The number of countries that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has visited for in-person inspections has plummeted over the last four years, as budget cuts have forced the agency to implement new inspection methods and rely on self-reporting by other nations. The number of countries the U.S. inspects in-person each year dropped to just three in 2011, and the average over the last four years has shrunk by 60 percent, Food Safety News reports:

Online documents show that from 2001 to 2008 FSIS inspectors were routinely evaluating, in-person, the foreign plants processing meat for American consumers. The number of countries audited annually, with only one exception (in 2006 there was a large drop in audits), was between 25 and 32, so FSIS was auditing an average of 26.4 countries per year. From 2009 to 2012, however, the number of countries audited annually dropped to between 3 and 20, so FSIS was auditing an average of 9.8 countries per year. [...]

By 2011, the number of countries audited by FSIS was down to just 3: Australia, New Zealand and Poland.

The Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) claims that its new system is a better way to evaluate food safety, but a source told Food Safety News that the changes came because of budget cuts. “The budget restrictions had pretty much forced the agency to re-evaluate the most cost-effective way to do audits,” the source said. Both President Obama and the GOP included cuts to FSIS in their budgets, and Republicans also included cuts to other food inspection agencies, like the Food and Drug Administration, even as E. Coli, salmonella, and other outbreaks have sickened thousands of Americans in recent years.

The number of audits in 2012 has increased to 11, according to Food Safety News, still far short of where it was during the Bush administration. If the reduction is indeed due to budget cuts, the savings aren’t likely to materialize: one out of six Americans suffer from a foodborne illness each year, with 128,000 resulting in hospitalization and 3,000 in death. Treating those illnesses costs the United States as $152 billion each year.

The average American woman who never got her high school diploma makes about $365 a week. That means, if she works every single week from January 1 through December 31, she’ll earn a total of $20,540 a year. But if that woman’s expecting a child, she is going to have to take some time off. And there’s a four in five chance that, here in the United States, she won’t get even a day’s worth of paid maternity leave to deliver her baby or be with her newborn.

The United States is one of the only developed countries that does not offer paid maternity leave. The Family and Medical Leave Act is supposed to provide protection for expecting mothers, but its stringent requirements exclude a lot of women, particularly low-income, low-education women of color. About half the workforce doesn’t qualify for FMLA.

But even if their jobs do fall under the requirements (they must have worked “for at least 12 months and have worked a minimum of 1,250 hours during that time for an employer with at least 50 employees within a 75-mile radius”), they aren’t guaranteed any income.

A new proposal from the Center for American Progress, however, is trying to remedy that. Its plan for Social Security Cares would require employers to give qualified employees up to 12 weeks of paid leave for certain life events that include “the birth of a newborn or the arrival of a newly adopted or fostered child; The serious illness of a spouse, domestic partner, parent, or child; The worker’s own serious illness that limits his or her ability to work.”

Women are growing to be a larger and larger percentage of the primary breadwinners in their homes. But for many, the joy of motherhood evaporates into a panic of trying make ends meet.

Paid maternity leave is a societal investment that would ultimately benefit everyone, including employers. Offering paid maternity leave allows employees to stay at their jobs who would otherwise be forced to quit, lowering training and start-up costs for employers. It also allows employers to recruit the best person for the job without the employee having to consider leave policy. When such a policy was implemented in California, 99 percent of employers found it had either no effect or a positive impact on employee morale; 91 percent said the same about profitability, and 89 percent said the same about productivity.

Our guest blogger is Gadi Dechter, Managing Director of Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Faced with an inconveniently robust jobs report today, the Romney campaign trotted out economic adviser Glenn Hubbard to pooh-pooh it. But Hubbard, a supply-side economist who was George W. Bush’s first chief economist and the architect of the Bush tax cuts, is an odd choice for this assignment, since any criticism he makes is undermined by the clear failure of his own policies in comparison with those deployed by Obama.

“Today’s unemployment numbers only further underscore the fact that President Obama has failed to fulfill his promise to the restore the strength of our economy,” said Hubbard in a statement released after the Labor Department showed unexpectedly strong October gains of 171,000 new jobs, and upward revisions for jobs created in August and September.

But if the Obama recovery, described by the New York Times today as showing “persistent economic growth,” is a failure, how would Hubbard describe the performance of the U.S. economy when he was whispering economic advice into the president’s ear — as he apparently hopes to do again?

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Earlier this year, a study by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts threw cold water on the GOP claim that wealthy Americans will uproot and leave a state that raises their taxes. “The evidence available in the research literature suggests that the worst fears of the policy debates over raising additional revenue from high-income households to sustain spending on public services are unlikely to materialize. The rich will not go on strike. They will not cease working, stop investing, or even move,” the study said.

Another study is now backing up that finding. Professors from Princeton and Stanford looked at California’s implementation of a tax hike on the rich in 2005 and found that — contrary to the GOP storyline — migration of millionaires actually declined:

Using difference-in-differences models, which compare migration trends of the group experiencing the tax increase to a group of high-income earners not facing a tax change, neither in-migration or out-migration show a tax flight effect from the introduction of the 2005 Mental Health Services Tax. In fact, out-migration has a “wrong-signed” estimate: out-migration declined among millionaires after the tax was passed (both in absolute terms and compared to the control group). In other words, the highest-income Californians were less likely to leave the state after the millionaire tax was passed.

According to the study, divorce was a much more important factor in millionaires leaving California than a tax hike. “The tax policy changes examined in this report are very modest compared to the life impact of martial dissolution,” the researchers found.

Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) has cited an expected exodus of millionaires to justify vetoing a millionaires’ surtax…twice. But the research simply doesn’t back up that assertion.

Our guest blogger is Jack Jenkins, a writer and researcher with the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Fed up with an unjust financial system that disproportionately affects the poor, Episcopalians in Massachusetts are speaking – and praying – out against unfair banking practices and corporate greed through a series of protest actions and church overtures.

This past Sunday a group of worshipers representing 10 Episcopal parishes in the diocese of Massachusetts, an ecumenical cadre of “protest chaplains,” and several members of Occupy Boston gathered in downtown Boston to protest and pray publicly for a better banking system.

“As Christians, we are our brother’s and our sister’s keeper,” Marisa Egerstrom, Campaign Director for Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation and lead organizer of the event, said in a press release. “We are obligated to love our neighbors by moving our accounts, credit cards, and investments to banks that do not commit mortgage fraud, practice discriminatory lending, unfairly foreclose with illegal robo-signing, or gouge consumers with hefty and often financially crippling fees.”

Attendees of the worship service sang hymns as they marched from the Cathedral of St. Paul through downtown Boston to a spot between city hall and a branch of Bank of America. There, Episcopal Bishop Thomas Shaw led the group in a “liturgy of commitment” where worshipers publicly committed to move their money out of Bank of America and other Wall Street banks and into local credit unions. People then placed “commitment cards” into offering plates, some cutting up their Bank of America credit or debit cards and placing the pieces in the bowls during the service before taking communion.

Episcopal Bishop Thomas Shaw delivered a sermon that invoked St. Francis of Assisi and explained the importance of speaking truth to financial powers, saying: “We’re standing here before a branch of Bank of America right over there, and what we’re saying to those people who make the decisions for Bank of America … is that somehow what we want to do by this little demonstration today, is to invite you into your humanity … to remind you that you’re just like all of us, and just a part of creation. We want your restoration as human beings.”

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During his closing argument Friday, Mitt Romney trotted out a new reason for voting President Obama out of office: Republican intransigence on the debt ceiling. Romney invoked the debt ceiling fight in 2011, when House Republicans brought the US to the brink of default due to their opposition to raising any new revenue.

The nation’s credit rating was downgraded immediately after the debacle. This showdown is likely to happen again, as the debt limit will be hit in early 2013, if not sooner. Romney argues that, unlike Obama, he is perfectly willing to give in to his party’s extreme Tea Party contingent this time around, thereby avoiding another manufactured crisis, as he said during an appearance on Friday:

You know that if the President is re-elected, he will still be unable to work with the people in Congress. He has ignored them, attacked them, blamed them. The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy. The President was right when he said he can’t change Washington from the inside. In this case, you can take him at his word. When I am elected, I will work with Republicans and Democrats in Congress. I will meet regularly with their leaders.

Watch it:

Romney is hardly the first Republican to blame Obama for the debt ceiling mess. In fact, many of Romney’s endorsers express disappointment in Obama’s supposed failure to compromise, despite the fact that Obama was willing to sign a deeply skewed deal of $3 in spending cuts for every $1 tax increase that was rejected by Republicans. Standard & Poor’s justification for downgrading US credit specifically called out Republican unwillingness to raise taxes under any circumstances. Romney has avoided mentioning the debt ceiling fight in the general campaign, possibly because a majority of Americans blamed House Republicans for the crisis.

If elected, Romney will have a hard time averting another stand-off. House Republicans’ unchanged opposition to any increase in the debt limit ensures that Romney will either have to convince them to change their minds, which conservative aides have flatly said will be impossible, or implement disastrous cuts to essential programs, which Senate Democrats will not tolerate.

Romney has refused multiple requests to comment on how he will choose to tackle the impending debt limit. He did, however, sign a pledge saying the US should default on its obligations unless Congress passed a Balanced Budget Amendment, which would gut federal programs — and still would not come close to balancing the budget without increasing taxes. If such an amendment were in place during the Great Recession, it would have doubled the unemployment rate and caused the economy to shrink by a whopping 17 percent.

Today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the economy added 171,000 jobs last month, beating analysts’ expectations. The private sector added 184,000 jobs (offset by some public sector losses), making this the 32nd consecutive month that the private sector has grown.

Overall, even accounting for the horrific month for jobs that was January 2009, the private sector has added 759,000 jobs overall under Obama. At this same point in the George W. Bush administration — October 2004 — the private sector had lost more than 1 million jobs. This chart shows the difference:

During the entirety of the Bush administration, the private sector ended up losing nearly 650,000 jobs.

The only reason that the unemployment rate did not spike during Bush’s first term is that the public sector so derided by conservatives was rapidly adding jobs. If the public sector had added jobs at the historical pace under Obama, rather than hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs, the unemployment rate would be under 7 percent today.

Data compiled by Jane Farrell.

Friday morning’s unemployment report found that the American economy added 171,000 jobs in October and the unemployment rate ticked up slightly from 7.8 percent to 7.9. The jobs growth — which beat the expectations of most economists — continued a trend of 32 months of job growth under the Obama administration. Significantly, the number of jobs created in August was revised up from 142,000 to 192,000, and September was revised up from 114,000 to 148,000. Underemployment also fell slightly to 14.6 percent.

Interestingly, Fox News viewers would think that the positive numbers are a political liability for the president. As the numbers came out at 8:30 AM, Fox — along with several other news networks — ran a misleading chyron displaying the small increase in the unemployment rate, without mentioning the growth in raw jobs or explaining that the rate ticked up because October’s job gains pulled more than half a million people into the labor force. By 9:00 AM, anchor Stuart Varney analyzed the political impact of the report and predicted that Romney would benefit from the administration’s economic recovery:

BILL HAMMER (HOST): How does this play politically?

VARNEY: It should play in favor of Governor Romney, President Obama will probably say, I haven’t gotten his official response, he will probably say the economy is expanding. It is going in the right direction. We need more time for number of new jobs we really need but we’re going in the right direction. Governor Romney will almost certainly respond we’re not growing fast enough. We could do a whole lot better without going into all this debt.

Watch it:

Indeed, Fox’s analysis closely mirrored Romney’s, who claimed that “Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill.” 5.4 million private sector jobs have been created under Obama’s presidency.