The U.S. economy is steadily recovering from the recession, with the unemployment rate falling to 7.7 percent last month — the lowest rate since December 2008. And the increasing number of health care jobs continues to outpace job growth in other economic sectors. Through November, the economy has gained about 290,000 health care jobs this year.

In the debates over how to avert the fiscal cliff, Republicans have recycled Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget plan, which calls for gutting Medicaid. But this would only serve to hurt job growth, particularly for jobs held by women, according to the National Women’s Law Center:

– Nationally, Medicaid spending supports nearly 3 million health sector jobs held by women.
– Nationally, 79.8 percent of Medicaid-supported jobs are held by women.
– Medicaid creates the most jobs in New York (381,024), California (273,870), and Texas (209,577).
– Even in smaller states with low populations, Medicaid still supports thousands of jobs held by women. Medicaid supports nearly 4,000 jobs in Wyoming and almost 7,000 jobs in both North Dakota and South Dakota.

As the NWLC report explains, these jobs indirectly support other jobs, like restaurants and coffee shops near hospitals. Women also make up the vast majority of lower-wage health occupations, so cutting Medicaid funding and eliminating these jobs would especially hurt low-income women. “Medicaid cuts would lead to job losses for women across the country, including low-income women who work as nurse’s aides, home health care workers, and other lower wage health care occupations,” according to NWLC’s report. “These losses would only slow down women’s economic recovery further.”

The latest annual report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that the national homeless population held steady from 2011 to 2012, hardly good news but perhaps better than expected given the relatively weak economic climate.

Progress is being made within the veteran community, with homeless rates falling by 17 percent since 2009, and among the chronically homeless, with 17 percent fewer people living on the streets as in 2007. But in the fight to end homelessness by the year 2020 — the stated mission of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness in their 2010 plan — progress isn’t happening fast enough:

“[The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness] have set ambitious goals for themselves, but I don’t think those are goals that aren’t doable,” said Nan Roman, the president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “But not at the rate that we’re going.”

What is needed, says Mark Johnston, the acting assistant housing secretary for community planning and development, is a ten-fold increase in HUD’s $1.9 billion budget to address the crisis. By any measure $20 billion is a lot of money, but the figure is far less daunting when placed in context:

During a speech at the Detroit Diesel Plant in Redford, Michigan on Monday, President Obama spoke out against Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R-MI) efforts to rush anti-union “right-to-work” legislation through a lame duck session of the state legislature. The effort would allow union members to opt out of paying union dues, while benefiting from union contracts and requiring the unions to represent them.

Building on the efforts of union leaders and Democrats, who met with Snyder to urge him to reconsider the measure, Obama argued that so-called “right to work” would actually take away workers’ rights to bargain for “better wages and working conditions.” He stressed that the legislative push is driven by politics, not economic consideration:

OBAMA: These so-called right to work laws, they don’t have to do with economics. They have everything to do with politics. What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money. You only have to look to Michigan, where workers were instrumental to reviving the auto industry, to see how unions have helped build not just a stronger middle class, but a stronger America. [...]

We don’t want a race to the bottom. We want a race to the top. America is not going to compete based on low skill low wage no workers’ rights. That’s not our competitive advantage. There is always going to be some other country that can treat its workers even worse. Right? What’s going to make us succeed is we’ve got the best workers, well trained, reliable productive, low turnover, healthy, that’s what makes us strong. And it’s also is what allows our workers then to buy the products that we make because they got enough money in their pockets.

Watch it:

At Snyder’s urging, the state House and Senate each passed versions of the law last week and Obama isn’t alone in condemning the governor. On Sunday, The Detroit Free-Press, which endorsed Snyder in his 2010 campaign, slammed his move as a “failure of leadership” and observed that his “about-face” amounted to a betrayal of Michigan’s voters. Earlier this year, Snyder told a U.S. House committee, “Right-to-work is an issue that is a very divisive issue… we have many problems in Michigan that are much more pressing… I don’t believe it is appropriate in Michigan during 2012.” But last Thursday, he announced that he had changed his mind and the Republican-controlled legislature soon rammed through the anti-union bills with minimal debate.

Michigan’s middle class has been hit particularly hard by the recession — earning only 47 percent of the state’s income in 2012 (down from 53.6 percent in 1979) — and allowing workers to opt out of unions would hurt employees even more. Research shows that “right-to-work” laws result in smaller wages, pensions, and health care benefits for union and non-union workers alike.

Former Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK) lambasted anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and the hundreds of Republicans who have signed his Americans for Tax Reform Pledge in an interview with PBS’s Bill Moyers on Friday. Edwards, a longtime conservative movement stalwart, attacked his party’s 22-year-long unwillingness to raise taxes as neither conservative, nor adult, nor rational.

Edwards, who served in Congress from 1977 to 1993, was a key architect of the modern conservative movement. He was one of the three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation, chaired the Republican Policy Committee, and was national chairman of the American Conservative Union for five years. He was also an adviser to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.

Asked about the Norquist’s frequent boast that no Congressional Republican has voted to raise taxes since 1990, he told Moyers:

EDWARDS: It’s certainly not Conservatism. It’s not rational. And it’s not adult. You know, when you create a program, you make a decision. You say, “I think we should conduct this war. I think that we should expand our security apparatus at home. I think that we should provide this additional benefit.” Then you pay for it. You vote to do it. And then you say, “Here’s what it’s going to cost.” And you pay for it. You know, Republicans may complain about the federal debt, but they’re as responsible as the Democrats for the debt being as large as it is. And once you have already done that, then you have an obligation to pay it down.

You know, so the idea that what you’re going to do is say– you know, “We’re not going to raise taxes, we’re not going to close loopholes, we’re not going to do anything” — that means that we’re not going to pay off what we’ve already created. I mean, that’s childish. That’s childish.

Watch the video:

When Moyers noted that Norquist devised his anti-tax pledge as a 12-year-old, Edwards observed “Well, you know, the fact is, the idea that, you know, ‘No, I’m not ever going to do this no matter the circumstances, no matter if we’re at war,’ whatever, it is a 12-year-old kind of thinking.” But, he noted, one “can’t just blame Grover,” as the Congressional signers or the pledge are also to responsible.

Last week, Michigan Republicans swiftly and unexpectedly approved so-called “right to work” legislation, backtracking on a commitment made by Gov. Rick Snyder (R-MI). Supporters of the effort claim that it is necessary to keep Michigan economically competitive with nearby states, such as Indiana, that have approved similar measures.

However, as the Center for American Progress’ David Madland and Nick Bunker noted, weakening labor unions via right-to-work won’t make Michigan economically stronger — it will just continue the recent hollowing out of the state’s middle class:

Over the past several decades, unions in Michigan have weakened and the middle class has been hollowed out—a trend that would significantly worsen if right-to-work became law. As Figure 1 shows, Michigan’s middle class earned 53.6 percent of the state’s income in 1979, a year when over 37 percent of the state’s workers were in unions. Today less than 18 percent of Michigan’s workers are unionized, and the middle class receives only 47 percent of the state’s income.

The Economic Policy Institute has found that “right-to-work laws cost all workers, union and otherwise, $1,500 a year in wages and that they make it harder for workers to obtain pensions and health coverage.” Workers in right-to-work states “are also significantly less likely to receive employer-provided health insurance and pensions.” Finally, directly undercutting Republican justification for passing such laws, researchers found that right-to-work laws “have not succeeded in boosting employment growth in the states that have adopted them.”

Corporate profits are currently at an all-time high (while worker wages as a percentage of the economy have plummeted to record lows). But despite those sky-high profits, corporate income tax revenue is projected to be just 1.5 percent of GDP this year, below the recent average and far below the amount raised by the tax just a few decades ago.

As the Century Foundation noted in this chart, the corporate income tax, as a share of total government revenue, used to track reasonably well with corporate profits. But in the last decade, the two have become decoupled:

As the Century Foundation’s Benjamin Landy explained, “In 1952, the corporate income tax accounted for about one third of of all federal tax revenue. But, over the years, U.S. multinationals have devised increasingly complex tax avoidance schemes, far beyond the ability of the IRS to credibly monitor or enforce. Although the corporate tax rate was also lowered significantly in 1986, tax avoidance is one of primary reasons why corporate taxes supply less than 9 percent of federal revenues today.”

Between 2008 and 2011, dozens of multinational corporations paid no corporate income tax at all, despite making billions in profits. In 2011, the effective tax rate paid by American corporations fell to 12.1 percent, a forty-year low.

On Monday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) conceded that Congress will find new revenues to avert the tax increases that are part of the so-called fiscal cliff in January, but predicted that Republicans won’t raise the nation’s debt ceiling unless President Obama agrees to fundamentally reform Medicare and Social Security.

Appearing on Fox News, Graham put forward an argument that is quickly becoming Republican conventional wisdom: Obama has leverage when it comes to raising tax rates, but once Republicans agree to some sort of a deal, the power will shift to the GOP. A growing number of Republicans now believe that after compromising on tax rates, the party will have the leverage and credibility to hold the nation’s borrowing limit hostage in order to force deep cuts to entitlement programs:

GRAHAM: In February or March you have to raise the debt ceiling. And I can tell you this, there is a hardening on the Republican side. We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling. We’re not going to let Obama borrow any more money or any American Congress borrow any more money until we fix this country from becoming Greece. That requires significant entitlement reform to save Social Security from bankruptcy and Medicare from bankruptcy. Social Security is going bankrupt in about 20, 25 years. Medicare is going bankrupt in 15 or 20 years. [...]

Yes, we will play that game, Mr. President, because it’s not a game. The game you’re playing is small ball. You’re talking about raising rates on the top 2% that would run the government for 11 days. You just got reelected. How about doing something big that is not liberal? How about doing something big that really is bipartisan? Every big idea he has is a liberal idea that drowns us in debt. How about maning up here, Mr. President and use your mandate to bring this country together to stop us from becoming Greece.

Watch it:

Toying with the debt ceiling will come at great economic cost. In 2011, Republican demands nearly led to a credit default and ultimately cost taxpayers “$18.9 billion over 10 years, due to elevated interest rates between January and August 2011.”

Graham’s alarmism about the nation’s entitlement programs is also greatly overblown. As the Washington Post pointed out on Monday, the nation’s social programs will be stressed as the babyboomers retire, but they won’t become bankrupt. Actuaries predict that Medicare Part A — the fund that covers hospital visits — would become exhausted by 2024, but the government “could still cover 87 percent of estimated expenses” in that year. Similarly, Social Security won’t face challenges until 2033 and can be addressed by lifting the “current payroll tax cap, which exempts wages in excess of a certain amount ($110,100 this year) from the tax.”

Last week, Reuters noted that the online retail giant Amazon had avoided hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes by stashing cash in Luxembourg, a notorious tax haven. Today, Bloomberg News’ Jesse Drucker reported that Amazon is not the only tech company employing this strategy — Google last year avoided $2 billion in taxes worldwide thanks to shifting money to Bermuda:

Google Inc. (GOOG) avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting $9.8 billion in revenues into a Bermuda shell company, almost double the total from three years before, filings show.

By legally funneling profits from overseas subsidiaries into Bermuda, which doesn’t have a corporate income tax, Google cut its overall tax rate almost in half. The amount moved to Bermuda is equivalent to about 80 percent of Google’s total pretax profit in 2011.

The increase in Google’s revenues routed to Bermuda, disclosed in a Nov. 21 filing by a subsidiary in the Netherlands, could fuel the outrage spreading across Europe and in the U.S. over corporate tax dodging. Governments in France, the U.K., Italy and Australia are probing Google’s tax avoidance as they seek to boost revenue during economic doldrums.

The UK, in particular, has been cracking down hard on tax avoidance by multinational companies, including Google. “People want to know why companies which benefit from an infrastructure paid for by them and are paying people low wages who receive taxpayer-funded tax credits from the exchequer are not paying their fair share,” said Margaret Hodge, chair of the UK public accounts committee. .

In addition to corporate tax dodging, tax havens facilitate tax avoidance by the super-rich. According to the Tax Justice Network, the world’s wealthiest are shielding about $21 trillion in offshore tax havens. If that $21 trillion “was taxed at just 30 percent, this would generate tax revenues of nearly $200 billion — roughly twice the amount OECD countries spend on international development assistance.”