Social Security, the government entitlement that provides support to seniors in retirement, the disabled, and other Americans, has long been in the cross-hairs of budget reformers. The program’s trust fund currently won’t be spent out until 2033, and after that it would still pay 75 percent of scheduled benefits.

Most of the proposed solutions to the shortfall involve cutting back benefits and raising the minimum retirement age. Both are deeply problematic; at its current level of benefits Social Security kept over 20 million people out of poverty in 2011, many Americans in demanding manual labor jobs already take early retirement and thus reduced benefits as it is, and lower-income Americans have not particularly benefited from the average rise in lifespans .

This week, however, Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) put forward a reform package that goes in the opposite direction, while still financially securing the program’s trust fund for roughly the next seven decades. The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews laid out the details:

The Begich bill would lift the current payroll tax cap, which exempts wages in excess of a certain amount ($110,100 this year) from the tax. In turn, it would give high earners, who would pay more, additional benefits upon retirement, just as benefits increase as wages do for workers below the cap. […]

It also increases benefits across-the-board. While Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin adopt a stingier “chained CPI” measure for inflation, Begich adopts “CPI-E,” or a measure that specifically captures inflation in goods that seniors buy.

Due to deteriorated health and other considerations, goods seniors buy tend to be more expensive than those younger people purchase. Begich’s CPI-E change would mean, effectively, a 4.5 percent benefit increase for the program’s beneficiaries, including not just seniors but their designated survivors and disabled Americans as well.

The Congressional Research Service ran the numbers back in 2010 and concluded that eliminating the payroll tax cap — while also paying out the new benefits to wealthier Americans in accordance with their new taxes — would eliminate 95 percent of the trust fund’s shortfall over the next 75 years.

Begich may not hit that goal exactly, depending on how the legislation is written. In particular, his change to CPI-E also lifts the overall benefit level, on top of the changes in CRS’ scenario. But his reform would probably come very close.

Today, Hostess Brands inc. — the company famed for its sickly sweet dessert snacks like Twinkies and Sno Balls — announced they’d be shuttering after more than eighty years of production.

But while headlines have been quick to blame unions for the downfall of the company there’s actually more to the story: before the company filed for bankruptcy, for the second time, earlier this year, it actually tripled its CEO’s pay, and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent.

At the time, creditors warned that the decision signaled an attempt to “sidestep” bankruptcy rules, potentially as a means for trying to keep the executive at a failing company. The Confectionery, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers International Union pointed this out in their written reaction to the news that the business is closing:

BCTGM members are well aware that as the company was preparing to file for bankruptcy earlier this year, the then CEO of Hostess was awarded a 300 percent raise (from approximately $750,000 to $2,550,000) and at least nine other top executives of the company received massive pay raises. One such executive received a pay increase from $500,000 to $900,000 and another received one taking his salary from $375,000 to $656,256.

Certainly, the company agreed to an out-sized pension debt, but the decision to pay executives more while scorning employee contracts during a bankruptcy reflects a lack of good managerial judgement.

It also follows a trend of rising CEO pay in times of economic difficulty. At the manufacturing company Caterpillar, for example, they froze workers’ pay while boosting their CEO’s pay to $17 million. And at Citigroup, CEO Vikram Pandit received $6.7 million for crashing his company, walking off with $260 million after the business lost 88 percent of its value.

American income inequality has skyrocketed over the last 30 years, as compensation for the wealthiest Americans has grown while wages have stagnated for the middle- and lower-classes. Incomes for the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans are now eight times higher than incomes for the bottom 20 percent, according to a study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute. The gap between the rich and poor has grown because incomes for the top 20 percent grew at an annual pace that exceeded the total growth of incomes for the bottom 20 percent over a 30 year period.

From the late 1970s until the 2000s, the richest 20 percent of Americans saw their incomes grow by $2,550 a year. By contrast, the bottom 20 percent saw total income growth of just $1,330 over the entire three-decade period the two organizations studied:

Pay for chief executives has risen 127 times faster than worker pay over that three-decade period, according to another recent study. Worker pay has failed to keep up with productivity gains in the workplace, and the minimum wage has failed to keep up with the buying power it once had. Low-wage jobs, meanwhile, are becoming more prevalent, pushing wages for low-income workers down even more. At the same time, tax rates for the wealthy have fallen, and while the wealthy have experienced a solid recovery from the Great Recession, middle- and low-income Americans have largely been left behind.

Discriminatory lending policies made the housing crisis worse for African-American and Latino borrowers, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a financial summit held Thursday in Atlanta. The housing crisis and economic slump followed the “unfortunate pattern” of “disproportionately affecting” minorities, Bernanke said, pointing to the fact that black home ownership rates have fallen five percentage points in the last eight years, compared to just a two percent drop for the general population.

Two major discriminatory actions made the crisis worse for minorities, Bernanke said:

“One is redlining, in which mortgage lenders discriminate against minority neighborhoods, and the other is pricing discrimination, in which lenders charge minorities higher loan prices than they would to comparable nonminority borrowers,” Bernanke said.

“We remain committed to vigorous enforcement of the nation’s fair lending laws,” he added.

Studies have shown that blacks and Latinos were twice as likely to have been affected by the housing crisis as white borrowers, largely for the reasons Bernanke outlined. Many minority borrowers were pushed into riskier, more expensive subprime loans even though they qualified for lower-interest prime mortgages. Subprime loans, which can add $100,000 to the price over the life of the mortgage, were given to 30.9 percent of Latinos and 41.5 percent of blacks, compared to just 17.8 percent of whites.

Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, paid $175 million to settle discriminatory lending charges in July, and other mortgage companies have been fined and ordered to pay settlements to homeowners they discriminated against.

The National Hockey League has been dormant so far this season due to a continued lockout of its players by the league’s owners. The first two months of the season have been canceled, and it looks like more cancellations are imminent.

According to one economist, the continued lockout is dealing a minor blow to the Canadian economy:

In Canada, where hockey is part of the national culture, the void is unsettling—and potentially costly.

Doug Porter, deputy chief economist at Canada’s BMO Capital Markets, said earlier in the lockout that a canceled season would shave 0.1% off Canada’s annual gross domestic product. Even if both sides settle, he said, a truncated 2012-13 NHL schedule could pare 0.05% from GDP.

In the grand scheme of things, one-tenth of a percentage point is not a huge economic hit. But it’s occurring because of a craven money grab by the league’s owners at the expense of players.

In addition to demanding that the players give up a percentage of their stake in league revenues, the owners — led by commissioner Gary Bettman — want the right to retroactively alter existing player contracts. As Columbus Blue Jackets defenseman Jack Johnson wrote, “The concept that the owners are trying to dismantle existing contracts that they in good faith offered, signed, and committed to is appalling, unprofessional, and disgraceful.” The NHL was profitable before the lockout, but Bettman and the owners want to boost their bottom line at the expense of their employees.

In fact, Bettman expects the players to literally concede to the league’s demands across the board. As New York Post sports columnist Larry Brooks put it, “What the league is proposing — no, what the league is demanding — is that the players accept the most restrictive system in pro sports. Concede on rights. Concede on money.” And in the meantime, the Canadian economy gets the short end of the (hockey) stick.

The United States Postal Service reported a $15.9 billion dollar loss for the 2012 fiscal year, calling into question the national mail service’s continued viability absent Congressional action. The loss was the largest in USPS history and roughly three times the previous year’s losses, prompting alarm from Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe:

We cannot sustain large losses indefinitely. Major defaults are unsettling..It’s critical that Congress do its part and pass comprehensive legislation before they adjourn this year to move the Postal Service further down the path toward financial health.

The Congressional action required to fix the service is exceedingly simple — all it has to do is fix a problem entirely of its own making. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 requires the USPS to “prefund” retirement benefits for 75 years, something that a) is not required of any other federal agency or private corporation and b) forces the USPS to set aside vast quantities of money.

Without this mandate, the USPS would be self-sustaining. Postal workers have gone on hunger strikes to protest Congressional unwillingness to make this simple fix, a version of which passed the Senate but languished in the House.

Were the USPS to collapse, it would hit poor Americans the hardest.