American workers are having a harder time finding full-time jobs, as the share of workers in part-time jobs grew to a multi-year high in February, according to a new survey from Gallup.

Just 43.3 percent of the workforce is now working in full-time jobs, the survey found, down from February 2012. The share of the workforce in part-time jobs grew to 20.6 percent last month, up from just 17.6 percent in July:

These part-time jobs rarely “provide an employee with enough money to live on” and “tend[] to have limited benefits,” making it hard for workers to support themselves and their families. But even many of the full-time jobs added since the end of the Great Recession aren’t enough for workers to make ends meet. A majority of jobs added since the recession have been in low-wage sectors, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and one-in-four American workers will be in low-wage jobs for the next decade.

At the same time, corporate profits are at record highs, even as workers’ wages are falling to record lows. Profits have risen nearly 20 times faster than incomes, and 88 percent of income growth during the recovery went to corporate profits, while just one percent went to workers’ wages.

According to new data from the Census Bureau, 600,000 Americans have commutes to work that are longer than 90 minutes and 50 miles. But those workers with longer commutes are far more likely than other workers to either use public transit or carpool. In fact, nearly 4 in 5 workers who work outside of the home drive to work alone:

According to Out-of-State and Long Commutes: 2011, 23.0 percent of workers with long commutes (60 minutes or more) use public transit, compared with 5.3 percent for all workers. Only 61.1 percent of workers with long commutes drove to work alone, compared with 79.9 percent for all workers who worked outside the home.

“The average travel time for workers who commute by public transportation is higher than that of workers who use other modes. For some workers, using transit is a necessity, but others simply choose a longer travel time over sitting in traffic,” said Brian McKenzie, a Census Bureau statistician and author of the brief.

Rail travel accounted for 11.8 percent of workers with long commutes, and other forms of public transportation accounted for 11.2 percent.

As a report from Texas A&M noted, workers in America sat in traffic for a collective 5.5 billion hours in 2011. And congestion in major cities has gotten significantly worse in recent decades, as this chart shows:

Public transit use has increased steadily in recent years, but investment in it has not. Instead, it has plateaued, leaving transit agencies to handle more riders with no new resources:

Republicans want to make this problem worse by diverting funding meant for mass transit to highway construction. But that would simply exacerbate the already existing incentives to drive to work alone, rather than adopting a different mode of transport.

Republicans have spent the past two years trying to delay and water down regulations included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, the landmark regulatory law passed in the wake of the financial crisis that sparked the Great Recession. Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby (R), who served as the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee in the previous Congress, is now renewing that fight, as he plans to introduce legislation that would require regulators to perform a cost-benefit analysis on all new financial regulations before they are finalized.

Under Shelby’s legislation, any new rule for which costs outweigh benefits would be prohibited from final implementation, The Hill reports:

“If a regulation’s costs outweigh its benefits, it should be thrown out,” Shelby said. “By providing a clear, rigorous and consistent process for regulators in making that determination, this legislation will eliminate unnecessary burdens on our economy.”

Shelby’s past efforts to ensure that cost-benefit analyses are performed on new regulations has drawn harsh rebukes from regulators and the Obama administration. “[W]e are seeing a determined effort to slow and weaken reforms that are critical to our ability to protect Americans from another crisis,” former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said of such a change in 2011.

Such a proposal may seem benign, but “quantifying costs and benefits objectively is notoriously difficult,” Reuters’ John Kemp wrote in 2012, and “the result tends to depend on who is doing the measuring.” Those analyses would likely throw out many regulations that could protect the nation from future financial crises or from incidences like the rate-rigging scandal that embroiled the financial industry last year. Independent studies have shown that the financial crisis cost the U.S. $22 trillion, including nearly $13 trillion in lost economic output.

And while they have support from the Chamber of Commerce and other financial industry interest groups who have challenged new regulations in court, the analyses are meant not to ensure smart regulations but to slow down or block the regulatory process. “The standard they seek to enforce,” Kemp observed, “would be impossible to meet.”

The Dow Jones reached an all-time high of 14,200 today, besting the pre-financial crisis record set in 2007. The robust gains may surprise many Wall Street analysts and cable news prognosticators who, just a few months ago, were raising the alarm that an Obama reelection would send the market into a tailspin.

During election season, experts warned that Obama’s intent to raise the capital gains, dividend and corporate taxes would hurt investments, while Mitt Romney’s business-friendly attitude would lead to a first day rally. It soon became “conventional wisdom” in the financial sector that the stock market would favor a Romney win, while an Obama second term would be disastrous.

Echoing a Romney campaign talking point, a chief economist at Gluskin Sheff praised Romney on CNBC as “a candidate that could more readily come to a compromise with the opposition” over the fiscal cliff deal, and would be “overall better” for the markets:

Fox Business seized on market gains the day after Romney’s first debate performance as evidence that the stock market was rooting for a Romney win. After Election Day, the network lamented that Obama’s win caused a market dip, which was actually a reaction to bad economic news from Europe and the impending fiscal cliff fight in still-gridlocked Congress:

CNBC market analysts also stoked the panic, hosting a Barclay’s Capital manager who suggested Obama’s reelection would spark a recession like the one in 1948:

Even after the stock market continued to improve after Obama’s re-election, this same “conventional wisdom” prompted many investors to dump stocks at the end of last year, fearing an uptick in the capital gains tax.

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On Tuesday morning, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack appeared before the House Committee on Agriculture to testify about the impact of the sequester’s across-the-board cuts on food safety inspections. The mechanism — which went into effect after lawmakers failed to reach a deficit reduction deal that would offset its $1.2 trillion in spending cuts — will lower funding for Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service by $56 million, cut $53 million from Food Safety and Inspection Service, and take an additional $2 million from Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration.

In his testimony, Vilsack stressed the consequences of the cuts. “No matter how you slice it and dice it, there’s nothing you can do without impacting front line inspectors,” he said. “The inspections are very, very important and we will do everything we can to minimize the disruption, but I have to be truthful to this committee that based on the way the sequester is structured, it will impact food inspection.”

Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) — the chairman of the committee — dismissed these concerns, arguing that Vilsack would have the “flexibility” to ensure that at least some inspectors remain on duty:

LUCAS: But you will, Mr. Secretary, utilize the maximum flexibility you have. You have substantial inspectors in plants all over the country, plants that work on different hour schedules. The odds that we would furlough every inspector on the same day are rather minuscule, correct?

Vilsack responded that he may not have the ability exert a great deal of flexibility since “some facilities are actually dendent on the work of other facilities” and the Department is required to “bargain with the union that represents the inspectors in terms of the sequencing a structure of the sequester and how it is implemented.” “It is extraordinarily complicated,” Vilsack stressed.

U.S. food safety standards are already far weaker than regulations in other developed countries. For instance, “48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne illnesses every year” — while the entire European Union had only “45,000 illnesses and 32 deaths from contaminated food in 2008.” That means foodborne illness strikes 15 percent of Americans each year, but only .00009 percent of Europeans.

Unfortunately, Lucas seems far more concerned with opposing increases in revenue than preserving food inspections. Last month, he correctly predicted that the House will not accept the Senate’s bill to replace the sequester because it “has tax increases.” “We say the problem is not that the federal government doesn’t tax enough, which is what the President and Harry Reid say, we say, quitem simply, we spend too much, and we’ve got to reduce spending. That’s how we fix the problem in the big picture sense,” he told a local Oklahoma radio station.

The stock market climbed to new heights today, clearing 14,200 for the first time in its history. The previous high of 14,164 was reached on October 9, 2007, in the days before the financial crisis. In this year alone, the stock market is up 7.8 percent.

But while stocks are achieving new highs, precious little benefit is trickling down to workers. This chart shows workers’ wages as a percentage of the economy, which are hovering near record lows:

As Quartz’s Matt Phillips put it, “in many ways Americans are still sucking wind after the gut punch they suffered in 2008.” In fact, the richest 1 percent of Americans have captured 121 percent of the income gains achieved during the current recovery, meaning everyone else has actually lost ground in terms of income since the economy bottomed out.

Two Democrats plan to introduce legislation today that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, more than a dollar over the proposal President Obama made during February’s State of the Union address. The current minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and has not been raised since 2009 as part of legislation signed by President George W. Bush.

The legislation backed by Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin (D) and California Rep. George Miller (D) would, like Obama’s proposal, index the minimum wage to inflation so that it keeps up with the cost of living over time. Harkin and Miller told the Huffington Post that raising the minimum wage was “a matter of justice” for low-income workers:

“When you see what’s happened to CEO salaries and compensation since the 1970s, and what’s happened to the minimum wage, it’s just startling,” Harkin said. “We can’t continue on this way. We need a higher minimum wage.”

“People do see the minimum wage as a matter of justice for people who don’t have the ability to bargain for decent wages,” Miller said. “And that’s all this is — it’s a minimum wage. Nobody’s walking away from here rich.”

As Harkin noted, executive salaries have skyrocketed over the last three decades, rising 127 times faster than worker pay. Corporate profits have also risen to record levels, but the minimum wage hasn’t kept up, even as low-wage jobs are becoming more prevalent after the Great Recession. The minimum wage reached its peak buying power in 1968; to equal that buying power today, it would have to be $9.92 an hour. Had it been indexed to inflation in 1968, it would be $10.40 an hour today.

Top Republicans have already come out against raising the minimum wage, but 65 Republicans currently serving in the House or Senate supported the minimum wage increase Bush signed into law in 2007.