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.”