of price stability.

This has been a consistent theme for Bernanke, claiming that unemployment will result in long-term damage to the economy, while refusing to take additional steps to do anything about it. As economist Chad Stone shows in U.S. News & World Report this morning, the Fed has utterly failed to meet its obligation to bring down unemployment, even as inflation, the other half of the Fed’s dual mandate, stays low:

Not all members of the Federal Reserve board are content with the central bank sitting on its hands. As Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren said, “If there’s a slowdown and you have an independent central bank, the appropriate response is to act. I think that’s exactly what we should do.”

David Koch, one half of the pair of billionaire brothers who have pumped millions into the Republican infrastructure, admitted today that even he thinks that the Republican Party has strayed too far too the right:

Koch said he thinks the U.S. military should withdraw from the Middle East and said the government should consider defense spending cuts, as well as possible tax increases to get its fiscal house in order – a stance anathema to many in the Republican Party.

“I think it’s essential to be able to achieve spending reductions and maybe it’s going to require some tax increases,” he said. “We got to come close to balancing the budget, otherwise we’re in a terrible deep problem.”

Koch’s disagreement with the GOP’s hard right turn must not be too serious, however. According to Politico, Koch-backed groups still play to spend $400 million this election cycle to buy control of the federal government for Republicans.

Mitt Romney will officially accept the Republican nomination for president at the party’s national convention tonight, and in his speech, he will undoubtedly talk about the economy and his supposed plan to spur growth and speed up the recovery. Romney’s plan is notorious for its lack of specifics, but through the few details he has provided, ThinkProgress compiled seven facts about his economic policies that he likely won’t mention in his speech tonight:

1) It gives the rich and corporations a massive tax cut. Romney’s proposal to give every American a tax cut is a giveaway to the rich that is four-times larger than the Bush tax cuts. Half the benefit would go to the richest five percent of Americans, and each member of the top 0.1 percent would get at least a $264,000 cut. Romney says he will balance the cuts with the closure of tax loopholes, but he can’t name which ones he’d close and even if he did, the plan wouldn’t generate enough revenue to offset revenue lost to tax reductions. His corporate tax plan, meanwhile, results in more than $1 trillion in tax cuts.

2) It raises taxes on the middle class. A Tax Policy Center analysis found that Romney’s plan would raise taxes on middle class families by up to $2,000 if he were to keep his promise to maintain the current level of revenue. A later analysis that added in the cost of Romney’s corporate tax cuts nearly doubled the size of the tax hike on the middle class to as much as $4,000 for a family of four.

3) It won’t balance the budget. Romney’s tax plan would add more than $10 trillion to the national debt if he doesn’t balance it with tax increases on the middle class or with spending cuts that are too impossibly large to fathom. Even if Romney closed every loophole for the rich, as he has promised to do, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for five years to avoid adding to the debt. The economy hasn’t grown that fast over a five-year period since the early 1960s.

4) It won’t lead to economic growth. The last Republican president promised that supply-side policies like tax cuts for the rich would boost the economy and lead to job growth. They didn’t. Romney is trying the same policies (Bush, “just updated,” as one RNC official put it), despite overwhelming evidence that they don’t work.

5) It will make it easier for corporations to dodge taxes and outsource jobs: Romney’s plan to switch to a territorial tax system will make it easier for corporations to stash their profits in off-shore tax havens. It would also make it easier for corporations to outsource American jobs. In all, economists estimate the plan could cost America 800,000 jobs.

6) It would put bankers between you and your student loans. Obamacare included a provision in the law that removed bankers from the federal student loan process, eliminating a middle-man and allowing borrowers to deal directly with the government. That reduced costs, saving students $100 billion. By repealing the healthcare law, Romney would put those bankers back in between students and government lenders, handing big banks billions of dollars in the process.

7) It won’t address the housing crisis. Romney’s economic plan had 59 points, but it failed to detail a plan to help America’s struggling homeowners. Instead, Romney says we should let the housing market “run its course and hit the bottom,” and that America shouldn’t “try to stop the foreclosure process.” His plan wouldn’t help the millions of Americans who are facing foreclosure or are underwater on their mortgages. It also ignores simple steps the government could take to help housing, and it has been criticized by Republicans in high-foreclosure states. Romney has since tried to reverse course, but he still offers no specifics.

Today marks the beginning of competition for the London 2012 Paralympics, after the games’ opening ceremony last night. But at the same time, disabled citizens of the United Kingdom are facing huge cuts to their aid programs, as the Washington Post detailed:

Hundreds of thousands of disabled Britons are seeing their benefits cut or facing the prospect of diminished or eliminated aid. More than 15,000 unemployed disabled people a week are being reassessed by a contractor to determine whether they are fit to work. New, stricter guidelines mean that Britons who can roll themselves more than 200 yards in a wheelchair or read Braille could be considered able-bodied enough to find a job.

At the same time, the government is sending letters to nearly all disability beneficiaries, including those gainfully employed, warning that they will also soon need reassessments for other types of aid that help them cover a variety of costs, including home health-care workers and wheelchair-accessible cars.

By 2015, the government anticipates a 500,000-person reduction in those receiving Britain’s primary disability benefit. The number of claimants now stands at 3.4 million, up threefold since 1992.

“I would argue this is not about trying to get disabled people back into employment or off aid,” said former Paralympics gold medalist Tara Flood. “This is simply about going after a group of people the government has now decided is too expensive in these times. They are using the kind of ‘burden on society’ argument that is dehumanizing us.”

The UK, of course, has engaged in austerity in response to the economic crisis, following the same course as many of Europe’s major economies. The results, however, have been just the opposite of those austerity’s advocates predicted: the countries cutting the most are growing the least. The UK has even entered a double-dip recession, with an economy that is smaller than it was before the conservative government took power. That Britain’s government is cutting aid to the disabled in the midst of the Paralympics simply adds insult to injury.

According to the world’s richest woman, low-income people are only poor because they don’t work hard enough, and because the government has coddled them with a minimum wage that is too high. Australian Gina Rinehart, who inherited her $30 billion fortune, said, “If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself — spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working”:

“There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire,” she wrote in an industry magazine column.

“If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself — spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working.

“Become one of those people who work hard, invest and build, and at the same time create employment and opportunities for others.”

Rinehart blamed what she described as “socialist”, anti-business policies for the plight of Australia’s poor, urging the government to lower the minimum wage, as well as taxes, unless it wanted to end up like Greece.

Australian Treasury minister Wayne Swan replied, “These sorts of comments are an insult to the millions of Australian workers who go to work and slog it out to feed the kids and pay the bills.” Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rinehart’s comments about the minimum wage “just plain wrong” and an “odd thing to say.” Australia’s minimum wage is $15.96 per hour.

Rinehart is not the only one of the the world’s richest people to weigh in on public policy recently. Last month, Carlos Slim, whose $65 billion fortune makes him the world’s richest person, said countries that are struggling economically should raise their respective retirement ages to 70.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) claimed during his convention speech Wednesday that President Obama is responsible for the closure of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin. However, as many media outlets have noted, GM announced plans to close the plant in June ’08 — long before Obama was even elected — and it ceased major operations in December of that year.

For proof, just ask one of the more prominent supporters of the Janesville plant shutdown — the George W. Bush Administration. After all, the closure was part of a broader GM restructuring initiative that the then-President supported. White House Press Secretary Dana Perino even praised it as evidence of GM “adapting well:”

The White House called the announcement a sign that the auto giant was “adapting well” to market shifts.

“It’s a sign that Detroit continues to adapt and evolve and address the change in consumer tastes and attitudes. And I think that they’re adapting well,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

“And they’ll make these changes, and hopefully be able to pull themselves up out of what has been a rough several years,” she said. …

GM plans to shutter production at its Toluca, Mexico, pickup truck at the end of the year and its Oshawa, Canada plant will be closed in 2009. Plants in Moraine, Ohio and Janesville, Wisconsin, are slated for closure in 2010 “or sooner if market demand dictates,” GM said.

In keeping with the rest of the night’s theme of ignoring and whitewashing the Bush Administration’s disastrous record, Ryan failed to mention this inconvenient history.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 103 people have been sickened by a salmonella outbreak linked to tainted mangoes that were grown in Mexico and circulated by a California-based company:

Illnesses were first confirmed July 1, and the majority of victims are in California, the CDC said.

The bacterium found is salmonella Braenderup, the same type of germ that has sickened 22 people in Canada through tainted mangoes, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. [...]

The CDC didn’t disclose the origin of the mangoes that sickened people in the U.S., but California-based produce distributor Splendid Products LLC is recalling Daniella brand mangoes grown in Mexico that it shipped to stores in the U.S., a company official said Wednesday.

Outbreaks such as this one would be much harder to detect and contain if House Republicans get their way. The Obama administration requested $4.5 billion for the Food and Drug Administration for 2013, since the agency is implementing the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act, the most comprehensive update of America’s food safety laws in years. The House Republican budget, however, provides $3.8 billion, continuing the GOP’s attempts to undermine the new law. The Office of Management and Budget called the GOP’s level of funding “harmful” to food safety regulations.

These cuts would come as foodborne illness rates are on the rise. Of five key pathogens tracked by the CDC, just one saw a decrease in infections between 2007 and 2011. Each year, one out of six Americans suffer from a foodborne illness, with 128,000 resulting in hospitalization and 3,000 resulting in death.

During his speech before the Republican National Convention last night, Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan blamed President Obama for the closing of a Janesville, Wisconsin, General Motors plant. “A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day,” Ryan said.

While it is true that the plant is no longer open, the announcement that it would halt production was made in June 2008, months before Obama was even President-elect, never mind President (though the plant didn’t finish production until April 2009). The Obama speech to which Ryan is referring was delivered months before the plant had even decided to end production. As U.S. News & World Report’s Robert Schlesinger wrote, “I know the presidency is powerful but it seems a stretch to blame [Obama] for his auto bailout lacking the ability to go back in time to save an autoplant.”

However, that didn’t stop Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) from parroting the tale last night during an interview on MSNBC. But Walker, when challenged by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and Al Sharpton, could only claim that a “managed bankruptcy” run by the “private sector” might have kept the plant open. Watch it:

Mitt Romney makes the same claim regarding the rescue of the auto industry, saying that a private sector intervention would have been preferable. But the government stepped in precisely because the private sector had no interest in financing a bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler. Auto industry insiders and reporters who covered the industry have dismissed Romney’s view as “reckless,” “dishonest,” and “pure fantasy.” Even other Republicans have corrected Romney’s version of the story.

As The Economist noted, “the credit markets were bone-dry, making the privately financed bankruptcy that Mr Romney favoured improbable. He conveniently ignores this bit of history.” But Walker is still touting Romney’s impossible solution as a magical path that would have kept Janesville’s plant open, in order to dishonestly blame Obama for events over which he had no control.