Carnival’s “cruise from hell” — during which the ship lost power off the Yucatan peninsula and was stuck for days, leaving passengers no recourse to relieving themselves in plastic bags — finally ended last night as the crippled boat was tugged into port. “It was horrible. Horrible,” one passenger said. “The bathroom facilities were horrible and we could not flush toilets. No electricity and our rooms were in total darkness.”

Carnival will be refunding money to the passengers of the ill-fated cruise and offering them a free trip in the future. (“This is my first and last cruise. So if anyone wants my free cruise, look me up,” one passenger said.) But one entity to which Carnival has not been giving any money is the national treasury — as the New York Times’ David Leonhardt reported, the company has paid just a 1.1 percent rate on 11.3 billion in profits over the last five years:

The Carnival Corporation wouldn’t have much of a business without help from various branches of the government. The United States Coast Guard keeps the seas safe for Carnival’s cruise ships. Customs officers make it possible for Carnival cruises to travel to other countries. State and local governments have built roads and bridges leading up to the ports where Carnival’s ships dock.

But Carnival’s biggest government benefit of all may be the price it pays for many of those services. Over the last five years, the company has paid total corporate taxes — federal, state, local and foreign — equal to only 1.1 percent of its cumulative $11.3 billion in profits. Thanks to an obscure loophole in the tax code, Carnival can legally avoid most taxes.

Carnival uses a tax loophole that allows companies incorporated overseas to avoid U.S. taxes, even if the bulk of their operations are based in the states. Between 2008 and 2011, 26 major corporations in the U.S. managed to pay no income tax, despite making $205 billion in pre-tax profits. (HT: Teamster Nation)

President Obama’s call for a minimum wage increase in Tuesday’s State of the Union address — like nearly all of his proposals — was met with immediate opposition from Congressional Republicans. But six years ago, many of the same Republicans supported a similar proposal backed by Republican President George W. Bush.

A ThinkProgress analysis finds that at least 67 Republicans who are still in Congress today backed an increase in the minimum wage in some form, including Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI).

Political momentum for an increase began in 2004, after President Bush announced his support for a bill by now-Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). After Democrats won majorities of the House and Senate in the 2006 elections, a minimum wage increase became one of their first priorities. The Fair Minimum Wage Act — which also included tax cuts for small businesses — passed the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. When the increase was folded into a larger appropriations bill, it again passed with strong bipartisan support and was eventually signed into law by Bush. 26 House Republicans even signed a letter to then-House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), asking for a vote on a minimum wage increase, including current Representatives Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Peter King (R-NY), Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ), Christopher Smith (R-NJ), and Fred Upton (R-MI). In incremental stages, the law raised the minimum wage from $5.15-per-hour to $7.25.

Though Ryan ultimately voted against the measure, he argued that he supported raising the hourly rate as long as it came with a suitable “offset” of small business relief. “Last year, I supported an increase in the minimum wage because it also included tax relief measures for employers to offset the cost of the proposed minimum wage increase,” he noted in a floor speech, as he announced “with great regret” that he could not back the bill without more small business tax cuts.

Like most Republicans, however, Ryan struck a far more defiant tone in response to Obama’s proposal, dispensing of any caveats and telling CNN that “I think it actually is counterproductive in many ways. You end up costing jobs from people who are at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.”

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Senate Democrats have officially rolled out their plan to replace the so-called “sequester,” the set of spending cuts scheduled for March that were set in motion by the deal that raised the debt ceiling in 2011. House Republicans have yet to roll out a new plan of their own to replace the sequester, instead pointing to a sequester replacement bill that they passed in the last Congress (that they have no plans to vote on again). The Congressional Progressive Caucus has also proposed a replacement for the sequester.

Here’s a comparison of the three plans::

House Republican Plan	Senate Democratic plan	Congressional Progressive Caucus Plan
Replaces the sequester with only domestic spending cuts.	Replaces the sequester with $110 billion in deficit reduction, equally split between spending cuts and revenue.	Replaces the sequester with $960 billion in new revenue, $278 billion in defense cuts, and invests in new job creation measures.
Includes no new revenue. Denies the Child Tax Credit to parents who are undocumented immigrants.	Includes $55 billion in revenue, split between: a 30 percent minimum tax on millionaires (the Buffett rule), repealing a tax loophole for oil companies, and eliminating the ability of corporations to deduct the cost of moving jobs overseas.	Reinstates the Making Work Pay tax credit. Ends the carried interest loophole that benefits wealthy money managers, closes tax loopholes that encourage corporations to send profits to offshore tax havens, cuts oil subsidies, closes loopholes that benefit buyers of private jets and yachts, and closes loopholes in the estate tax.
Voids defense cuts.	Includes $27.5 billion in cuts to defense spending.	Includes $278 billion in cuts to defense spending.
Cuts domestic spending via: cutting food stamps, Medicaid, and the social services block grant (which, among other things, funds Meals on Wheels).	Cuts domestic spending via ending direct agriculture subsidies, “which are currently provided regardless of yields, prices, or farm income.”	Invests $160 billion in infrastructure.

House Democrats have also released a plan largely in line with the Senate Democrats’ version. The sequester itself, meanwhile, would devastate several important programs that have already been hurt by budget cuts.

Already, the deficit reduction achieved since 2010 (which is hampering economic growth and hurting job creation) has been primarily achieved through spending cuts. In fact, just one-quarter of it has come through new revenue. Even adopting the Senate Democrats plan would mean that overall deficit reduction is tilted heavily towards spending cuts. Only the CPC’s plan would result in deficit reduction having been achieved through equal parts spending cuts and new revenue. The CPC plan is also the only one acknowledging that job creation, not the deficit, is the country’s most pressing problem.

House Republicans are attempting to blame Democrats and President Obama for “sequestration,” the automatic budget cuts that will begin taking effect on March 1 if Congress fails to avert them. But even as they cast that blame and ignore their own role in creation of the sequester, which wouldn’t exist had Republicans not refused to raise the debt ceiling in August 2011, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) is expected to count the sequester’s automatic cuts in the next version of his budget, BuzzFeed reports:

According to two senior GOP aides familiar with Ryan’s thinking on the budget, the Wisconsin Republican and former vice presidential candidate will use the so-called sequester as part of the baseline level of spending for his budget.

Ryan’s position on the sequester has changed multiple times:

1. Helped make the sequester happen. Ryan was among the Republicans leading demands for spending cuts to offset a debt ceiling increase in the summer of 2011, and was among the leaders who refused to consider new revenues in those negotiations. Had Republicans not refused to raise the debt ceiling in the first place, the sequester wouldn’t exist.

2. Voted for plan to create the sequester, then bragged about it. Ryan took credit for the sequester in August 2011, bragging to Fox News that it guaranteed the massive budget cuts Republicans were seeking. “We got that in law,” he boasted. On the House floor, he said the Budget Control Act’s spending cuts were “a victory for those committed to controlling government spending.”

3. Called the sequester “devastating” during the presidential election. Ryan blasted Obama for wanting the sequester’s “devastating defense cuts” to take place during the presidential election, when he was the GOP’s vice presidential candidate.

4. Blamed the likelihood of the sequester occurring on Obama. The sequester “will probably occur” because “the president has not a proposal yet on the table,” Ryan told CBS News last week. “Don’t forget it’s the president who first proposed the sequester. It’s the president who designed the sequester as it is now designed,” he added.

5. Will include sequester cuts in his latest budget.

This is hardly a new strategy for Ryan, who crisscrossed the country blasting Obama for cutting Medicare spending even as he included the cuts in his last budget proposal and made even bigger changes to the program.

It seems a little late to talk about the potential dangers from above as an asteroid 150 feet across flies by closer than the moon and more than 400 people have been injured by a meteor in Russia. But if there is one thing that today’s headlines highlight, it’s that we do not have the capacity to protect ourselves from space.

As hyperbolic as that may sound, it’s true: Asteroid 2012 DA14, the hunk of rock hurtling 17,000 miles above us today, wasn’t discovered until last year — too late to do anything about it, had it been on a collision course. According to comments from Ed Lu, a former astronaut and head of a nonprofit dedicated to protecting humanity from asteroids, “[w]e only know the locations and trajectories of about 1 percent of asteroids this size or larger [...] So for every one of these, there’s 99 out there we don’t know about.”

Had 2012 DA14 hit the Earth, the impacts would have been comparable to the 1908 Tungusta Event that devastated 2.150 square km with an estimated 10 and 20 megaton explosion. But while, the Tungusta Event hit an isolated pocket of Eastern Russia, because of our lack of interstellar observational capacity we don’t yet know where the next major impact will hit — or if it will be a few hundred feet across like in Tungusta, or up to 20 kilometers like the asteroid that new evidence shows struck Australia between 298 and 360 million years ago.

Despite the evidence that space represents some very real risks to humanity, President Obama’s 2012 budget proposal decreased NASA’s overall budget by $59 million, to $17.7 billion with another marginal decrease in the 2013 proposed budget. While that may seem minor, the NASA budget has decreased from above 5 percent of GDP at the height of the space race to around half a percentage point today, as shown by this chart via azizonomics:

The very existence of Lu’s nonprofit and NASA’s budget cuts are evidence that the U.S. isn’t taking this truly global security issue seriously.

It’s a rough time for science right now:The U.S. is facing serious negative impacts on long-term economic competitiveness due to research and development cuts and politicians deemed “saviors” choose to ignore the evidence of climate change. But maybe today’s headlines will be enough to spur the nation’s leaders to have a serious dialogue about investing in space research.

Every afternoon on CNBC, viewers can watch Jim Cramer dispense stock advice (while ringing various bells and whistles). On Saturday evenings, Suze Orman tells her audience how to invest and save for the future. They are just two characters in a thriving industry based on telling people how best to make money and plan for their financial futures: but is that advice worth anything?

In her recent book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, reporter Helaine Olen explains how Cramer, Orman, and their ilk make huge profits for themselves while offering advice that is questionable at best. Olen got her start in the personal finance world when she ran a series for the Los Angeles Times called Money Makeover, which involved helping regular folks connect with financial gurus sort out their personal finances.

“My question was, did we mislead people?” Olen said. “That was really the genesis of the book.” As she found out, the personal finance industry is a swamp of conflicts of interest, shoddy advice, and prognosticators who profit off of the economic anxiety of everyday Americans. “These empires of personal finance sort of start up, in part, as a way to explain it all to us,” she said, and they proliferate during hard economic times:

People are desperate, and we live in this society where there’s deep shame around money, and there’s this idea that everybody should be able to make it…And so we feel very bereft and alone. Until very recently — like the past year recently — I would argue the average person really had no idea that they weren’t alone in this. The number in our 401(k)’s is roughly $25,000. That’s not enough money to get you through more than a year or two, nevermind a 30 year retirement. But everybody thought this was their individual failure. It didn’t occur to anybody that this was the average number and everybody was in on this. We’re all bereft here.

And the personal finance industry really preys on this idea that you can do it alone. And that you are alone in this. And that to not be able to do it is a personal failure. For instance, to give one very specific example, Dave Ramsey, who’s the big radio guru, has explicitly denied income inequality exists. And has told people they can choose not to participate in a recession.

“I think it really does go back to that 1980s, greed is good, we’re all the captains of our individual destiny here. The sort of sense that the government is bad for you, forgetting that Social Security exists for a reason, for example,” she said. “Previous to Social Security, if you lived to be old and you couldn’t convince a family member to take you in, you ended up in a poor house…The age of this great self-responsibility that we like to idealize really never occurred in our history.”

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