Few will even notice major cuts in our nation’s food stamp program, according to Rep. Steve King (R-IA).

Speaking on the floor Tuesday, King argued that a $20 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “spread out over ten years is not something that is going to be noticeable.”

KING: We do calculate our budget and spending in a 10-year window, so that means $800 billion is the universe of money we’re talking about. … Over the time period of 10 years, there would be $20 billion trimmed off of $800 billion. What comes to about a 2.5 percent decrease in the overall projected expenditures of the food stamp program known as SNAP. After all of that technical gibberish, the bottom line is a $20 billion cut is a $2.5 billion cut in the increase. $20 billion spread out over ten years is not something that is going to be noticeable.

Watch it:

Last year, the House Agriculture Committee passed a bill that included $16.5 billion in cuts to food stamps. As a result, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated, 2 to 3 million low-income people would no longer receive food assistance. The legislation touted by King would go even further.

Food stamps are an essential part of the American safety net and keep millions out of poverty. In 2011, SNAP lifted 4.7 million people out of poverty, nearly half of whom were children, despite the fact that most recipients receive less than $1.50 per meal on average.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) is having a busy week fighting for stronger consumer protections. First he introduced legislation that would stop companies from using private arbitration to escape facing judgment in courts, and yesterday he introduced H.R. 1913, the Application Privacy, Protection and Security (Apps) Act of 2013, a bill that could fix the gap between the privacy consumers expect from apps on their mobile devices and the experience they actually receive. Rep. Johnson explained the bill during a speech to the State of the Mobile Net conference:

The APPS Act would require that app developers give effective notice about data collection and obtain consent from consumers before collecting personal data. Trust in the mobile marketplace is crucial to its continued growth. Transparency is the cornerstone of this trust.

The APPS act would also require that developers securely maintain personal data. And it would give consumers a clear way to permanently delete their personal data once they stop using an app.

Smartphones are a regular feature of modern life, with 114 million Americans using them as of July 2012, but developers for mobile apps have struggled to keep pace with consumer privacy expectations. A February Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report showed that 57 percent of all app users “have either uninstalled an app over concerns about having to share their personal information, or declined to install an app in the first place for similar reasons” and less than one in three “feel they are in control of their personal information on their mobile devices.”

And there is an awful lot of personal information on mobile devices that many apps can access — including contact lists, browsing habits, and geographic location. One 2012 study discovered 19 percent of Apple iOS 5 apps accessed address books without user knowledge or consent and 41 percent tracked location. It also found more than 40 percent of them didn’t encrypt user data once it was collected, potentially leaving it vulnerable to hackers.

A number of consumer advocates have praised the APPS Act, including experts from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Consumer Federation of America, and Consumer Watchdog, Privacy Project Director at Consumer Watchdog. Susan Grant, Director of Consumer Protection at Consumer Federation of America calls it “a common-sense approach to an urgent problem,” saying the legislation will “give consumers the information and control they need to use apps with confidence.”

West, Texas continues to be rocked by the aftermath of the fertilizer plant explosion last month. Victims are now discovering they may still have to pay property taxes on their destroyed homes. While these homeowners can file protests until the end of May, the law requires property values to be determined on January 1 of the tax year. Local governments are allowed to reappraise homes after natural disasters, but the fertilizer plant explosion was very much a man-made calamity.

Even the mayor, Tommy Muska, has filed to protest the property value of his home, which is so badly damaged from the blast that it may cost $300,000 to repair. However, the mayor noted, granting victims relief is a “double-edged sword,” as the town will flounder from the millions of lost tax dollars. The magnitude of the explosion, which claimed 15 lives and injured 160 others, also devastated a huge chunk of West’s much-needed revenue for many years to come:

Hahn estimated that West lost at least $29 million in taxable value as a result of the blast, not counting damage to nontaxable property such as schools, water tanks and infrastructure.

That amount represents more than one-fifth of West’s tax base of $140.4 million, according to preliminary values. Hahn said losing that much revenue this year would hobble the finances of the city and West Independent School District when they need the money the most.

Whatever the appraisal district decides, either the victims or the town will take a debilitating hit. Victims cannot count on West Fertilizer Co. for compensation, either. The plant was only insured for $1 million of damages, a negligible sum that does not even begin to cover the actual losses. Property damage alone is projected to reach $100 million. Even so, the company was not required to carry any liability insurance at all. Many states, including Texas, do not impose any legal requirements for companies to have liability insurance. This latest revelation is just one of the myriad regulatory failures that led to the deadly explosion.

On Friday, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers launched a criminal investigation into the explosion. Some victims are also pursuing civil lawsuits against the company.

Zack Beauchamp has started an interesting discussion on TP Ideas on how and why conservatives love to link race and IQ. Allow me to point out that they don’t just stop with linking race and IQ. They also delight in linking economic inequality in general to IQ, for the same reasons: to make conservatives appear to be the reasonable ones not afraid to face the hard truths about a troubling social problem.

It should be no surprise to anyone that Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, is once again taking the lead in making this case. In last year’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, he argued that to understand today’s economic inequality you need to go back to the 1960s. Since then, American society has been coming apart. Under the baleful influence of a relativistic, anything goes, 60s morality, America’s work ethic and honesty have been destroyed: the commitment to religion and the institution of marriage has been all but lost. As a result, the less-educated bottom 30 percent of whites have seen their economic and social fates diverge radically from the well-educated top 20 percent of whites. Weirdly, Murray dubs the former group “Fishtown,” in honor of a white working-class Philly neighborhood on the banks of the Delaware River; the latter group is named “Belmont,” after a tony Boston suburb.

A segment of Belmont whites — comprising perhaps 5 percent of the U.S. population — make up what Murray believes is the new upper class. These are the folks who hold the most powerful managerial and professional jobs in our social institutions and really run the country. Unlike in the good old days, they live in a culture that is separate and distinct from the rest of America (think upscale coffeehouses and restaurants, gourmet food stores, “green” consumer goods, highbrow news media, and “serious” movies and TV). They even live together in the same places, huddled together in what Murray calls “SuperZips,” where they can escape the unrefined masses, send their kids to good schools, and marry each other. Oddly, it is this very same new upper class that most fervently embraces the values of the 1960s — and yet they are doing very, very well.

And why are they doing so well? For Murray, it’s simple: they’re smarter! In his view, the sorting mechanisms in our technologically advanced society have become ever more efficient at ferreting out the cognitively gifted among us (elite colleges play a big role) and slotting them into positions where they can reap the market’s increasing return for high-level skills. So the cognitively advanced Belmont whites pull even farther away from the cognitively challenged Fishtown whites, who, you will remember, no longer have even their sturdy values of honesty, hard work, marriage, and traditional religion to rely upon.

As for the problems of blacks and Hispanics, Murray stands by his earlier work in The Bell Curve, where he argued that they’re just not as smart as whites and hence do more poorly in a society that increasingly rewards cognitive ability.  So blacks and Hispanics are dumber than whites and lower class whites are dumber than upper class whites. That’s Murray’s view of the world and his overarching explanation for the ongoing pathologies of racial and class inequality.

None of this makes any sense. On the one hand, Murray laments over and over the depth of the inequality problem we face; some of the economic trends he documents are the sorts of things you’d expect a liberal think tank or academic to lament. Yet that overlap has not led him to pay the slightest attention to the careful work these think tanks and academics have done analyzing the growth in inequality (well-summarized in Timothy Noah’s book, The Great Divergence). Murray dismisses out of hand explanations rooted in structural shifts in the economy, slower growth in educational attainment, changes in labor market institutions (unions, the minimum wage), or really anything other than increasing rewards for smart people and declining morals for dumb people. Thus in his quest for a scientific, hard-headed explanation for inequality, he winds up rejecting all the real science on the issue.

Don’t be surprised if this view, as appalling and absurd as it seems, continues to surface in conservative circles. The temptation to don the mantle of science, even when it is fundamentally fraudulent, will, for some, be too great to resist.

If you did nothing but watch cable news for the last two days, you would have no idea that hundreds of fast food workers in the midwest are on strike — walking out of their jobs, protesting outside of the storefronts, calling on employers to end the horrendously low wages that have left many workers in poverty.

Since Wednesday, when the strikes began, neither CNN nor Fox News has even mentioned the fast food worker protests, according to a quick search of media monitoring site TV Eyes. MSNBC has discussed the strikes once, during a segment of All In With Chris Hayes.

It’s not that the channels haven’t discussed economic issues: For comparison’s sake, in the same time period, CNN mentioned the Dow on eight separate occasions, MSNBC on 23, and Fox News on 14. They have also managed to have dozens of discussions about fast food — particularly McDonald’s. But all were in reference to what Charles Murray — one of the men who rescued three kidnapped women in Ohio — was eating before his heroic act.

Cable news often fails to cover economic news as it relates to people’s lives. Every station was equally abysmal at discussing job-threatening sequestration cuts, though they spent a lot of time focusing on lines at airports or the discontinuation of White House tours.

But the workers’ strike is certainly worth the time of all three major cable channels. Currently, those hundreds of workers on strike don’t make a living wage and lack any union representation that would help them collectively bargain. Even as the profits of the companies they work for rise, workers’ wages have stagnated. The fight is also happening at the federal level; in his State of the Union, President Obama called on Congress to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour. That puts it just at 1981 levels, accounting for inflation.

One World Trade Center, which will replace the World Trade Center towers that fell in the September 11 terrorist attacks, became the tallest building in the United States this morning when workers hoisted a 408-foot spire atop it. At 1,776 feet tall, the building is now the tallest in the United States and the third-tallest in the world.

And, as American Rights at Work noted when it became the tallest building in New York, it was built with union labor:

It’s fitting: union members were among the first responders; union members served in the immediate cleanup; and now union members are part of the rebuilding.

Anti-union legislation has made its way across America in recent years, from Michigan to Indiana to Wisconsin. But unions were instrumental in building America’s middle class, in responding to the attacks on 9/11, and now, in rebuilding the World Trade Center in the decade since the attacks.

“It’s a pretty awesome feeling,” project manager Juan Estevez told the Associated Press. “It’s a culmination of a tremendous amount of team work … rebuilding the New York City skyline once again.”