Our guest blogger is Jane Farrell, a Research Assistant for economic policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Portland became the fourth American city to approve a paid sick days law Wednesday, an important step forward today that will help the city’s workers, employers, and residents. Portland joined three other cities – San Francisco, Washington DC, and Seattle – and one state, Connecticut, in modernizing its workplace policies and acknowledging an important reality: everybody gets sick but no one should be at risk of losing a job, infecting coworkers or customers, or missing a day’s pay because of an illness.

While the economic and social benefits of paid sick days are numerous, Portland City Councilmembers nevertheless weighed the evidence in favor of and against paid sick leave carefully. Ultimately, they unanimously decided that this policy would help make Portland a stronger city and community. Worker-friendly policies like paid sick leave help reduce turnover, saving businesses time and money they might have spent on training, hiring, and replacing employees. It also strengthens worker loyalty and increases worker productivity.

Paid sick leave also helps lower health care costs by reducing the number of costly emergency room visits Portland hospitals will have to finance or subsidize. While 40 percent of private sector workers across the US lack even one paid sick day, Portland residents who previously lacked this protection can now rest easy – and work even more diligently – knowing they are safe and covered.

A day after House Republicans outlined their budget proposal for fiscal year 2014, Senate Democrats unveiled a broad outline of their budget, which Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) said will reduce the deficit to less than three percent of gross domestic product while bringing total deficit reduction to $4.2 trillion over the last four years.

The Democratic budget would replace the automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, that took effect on March 1 with a different set of cuts that will achieve $1.95 trillion in total cuts and revenues. Here are the main provisions of the Democratic budget as outlined by Murray:

$1.85 trillion in total deficit reduction: The Senate budget achieves $1.85 trillion in total deficit reduction split evenly between spending cuts and new revenues and bringing total deficit reduction since President Obama took office to more than $4 trillion once combined with past spending cuts and tax increases. It includes $493 billion in domestic spending cuts, $275 billion of which would come from health savings determined by the Senate Finance Committee. The other $240 billion would come from defense and the end of the war in Afghanistan, and the budget would save $242 billion in interest savings.

$975 billion in new revenues: The budget would achieve half of its deficit reduction from new revenue increases derived from the elimination of tax expenditures and loopholes, though it does not include specifics on which would be eliminated. That would be left to the Senate Finance Committee as part of a broader tax reform bill. A report from the Center for American Progress found that there were more than $1 trillion in tax expenditures that could be eliminated. Those include subsidies for oil and gas companies, a loophole that benefits hedge fund managers, ending tax breaks for corporations that move jobs overseas, and limits on deductions for wealthy taxpayers.

$100 billion in stimulus spending: The budget also includes $100 billion for programs meant to boost the economic recovery, including $50 billion for infrastructure projects. The rest would go toward worker training programs and other forms of stimulus spending, according to Murray.

The Democratic budget would not achieve balance over the 10-year budget window, a point the Budget Committee’s Republicans repeated throughout the markup today. The House GOP budget, by contrast, claims to balance in 10 years, though those claims are built almost entirely on unrealistic revenue projections.

Our guest blogger is Rachel Curley, an intern at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has been described as a “collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators”, is waging a campaign against workers, especially those in minimum wage jobs with few to no benefits.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) recently released a report that tracks “the concrete legislative campaign that ALEC has conducted over the past two years to translate economic ideology into law.” Since 2011, 105 bills “aimed to repeal or weaken core wage standards at the local level” have been introduced in 31 state legislatures, and of those 105 bills, 67 were “directly sponsored or co-sponsored by ALEC-affiliated legislators,” according to NELP. Already, eleven of the 67 bills sponsored by ALEC members have been signed into law.

The report released by NELP highlights three types of bills introduced in state legislatures that reflect “model” legislation already written by ALEC. The report focuses on living wage and prevailing wage repeal and preemption bills, but it also points to other bills designed to repeal, suspend, and weaken state minimum wage laws, as well as ones that weaken overtime compensation policies.

The first one of these preemption bills surfaced in Wisconsin in 2011. The bill targeted a 2008 Milwaukee ballot measure passed with 69 percent of the vote that required city businesses to provide paid sick leave to workers. In response, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law directly nullifying the paid sick leave ordinance. Judge Thomas Cooper of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court upheld the state law, noting that the Wisconsin legislature had “put a bull’s eye on paid sick days” and that the state was completely within its right to void the Milwaukee ordinance.

One sponsor of the bill in Wisconsin was state Sen. Glenn Grothman, a confirmed ALEC member. He previously supported Gov. Scott Walker in repealing the state’s equal pay law by claiming that “money is more important to men” and that “to attribute everything to so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”

The strategy of ALEC-affiliated legislators, according to NELP, is to repeal current living wage policies or to preempt city and local governments from “establishing a living wage or prevailing wage policy in the first place.” Living wage and prevailing wage policies require employers who receive local government funds to pay their workers according to the cost of living in the area or industry standards for the region.

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Republicans and Democrats agreed to increase the debt ceiling for three months at the end of January, but with another deadline approaching in May, the top Senate Republican is hinting that the GOP will again demand spending cuts in exchange for any increase.

That is par for the course for Republicans, who have repeatedly threatened to let the nation default on its obligations if President Obama and Senate Democrats don’t agree to cut spending, but this time, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said the GOP will likely demand cuts to America’s entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — to agree to an increase in the borrowing limit, The Hill reports:

“Until we make our entitlement programs fit the demographics of our country, you can’t save America, you can’t save the healthcare system,” McConnell said. “There is no revenue solution, I would say to you.”

“We all anticipate that the president’s request of us to raise the debt ceiling, which we’ll probably do sometime this will generate another, hopefully, another discussion about solving the real problem,” he said.

Republicans continue to crow about entitlement reform, ignoring that Social Security is fully solvent for at least two decades, that Obama extended Medicare’s solvency by nine years as part of his sweeping healthcare law, and that at least one of the major reforms Republicans favor — raising the retirement age for Medicare enrollees — would do nothing to improve the program’s health. Meanwhile, the GOP refuses to actually put forth specific entitlement reform plans that would do anything other than end the programs as they exist today.

Using the debt ceiling to extract such cuts is an even less reasonable position, given the pain the GOP’s debt intransigence has already inflicted on the economy. The 2011 debt fight led to increased borrowing costs, hampered job growth for months, and created the automatic budget cuts that went into effect at the beginning of March — all of which burdened an economy that is still struggling to fully recover from the Great Recession. That brinksmanship has led leading policymakers like Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, as well as a vast majority of economists, to call for the abolition of the statutory debt limit.

At a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) rebuked Republicans for blocking Richard Cordray’s confirmation as director of her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. After a bitter confirmation fight in 2011, President Obama bypassed the Senate using a recess appointment to grant Cordray a temporary term until the end of 2013. Republicans are threatening to filibuster him this time around unless the CFPB is drastically restructured.

Warren declined to question Cordray, who has testified a dozen times. She then directed scrutiny to her Republican colleagues, calling them out for using her former lieutenant’s confirmation as an excuse to undermine the Bureau:

What I want to know is why every banking regulator since the Civil War has been funded outside the appropriations process — but unlike the consumer agency, no one in the U.S. Senate has held up confirmation of their directors demanding that that agency or those agencies be redesigned…I see nothing here but a filibuster threat against Director Cordray as an attempt to weaken the consumer agency. I think the delay in getting him confirmed is bad for consumers, it’s bad for small banks, bad for credit unions, for anyone trying to offer an honest product in an honest market. The American people deserve a Congress that worries less about helping big banks and more about helping regular people who have been cheated on mortgages, on credit cards, on student loans and on credit reports. I hope you get confirmed. You have earned it, Director Cordray.

Watch it:

Warren herself was ousted from the running for CFPB director in an effort to avoid a confirmation battle with Republicans. Still, Senate Republicans are intent on holding up the confirmation of any director to the Bureau. In a letter to Obama last month, 43 Senate Republicans vowed to filibuster any nominee unless they are allowed to hobble the agency’s authority.

Republicans have tried to weaken the Bureau from its inception, claiming it lacks transparency. Unlike other financial regulatory agencies, which are dependent on Congress for funding, the CFPB is intended to be an independent agency with independent funding. If Republicans get their way, the CFPB will lose this independence, making it vulnerable to the partisan shenanigans and funding shortages that have derailed other regulators.

Cordray’s first term demonstrates the CFPB’s efficacy as an independent agency. In one year, the agency has increased supervision over mortgage lenders, brokers, consumer reporting agencies, and large banks, set up programs to help consumers better understand loan agreements and recoup refunds from deceptive and illegal practices, and wrote new rules to prevent wrongful foreclosures.

A Republican Congressman on the House Budget Committee whose car dealership has at least $2.5 million in debts insisted on Wednesday that companies and individuals must balance their budgets “every single day.” The comments came during a day-long hearing about Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) spending plan, which achieves balance within 10 years.

“I’m a small business owner,” Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), began. “I have owned and operated my business for over 41 years and I still operate it,” he said, before linking the government’s budget to the financial well-being of families and businesses and suggesting that the federal books should resemble the practices of every day Americans:

WILLIAMS: We have to have a balanced budget. I have to balance my budget. Everybody in America has to balance their family’s budget or their business’ budget, not every ten years, not even every single year, but every single day…. If we apply the same principals in families and businesses use every single day we will ensure that America’s best days are ahead and we will stay the most powerful country militarily and economically.

But businesses and individuals don’t balance their budgets each day. They routinely take out mortgages, business and student loans, reasoning that an investment made today in college education or a new equipment can lead to greater returns down the road. Williams’ own Chrystler car dealership has a long line of credit and a note payable and by definition does not maintain a balanced budget. From the Williams’ financial disclosure form:

The federal economy is fundamentally different from household budgets and economic data and history suggest that the government should be spending more, not less given the current economic circumstances. After all, overall government spending has plateaued under Obama after rising sharply under George W. Bush and the resulting fiscal contraction has resulted in a lower recovery.

Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Paul Ryan says we must slash spending. We must do it now, and we must do it dramatically. We must cut 47 percent from education, 32 percent from infrastructure, and 28 percent from scientific research. We must repeal Obamacare, denying health insurance to 30 million people, and then further slash $750 billion from Medicaid. We must cut food stamps, child care support, and housing assistance. We must cut non-defense discretionary spending down to levels we have never before seen in modern history. Paul Ryan says we must do these things because otherwise, “We face the threat of a debt crisis.”

Now, take a look at the terrifying graph of what Paul Ryan says will happen to our national debt unless we adopt his policies:

That’s right. Under Ryan’s own definition of current policies – policies we are currently doing before any of his new draconian spending cuts take place – the debt is already projected to decline for the next six years, and only after that will it begin a slow rise.

This is the horrifying dystopian future that Paul Ryan seeks to avoid with his enormous cuts to anti-poverty programs and middle class protections? You could be forgiven if you find it hard to see a looming “debt crisis” in this graph.

Congressman Tom Price (R-GA) made a startling admission on CNN’s Starting Point on Wednesday morning, telling host Soledad O’Brien that Republicans are not concerned about how they cut spending — or the millions of people who suffer as a result — so long as they achieve a balanced budget.

O’BREIN: [The President] said he doesn’t want balance for the sake of balance, that actually the wrong kinds of cuts that would be hurtful to people would be a problem. What do make of what he told George Stephanopoulos?

REP. PRICE: We believe it’s important to balance not the how of ‘how you balance,’ but the ‘why’, why is it important to balance. well it’s important to get our budget in balance, so that means that Washington doesn’t spend more money than it takes in, just like families can’t, just like businesses across this country can’t.

Watch it:

The lack of concern over how Republicans are cutting some $5 trillion in spending is evident in the cuts they are planning to hand down to low-income families, young people, women and seniors, all of whom stand to lose significant protections under the Republicans’ balanced budget. Meanwhile, the Ryan budget likely maintains billions in tax savings for millionaires, Big Oil and financial conglomerates that will benefit from the proposed repeal of regulations imposed on Wall Street.

The comment provides a sharp contrast to President Obama’s competing vision for the federal budget. During an interview with Geroge Stephanopoulos, Obama argued that rushing to balance the budget during a recovery could undermine growth and significantly hurt the most vulnerable populations,” Obama said. “If we’ve controlled spending and we’ve got a smart entitlement package, then potentially what you have is balance. But it’s not balance on the backs of, you know, the poor, the elderly, students who need student loans, families who’ve got disabled kids. That’s not the right way to balance our budget.”