A century ago, Massachusetts became the first state in the country to pass a minimum wage law. Now, the state legislature is considering legislation to increase its minimum wage — currently at $8.00 an hour, $0.75 above the federal minimum — to $10.00 an hour. If the legislation becomes law, it will give more than a half-million low-wage workers a pay increase and could generate 4,500 new jobs because of increased economic activity, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute:

Increasing Massachusetts’s minimum wage to $10.00 on January 1, 2013, would give a raise to more than 581,000 of the state’s lowest-paid workers. It would provide nearly $824 million in additional wages to directly and indirectly affected families, who would, in turn, spend those extra earnings. Indirectly affected workers—those earning close to, but still above, the proposed new minimum wage—would likely receive a boost in earnings due to the “spillover” effect (Shierholz 2009), giving them more to spend on necessities. [...]

Using these same standard fiscal multipliers to analyze the jobs impact of an increase in compensation of low-wage workers and decrease in corporate profits that result from a minimum-wage increase, we find that increasing the Massachusetts minimum wage from $8.00 to $10.00 per hour would result in a net increase in economic activity of approximately $522 million and would generate roughly 4,500 net new jobs.

Though Republican lawmakers across the country consistently oppose minimum wage increases on grounds that they hurt job growth, small businesses, and overall economic growth, multiple studies, including EPI’s, contradict those claims. An analysis by the Center for American Progress found that “a significant body of academic research has found that raising the minimum wage does not result in job losses even during hard economic times.”

At the beginning of 2012, scheduled minimum wage increases were set to benefit 1.4 million workers, and such policies tend to benefit women and minorities, workers who typically face pay gaps and other disadvantages in the workplace.

The United States’ share of global college graduates fell substantially in the first decade of the 21st century and stands to drop even more by 2020 as developing economies in China and India have graduated more college students, presenting challenges for American workers’ ability to remain competitive in a global economy in the future. The U.S. share of college graduates fell from nearly one-in-four to just more than one-in-five from 2000 to 2010, according to “The Competition That Really Matters,” a report from the Center for American Progress and The Center for the Next Generation:

From 2000 to 2010, the U.S. share of college graduates fell to 21% of the world’s total from 24%, while China’s share climbed to 11% from 9%. India’s rose more than half a percentage point to 7%. Based on current demographic and college enrollment trends, we can project where each country will be by 2020: the U.S. share of the world’s college graduates will fall below 18% while China’s and India’s will rise to more than 13% and nearly 8% respectively.

India and China aren’t just closing the gap in overall graduates, they’re also making huge strides in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). According to the report, the annual number of U.S. STEM graduates from four-year colleges and universities increased by 24 percent from 2000 to 2008. In China, the annual increase was 218 percent, and in India, the number of STEM degrees awarded each year tripled from 1999 to 2006.

“The fact that other countries are graduating more and more of their people and giving them a good education, that, in and of itself, is certainly not a negative,” Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D), who helped unveil the report today, told ThinkProgress. “It’s good for their countries, it’s good for the global economy when there’s a stronger middle class.”

But, Markell said, the falling share of college graduates is indicative of the more competitive global economy, and, as the report notes, the U.S. faces problems in the education sector that could harm future American competitiveness. Only half of American students receive early childhood education, for instance, and the nation has no strategy for improving enrollment, even as evidence shows that those programs increase educational success. Meanwhile, rising levels of income inequality and poverty are broadening America’s education gap, further threatening the nation’s overall educational success and future competitiveness.

As states and localities crushed by the Great Recession are forcing through education cuts at all levels in the United States, other countries — including China and India — are taking major steps to increase educational attainment among their lower- and middle-classes. By creating stronger national standards, improving teacher quality, and making investments into early childhood education and other programs, the report says, the U.S. can follow suit and remain competitive in the future.

“What we have to recognize is that just because we’ve been number one in the past doesn’t mean we’ll be number one in the future,” Markell said. “We have to truly recognize that investments in early childhood and K-12 and higher education and investments in human capital generally are one of the surefire ways to lead to long-term prosperity. … We’re in a new world now, we’re in a new generation, and if you don’t maintain that commitment and that covenant with each new generation of Americans, I’m very concerned about the consequences,” Markell said. “You can’t afford not to make these investments in the future.”

The USDA has closed the slaughterhouse at Central Valley Meat Corporation in Fresno, California after evidence surfaced showing inhumane and illegal treatment of animals on the killing floor. A video distributed by the animal advocacy group Compassion Over Killing depicted utterly horrific treatment of animals that — aside from the obvious problems with the casual torture of a sentient being — likely runs afoul of state and federal humane slaughter laws, including protections designed to prevent meat from sick cows entering the food supply:

Four minutes of excerpts the animal welfare group provided to The Associated Press showed cows being prepared for slaughter. One worker appears to be suffocating a cow by standing on its muzzle after a gun that injects a bolt into the animal’s head had failed to render it unconscious. In another clip, a cow is still conscious and flailing as a conveyor lifts it by one leg for transport to an area where the animals’ throats are slit for blood draining…

The USDA probe will include whether sick “downer” cows entered the food supply. That information would be used to determine whether a recall of the company’s meat products is warranted.

“That’s the main issue right now,” DeJong said.

Just because a cow is down doesn’t mean it’s sick, officials said. The video clips showed some cows with udders swollen so large they could not keep their legs underneath them. One was on the ground twitching, and another tried to walk but kept falling.

While this case is egregious, the abuse of animals is endemic to American factory farming. The horrific treatment of animals has consequences for human as well, as it creates ideal conditions for the incubation of foodborne illnesses. However, Congressional Republicans have pushed legislation that slashes food safety budgets and takes away states’ ability to impose their own standards for humane treatment of animals.

While states across the country are facing crunched budgets and struggling to reduce unemployment and put people back to work, they are sitting on more than $470 million in unspent transportation funds meant to pay for road, highway, and other infrastructure projects, the Dept. of Transportation said last Friday. In an effort to speed up spending ”that will create jobs and help improve transportation,” the Obama administration said it would free up those funds for other projects if they aren’t used in the 2013 fiscal year.

Roughly $473 million in funds that were earmarked in 2003 to 2006 appropriations packages remain unspent by states, according to DOT. As this chart from Transportation Nation shows, Alabama ($51.5 million) and California ($43.1 million) lead the nation in unspent funds, and three other states have at least $28 million in transportation money that has not been spent:

In a release Friday, President Obama and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that the funds would be freed up for transportation projects other than those for which they were specifically earmarked. If states fail to spend the money or re-obligate it to other projects by the end of the 2013 fiscal year, it will be released for use in other states. “We are freeing up these funds so states can get down to the business of moving transportation projects forward and putting our friends and neighbors back to work,” LaHood said.

Before the stock market opened Monday, Apple was already the world’s most profitable tech company and it was already bigger than the entire American retail market on its own. By the time the market closed yesterday, the company had another feather to add to its cap: it is now the most valuable publicly-traded company ever, as its closing $665.15 share price gave it a market value of $623.52 billion, pushing it past Microsoft’s 1999 record number (though, adjusted for inflation, Microsoft’s value at the time was higher).

While Apple’s value — and its profits — have soared, the amount the company pays in taxes hasn’t. By utilizing low-tax states in the U.S. and offshore tax havens abroad, Apple has dodged billions of dollars in taxes over the last decade, including an estimated $2.4 billion in 2011 alone. The company paid a 9.8 percent tax rate in the U.S. in 2011 but just a 3.2 percent global rate, and the percentage it pays worldwide hasn’t exited single digits for more than a decade. As this chart from the New York Times shows, the amount Apple pays in taxes has remained relatively constant even as its profits have soared:

Those low tax rates aren’t enough for Apple, which has lobbied for tax breaks both at the state and federal level. California has passed four tax breaks aimed at tech companies since the 1990s; Apple lobbied for the last of those breaks, which could cost the state as much as $1.5 billion a year. It was also part of a coalition that lobbied Congress for a massive one-time corporate tax holiday that would allow it to bring its overseas profits home at a discounted tax rate, and it has admitted sending profits overseas to avoid American taxes.

Apple-style tax dodging comes at a cost to taxpayers and other American businesses. The California Public Interest Research Group estimates that corporate tax dodging cost the average taxpayer $434 in 2010. Citizens for Tax Justice, meanwhile, found that making up revenue lost to such tax dodging would cost each American small business $2,116 a year.