Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) is pushing a report from his administration’s Department of Workforce Development that puts the state’s net private-sector job gains at 32,000 for 2012. Federally tallied figures for all states won’t be available until June, as CBS affiliate WSAW explains, which renders comparisons impossible:

Walker’s Department of Workforce Development released the new figures on Thursday, but they can’t be compared to other states until next month. Walker has been releasing the figures before they are published officially by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Critics say the state’s performance can’t be adequately measured until the numbers can be compared with other states. The most current ranking, comparing jobs created between September 2011 and September 2012, showed Wisconsin was 44th in the nation.

Walker is claiming a two-year total gain of 62,000 private-sector jobs, and a table on page 3 of the state’s report acknowledges the public sector is employing about 8,500 fewer people than it did the month before he took office. That puts the governor less than one quarter of the way to his campaign pledge of 250,000 total jobs created in four years.

If any independent organization would be likely to defend Walker’s record, it would be the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But the Chamber’s most recent annual scorecard of state economies has the state near the bottom in job creation, as the Madison Capital Times noted shortly after the report was released:

Its annual scorecard on state economies ranked Wisconsin 44th for overall economic performance and 50th — as in dead last — for short-term job growth as measured between September 2010 and November 2012. It also has Wisconsin 39th in “business climate” — on par with the state’s ranking under Gov. Jim Doyle.

Walker’s early-term agenda focused on busting public worker unions in the state and slashing state spending. His successes in pursuing those legislative goals amount to a localized version of the austerity approach to economic growth which Republicans have pressed with less success on the national level. Following the billions in budget cuts he pushed upon taking office, Walker has proposed both further cuts to school budgets and a tax cut that’s heavily slanted towards the state’s wealthiest residents.

Those policies have pulled demand out of the state’s economy, undermining Wisconsin’s growth prospects. Beyond the paltry jobs progress Walker is touting, U.S. Commerce Department figures show the state ranked near the bottom in terms of personal income growth over the 2011-12 period.

Legislation at the federal level designed to improve women’s economic opportunities appears stalled, including, most recently, the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. But some states are taking matters into their own hands and working on similar laws in their legislatures. They could serve as models for what needs to be done at the federal level.

On Tuesday, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) signed an equal pay bill into law. The new law will require employers to prove they have legitimate business reasons for paying workers unequal wages, protect workers who discuss pay with each other, provide protections for employees who request flexible work arrangements, give mothers who need to express breast milk at work protection, and improve the process that ensures state government contracts pay equal wages. It also establishes a study committee to look at instituting a paid family leave law.

New York may soon follow in Vermont’s footsteps. In his 2013 State of the State address, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced a Women’s Equality Agenda that is currently winding its way through the state legislature, and many of the provisions relate to women’s economic opportunities.

One would amend state law to make it explicit that pregnant workers are entitled to reasonable accommodations related to pregnancy and childbirth unless they would create a hardship for the employer. Women are often pushed out of their jobs or fired when they request accommodations like a stool, the ability to drink water on the job, or be given light lifting duties. On a recent conference call about the proposal, Dina Bakst, co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance, recounted the stories of New York women who experienced these responses, including a worker who was pushed out of her job at 17 weeks pregnant because her employer refused to modify a lifting requirement. She ended up in a homeless shelter thanks to the loss of income.

Another provision would prohibit employers from retaliating against employees who share wage information with each other and redefine what exceptions employers can cite for pay differentials so that they can only relate to job performance or business necessity. Yet another would amend New York State’s human rights law to provide explicit protections for workers who have children.

New York goes even further, though, by taking an intersectional approach to women’s equality. While statehouses across the country continue to consider a record number of bills that seek to limit women’s reproductive access, New York’s bill is the only current one that would expand it. The state’s existing laws regulate abortion in the criminal code and only allows for abortion care later in a pregnancy when a women’s life is at risk, not when her health is at risk. If the national precedent of Roe v. Wade were to be struck down, abortion care could be hampered, so the agenda seeks fixes to clarify women’s rights.

While it may seem unrelated to women’s economic opportunities, access to abortion care plays a big financial role in women’s lives. Women who aren’t able to get an abortion when they seek to terminate a pregnancy are three times more likely to fall below the poverty line within two years. Controlling fertility allows women to hold jobs and invest in their education.

New York and Vermont are following other state-level successes for equal pay laws. Texas passed its own Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to reform the constitution to allow workers more time to file a charge of discriminatory pay. New Mexico passed the Fair Pay For Women Act this year, which also eases the ability to bring cases alleging pay discrimination.

These bills are popular with both the general public as well as the business community. In New York, 84 percent want to enact equal pay legislation and 80 percent want to update the state’s abortion laws. The state’s chamber of commerce has also come out in support. Federal lawmakers may want to take note of the success of these efforts at the state level.

A week after a bipartisan group of lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee overwhelmingly approved a rollback of certain financial reforms contained in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, one of the Senate’s biggest consumer advocates is pushing back.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) came out swinging against the repeal of new rules meant to regulate derivatives, the complex financial instruments that were at “the center of the storm” that caused the financial crisis. The rules shouldn’t be weakened or repealed just because big banks want to see them eliminated, Warren argued Thursday, The Hill reports:

“The big banks won some battles and lost some battles during the financial regulatory debate in 2009 and 2010, but their tune never changed and their lobbying never let up,” she said. “It is dangerous for Congress to amend the derivatives provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act without at the same time taking accompanying steps to strengthen reform and maintain the law’s equilibrium.”

One rule the package of legislation advanced by the House committee would eliminate is a “push out” provision that would limit derivatives trading at banks that receive federal backing. Similar to the Volcker Rule, another provision Wall Street largely opposes, it is aimed at making taxpayer-backed banks safer to avoid crises similar to the one that thrust the United States into a recession and led to a bailout of major banks in 2008.

Warren isn’t alone in her opposition to the rollback. The Obama administration has long opposed the repeal of the derivatives rules, and former Federal Deposit Insurance Commission chair Sheila Bair has said the swaps and derivatives rules need to be strengthened rather than weakened. Whether the rules will face a repeal vote in the Senate isn’t clear: the House passed similar legislation in 2012, only to see it die in the Senate without a vote.

Credit: The Economist

At noon on Friday, the Treasury Department began the latest round of accounting contortionism brought on by Republicans’ refusal to raise the debt ceiling. CNN Money explains that a financing mechanism to aid state and local governments will be the first casualty:

The debt ceiling clock is about to start running again. The U.S. Treasury on Friday will begin using “extraordinary measures” to keep the country from defaulting on its obligations. […]

It’s unclear how much time the extraordinary measures will buy, but Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said last week the measures could last “at least” through Labor Day. Other estimates put the drop-dead date for raising the debt ceiling at sometime in October or even November.

The first move that Treasury will take is to temporarily stop issuing special securities to state and local governments as of noon on Friday.

Treasury calls these maneuvers “extraordinary measures,” but they have become routine since the GOP began dabbling in debt ceiling brinkmanship in the summer of 2011. That fight ended the precedent of legislators raising the ceiling as necessary for the past 50 years, including seven times under President George W. Bush. The GOP’s 2011 maneuver led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade its rating of U.S. debt for the first time in the nation’s history, but that didn’t stop Republicans from labeling the nation’s creditworthiness “a hostage worth ransoming.”

That attitude persists in 2013, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) indicated in March. Even with the deficit shrinking so rapidly that the Congressional Budget Office can hardly keep up, and with Republicans’ dire claims about debt levels hampering economic growth proven wrong, the GOP is reportedly mulling over what ransom to seek this year. After successfully extracting fiscal concessions in the past, however, its focus is sliding from spending toward conservative red meat.

At a House GOP meeting this week to decide what to demand, the Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery reports that proposals included tying the nation’s credit rating to the Keystone XL pipeline or the repeal of Obamacare, and that “at least one person wanted to take on late-term abortion.”

On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced new requirements for child care centers that serve children who receive federal subsidies through the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). The requirements are meant to improve the health, safety, and quality of child care centers that serve low-income families and to make the process of obtaining subsidies less onerous on parents.

The provisions in the new rules include a variety of ways to improve quality and access:

• Implementing requirements for child care providers such as first aid and CPR training, background checks, and strengthened monitoring.
• Setting minimum standards for providers to comply with fire, health, and building codes.
• Providing parents with greater transparency about centers by making easy-to-understand information about the quality of care available.
• Facilitating the replication of best practices across the country and tracking the progress of those investments.
• Reducing unnecessary administrative burdens on families and improving coordination with other programs that serve low-income families.

Nearly 1 million low-income families who receive subsidies and the 1.6 million children served by the program will benefit directly, but other children who don’t receive the benefits also stand to see improvements. That’s because many children who don’t receive CCDF subsidies attend centers alongside those who do, so the new rules will impact approximately 500,000 centers.

Although each week nearly 11 million children under the age of five spend time in a child care setting, American centers often offer poor quality and safety. A 2007 survey found the majority of centers to be “fair” or “poor,” with just about 10 percent found to provide high-quality care. State oversight is also often lax. The latest comprehensive report on state requirements for centers found that none earned an A or B grade on training, safety, and health requirements and 20 states earned a failing grade. These federal requirements would help to raise standards across the board.

The CCDF program was last reauthorized in 1996 and hasn’t undergone significant changes in more than 15 years. The announcement comes as President Obama has also proposed $75 billion in spending to expand access to child care and preschool to American families. His proposal would similarly come with stricter requirements for quality and safety.

While the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (AFT) has concluded its excavation of the site where a fertilizer plant exploded in West, Texas, killing 15 and injuring hundreds, it has yet to determine the cause of the accident, officials announced on Thursday evening. Potential causes thus far include criminal activity, a problem with its 120 volt electrical system, or an old golf cart located on the premises. They have ruled out the ignition of anhydrous ammonia or smoking as potential causes.

What is clear is that something started a fire in a seed room in the fertilizer and seed building, and the fire kept burning hotter, increasing the chances that ammonium nitrate at the facility would explode. When debris and equipment from the burning building made impact, it set off a detonation that in turn set off another. In total, about 28 to 34 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded with the power of 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of TNT. Most debris fell within 3,000 feet but some traveled as far as 2.5 miles.

This investigation has taken much longer than is usual: most last three to seven days, but the agency has spent a month looking into the causes and still has yet to determine the exact one. It has also spent nearly $1 million on the investigation in West.

That cost will be added to the estimated $100 million in property damage that the explosion caused, plus federal aid promised by President Obama. Yet because the plant only carried $1 million in liability insurance, many victims may not see their losses covered. Texas overall has the highest rate of workplace fatalities in the country and a high rate of fires and explosions, which come with very high costs: The fires and explosions at Texas’s chemical and industrial plants cost as much in property damages as in all other states combined. Overall, workplace accidents cost the economy around $250 billion a year.

Whether gaps in regulatory oversight might be to blame is also yet to be determined and is at the core of a separate, ongoing investigation by the Chemical Safety Board. What is clear, however, is that the plant hadn’t been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985, and it also slipped by six other regulatory agencies.