Congressional Republicans and their party’s presidential nominee have both pushed plans to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans in hopes that such a move would stimulate the economy and aid the recovery from the Great Recession. A new study, however, indicates that tax cuts for the wealthiest earners fail to generate economic growth at the same pace as tax cuts aimed at low- and middle-income earners.

The study, conducted by Owen M. Zidar, a former staff economist on President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a graduate student at California-Berkeley, examined economic growth in the states with the most high-income earners. Zidar reasoned that “states with a large share of high income taxpayers should grow faster following a tax cut for high income earners” if the tax cuts had the economic effect conservatives claim.

What he found, though, is that the effect of tax cuts for the rich was “insignificant statistically,” as Reuters’ David Cay Johnston reported:

“Almost all of the stimulative effect of tax cuts,” Zidar found, “results from tax cuts for the bottom 90%. A one percent of GDP tax cut for the bottom 90% results in 2.7 percentage points of GDP growth over a two-year period. The corresponding estimate for the top 10% is 0.13 percentage points and is insignificant statistically.”

Zidar’s study provides more empirical backing to what the U.S. has experienced over the last 30 years. Supply-side tax cutting policies have not led to the growth their Republican proponents promised. The Bush tax cuts, for instance, were followed by the weakest decade for economic expansion on record.

Still, Republicans, some of whom admit that the Bush tax cuts didn’t lead to the desired growth, are sticking to their ideology. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney proposed a tax cut that is four times larger than the Bush tax cuts; the GOP has fought efforts to allow the high-income tax cuts expire at the end of the year, arguing that doing so would dampen growth; and Republican governors across the country have pushed tax cut packages aimed at the wealthy even as their states struggle with budget shortfalls.

Just as Apple unveils the iPhone 5, its Chinese manufacturer, Foxconn Technology, is once again plagued with labor concerns. This time, the accusation is that it forced student interns to assemble iPhones, according to the New York Times.

Chinese state media reported several schools in the eastern city of Huai’an were closed so that hundreds of students could work on assembly lines to make up for worker shortages. About 32,000 students work in Foxconn factories, and shifts can last up to 12 hours. Though the company says students are free to go at any time, interns that spoke with labor advocacy groups said that was not the case and that their teachers forced them to work there. Students were told they would not graduate unless they worked and that it was “a good way to experience corporate culture.”

Labor advocates say Foxconn is under tremendous pressure to fill huge numbers of orders for devices like the iPhone 5 and that deadlines can only be met by adding workers. And Foxconn has a long history of labor abuses, which ThinkProgress has addressed before. Multiple investigations into its practices over the last few years — some of them commissioned directly by Apple — have found “illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers, improper disposal of hazardous waste and, in some cases, industrial accidents.”

In 2010, an undercover report found:

New employees must sign a voluntary affidavit committing to between 60 and 100 hours of overtime each month — far more than the legal limit of 36 hours.

Workers claimed they stood so long their legs swelled up and they had difficulty walking.

Employees face more serious harm than swelled legs, however. Two explosions within 7 months at Foxconn factories killed four people and injured almost 80 in 2010. Employees also face serious health risks, and 137 were injured when they were forced to clean iPads with toxic chemicals. Perhaps not surprisingly, as many as 17 Foxconn employees committed suicide over the last five years — a trend that got so bad the company chairman sought the help of an exorcist.

Though years of bad press prompted some improvements, including reduced hours and higher pay, Foxconn’s work environment apparently remains “military-like,” and Apple is still relying on it to deliver the iPhone 5 successfully.

– Greg Noth

Workers in Orange County, Florida, might not have paid sick leave to look forward to in the coming months, after conservative lawmakers successfully negated a ballot initiative that would have required any business of more than 15 employees to provide paid sick days. The Orange County Commission voted to delay consideration of the measure last night.

The commission ruled that the initiative couldn’t appear on the ballot because an outside lawyer was needed to edit the ballot language. That lawyer’s revisions won’t be due until October 16, meaning that the sick days measure won’t meet the September deadline for initiatives slated for the November ballot.

Sick leave advocates were outraged. When the vote was announced — after six hours of debate — they “stood in unison and turned their backs on commissioners, with some chanting ‘no justice, no peace’ as they walked out.” In a statement, Citizens for a Greater Orange County called the commission’s move “voter suppression in its purest form” and saying they will sue the commission:

Instead of putting the first ever citizen-led petition in Orange County on the November ballot they violated the law requiring them to let voters have their say. In the process, they silenced the voices of more than 50,000 citizens who signed petitions to put Earned Sick Time on the ballot. These commissioners should be ashamed. Because of their failure to follow the law and perform their duties proscribed in the county charter, we will be filing a court suit later today.

The Orange County Commission’s refusal to put Earned Sick Time on the November ballot is voter suppression in its purest form. The advocates who helped gather the necessary signatures played by the rules for citizen-led initiatives under the Orange County Charter.

The comissioners are not the first to claim that the Earned Sick Leave ballot language is unclear. They were perhaps inspired by the the lawsuit filed by big businesses earlier this year to block the measure. In that suit — which was dismissed yesterday — businesses argued that it was unclear whether churches and non-profits would be exempt from the paid sick leave law. (They would not.)

Orange County’s paid sick leave effort would require any employer with more than 15 workers to provide one hour of sick time for every 37 hours worked, maxing out at 56 hours of sick leave a year. A worker could use that leave to take off when sick or to take time to care for a sick family member. Such policies are beneficial to businesses, because employees don’t come in sick to infect other workers.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual poverty estimates, released today, found that the poverty rate remained stable in 2011 after three consecutive years of rapid increases during and after the Great Recession. But 46.2 million Americans still live in poverty, defined as less than $23,000 in annual income for a family of four.

The data also noted that government benefits played a significant role in keeping millions of Americans — particularly women, children, and the elderly — out of poverty. Social Security alone kept roughly 21.4 million people out poverty, and unemployment benefits helped an additional 2.3 million stave off poverty last year alone.

The Census Bureau estimates it poverty rate based on cash income and assistance, but many government programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and certain tax credits aimed at combating poverty, aren’t included in its income estimates. Including SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, in the Census data would lift another 3.9 million Americans out of poverty, and including the Earned Income Tax Credit that helps low-income taxpayers would bring 5.7 million people above the poverty line. Other tax credits aimed at low-income working families, like the Child Tax Credit, would keep millions more out of poverty if they were included.

This chart from Melissa Boteach, the director of the Poverty to Prosperity program at the Center for American Progress, breaks down how many Americans avoided poverty thanks to certain government programs:

Many of these programs, however, are facing cuts as Congress attempts to reduce the federal budget deficit and national debt. The House Republican budget included massive cuts to SNAP and other food assistance programs; all told, it could have booted millions of people off of food stamps and 280,000 from the school lunch program. Under tax plans put forth by both House and Senate Republicans, meanwhile, 12 million Americans would have lost part or all of the Child Tax Credit, while six million would have lost part or all of the Earned Income Tax Credit, an effective tax hike on millions of families.

After three consecutive years of increases in American poverty, the number of Americans living on incomes at or below the poverty line remained stable in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau released today. The poverty rate remained unchanged at 15 percent, meaning 46.2 million Americans are living at or below the federal poverty line, defined as $23,000 a year for a family of four. The poverty rate remained statistically unchanged across racial groups with the exception of Hispanics, the only group to see a statistically significant decline.

But median household income dropped 1.5 percent and the gap between the wealthiest Americans and those in the middle grew in 2011, according to Census data. As the following chart shows, the share of income grew for the richest Americans but fell for other groups:

The poverty rate had been expected to rise significantly. Shifts in the number of low-income workers moving from part-time jobs to full-time employment may explain the unchanged rate, David S. Johnson, the chief of the Census Bureau’s Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division, said on a conference call.

According to the Census Bureau, unemployment benefits kept roughly 2.3 million out of poverty in 2011, while Social Security payments kept roughly 21.4 million out of poverty.

It is worth noting, though, that poverty experts say the official poverty numbers are often flawed, since they do not take into account government benefits, differences in cost of living, and other factors that could affect the overall statistics. The government last year developed an alternative measure of poverty to take some of those factors into account. Those numbers will be released in November. Adding in benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would remove 5.7 million and 3.9 million from poverty, respectively, according to the Census data.