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.

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.

The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. A Democratic amendment to strip $20.5 billion in Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts was defeated by a 27-17 vote, after more than an hour of debate.

In introducing the amendment to protect SNAP funding, Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern (MA) noted that cutting food stamps comes with many expensive unintended consequences – hunger undermines worker productivity, and malnutrition increases medical costs – and that every dollar of spending returns much more than a dollar of economic output. In response, Republican Rep. Steve King (IA) alleged that the White House is seeking to swell the SNAP rolls in order to make Americans more dependent on government:

REP. KING: Handing out benefits is not an economic stimulator. But we wanna take care of the people that are needy, the people that’re hungry, and we’ve watched this program grow from a number that I think I first memorized when I arrived here in Congress, about 19 million people, now about 49 million people. And it appears to me that the goal of this administration is to expand the rolls of people that’re on SNAP benefits. And their purpose for doing so in part is because of what the gentleman has said from Massachusetts. Another purpose for that though is just to simply expand the dependency class.

Watch:

But the reality for SNAP recipients is far from King’s image of a “dependency class.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains that “only 4 percent that worked in the year before starting to receive SNAP did not work in the following year,” and adds that the raw total of recipients who work while enrolled in the program has tripled since 2000.

The think tank also notes that SNAP’s role as an unusually efficient stimulative multiplier is backed by Moody’s Analytics and the Congressional Budget Office.

Furthermore, the program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows:

Two of the Democrats on the Agriculture Committee — Ranking Member Collin Peterson (MN) and Rep. Mike McIntyre (NC) — joined Republicans in supporting the cuts, which will cause two million people to lose their benefits.

Joining other Republicans who trumpet automatic, across-the-board cuts to preschool, education, unemployment benefits, and health services, House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) said sequestration is “a legitimate effort” to implement budget cuts in a Wednesday address to the Ripon Society:

[There are] a whole array of other issues including the profligate waste in all sectors of the government as the administration attempts to vilify sequestration, a legitimate effort to cut 2.5 percent of the entire federal budget or about 7-8 percent of domestic and defense discretionary spending. At a time when the Department as purchased a new prison at a cost of $170 million when we have four new prisons all standing empty, and at a time when they are having $12 cups of coffee and $10,000 dollars pizza parties. So there will be questions there about why it is necessary to put deportable aliens, many of them criminal aliens, out on the street to save money where they can commit crimes against citizens of the U.S.

Goodlatte has expressed selective outrage over the budget cuts affecting immigration enforcement and airports. However, his home state Virginia will lose millions for primary and secondary education, affecting hundreds of teachers and 14,000 students, nearly $3 million for clean air and water services, child care for 400 children, vaccine services for more than 3,500 children, and much more. The Huffington Post also outlined 100 ways the sequester is hurting local communities across the country. But Goodlatte has zeroed in on the release of non-violent immigrants, who can be tracked through cheaper methods than detention at the cost of $164 a day.

This represents a marked change in the GOP’s tone on the sequester and a shift to blame the White House after forcing the sequester agreement in the first place. Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Raul Labrador (R-ID), and Blake Farenthold (R-TX) have downplayed how budget cuts have hurt everyday Americans to instead claim it is “working.”

More than four-in-five of fast food workers in New York City say they have been victims of wage theft or work hour abuse at their jobs, according to a survey released today from Fast Food Forward, an advocacy group that has been aligned with striking restaurant workers across the city.

Workers at New York City fast food chains have staged multiple one-day strikes in recent months, first in November and most recently in April. The strikes have centered on claims of low-wages, the lack of health and retirement benefits, and their inability to organize unions without intimidation from employers, and the survey’s numbers lend credence to their wage claims:

More than 8-in-10 employees (84%) report being victims of wage theft over the course of the last year; 66% report at least two abuses, 45% report at least three, and more than thirty percent of employees (31%) report being victims of at least four of these practices. Specifically:

• 36% of workers report being required to work while off the clock
• 32% of cashiers report being required to pay their employer if their register is short
• 30% of those who have worked 40+ hours in a week report they have not always received pay of time-and-a-half for overtime hours.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, recently launched an investigation into the practices of fast food owners and their parent corporations, the New York Times reported today. Schneiderman’s investigation is looking into claims made evident by the Fast Food Forward survey, including whether employers paid workers less than the minimum wage and failed to pay overtime. Schneiderman has previously brought claims against more than 20 companies for labor violations, according to the Times.

The abuses, however, aren’t limited to New York. Since workers there launched the first round of strikes in November, they have been joined by fast food and retail workers in Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, and, most recently, Milwaukee, where workers held a one-day walkout Wednesday.

Following the London Whale trading scandal that cost JP Morgan at least $6 billion, Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon is facing pressure from shareholders, who will hold a vote at the annual general meeting on May 21 to potentially split his roles. The failed trade originated from a trading desk that was meant to help the company reduce risk. It sparked a Senate investigation that ultimately concluded that the company misled regulators by mislabeling the portfolio of trades.

But rather than bring the hammer down on the head of the company, some are now potentially moving to vote against other shareholders who serve on the risk committee – Ellen Futter in particular, who is president of the American Museum of Natural History and a former director of AIG. At last year’s meeting, before the full effect of the London Whale trade was known, 14 percent of the vote was cast against her re-election.

While some shareholders may feel it is better to hold the risk management committee accountable and oust those who don’t have as much experience at financial institutions, Flutter’s expulsion would follow a disconcerting trend of laying the blame with women when things go wrong in the financial industry.

When the failed trade first surfaced, the first head to roll was not the London Whale himself, and Jamie Dimon managed to stay mostly insulated. Rather, the first person to step down was a woman: Ina R. Drew, JP Morgan’s Chief Investment Officer who was in charge of the division in which the trades were made. Drew was among the highest paid women in finance, being one of the top paid officials at JP Morgan. She has since been replaced by two men.

Similar resignations or firings happened during the chaos of the financial crisis. Erin Callan of Lehman Brothers and Zoe Cruz of Morgan Stanley were both high-ranking executives who may have been scapegoated when their companies faltered. This is what Michelle Ryan, an associate professor at Exeter University, has dubbed the “glass cliff”: “women often tend to occupy these dangerous leadership positions in dangerous times, when things are getting hairy,” she says. When things do go south, then, the women take the hit.

There were likely valid reasons for each of these women to be let go when they were. Drew, after all, oversaw the division making risky trades, although the risks of those bets were conveyed to top executives and dismissed. But they fit a trend in which female executives were three times as likely to lose their jobs in the recession.

Women already make up a small share of leadership positions in the United States, and in finance in particular. They hold 8.6 percent of executive officer roles in the finance and insurance industries and less than 20 percent of board director positions. If they are more likely to get ousted when a company hits troubled times, those numbers will continue to be depressed.

Late on Wednesday, American retailer Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would sign a safety upgrade plan that has been signed by six major European retailers and one other American company, PVH, owner of Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Izod. The agreement, which is legally binding, includes independent factory inspections and requires companies to help underwrite building upgrades and repairs.

Many other American retailers have yet to sign on, including Walmart and Gap. Gap has voiced concerns that the plan could be used to sue it in American courts and Walmart objected to governance and dispute resolution mechanisms. Walmart announced on Wednesday that it would instead use its own voluntary plan that includes inspecting all of its Bangladesh facilities and providing fire safety training to workers. Gap also sent a letter to employees at its headquarters saying that it has hired a fire inspector to examine factories in Bangladesh and will commit $22 million in loans to factories to make upgrades.

Meanwhile, other retailers are already looking to pull operations in Bangladesh and move them to other countries. The New York Times reports that Western executives are looking into sourcing production in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia. But pulling operations out of Bangladesh could only harm workers further:

Garment manufacturing makes up a fifth of the economy in Bangladesh and four-fifths of its exports, which means that one of the world’s poorest, most densely populated countries is desperately dependent on continued export orders to stave off soaring unemployment and possibly further political unrest. Some executives say that many multinationals will continue buying from Bangladesh, although some may diversify their orders to more countries.

Executives may also struggle to find safer working conditions elsewhere. A shoe factory in Cambodia collapsed on Thursday morning, killing two workers and injuring seven. An initial investigation showed that the ceiling lacked the materials to support heavy weight.

Rather than pulling operations, some companies are indicating that they will stay and make further investments in the country. In an interview on Wednesday with the Financial Times, H&M CEO Karl-Johan Persson said he supports Bangladesh’s recent announcement that it would raise the minimum wage for garment workers, saying that he wants salaries to be revised yearly. The company has also agreed to pay as much as $500,000 per year toward factory improvements and inspections by signing onto the safety agreement.

Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

A report out today from the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee shows costly new flaws in Congress’ approach to fiscal policy. Beyond providing updated information on the anticipated impacts to specific programs from the across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration, the report shows Congress’s piecemeal approach to “fixing” sequestration is more than just unfair – it’s costing the U.S. more money.

Since the threat of sequestration failed to spark a spending compromise and the haphazard slashing began, lawmakers have faced uneven amounts of pressure to replace chunks of sequestration cuts from varying groups. The success of that pressure seems to hinge on the political influence wielded by the group affected by a given cut. Unemployment beneficiaries, Head Start students and parents, 140,000 families on housing assistance, and seniors who rely on Meals on Wheels, among many other politically marginalized groups, have received no relief from sequestration.

Business travelers, on the other hand, have seen their outcry over airport delays due to sequestration yield a “fix” for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Today’s report goes beyond that unfairness to explain how the piecemeal “fix” to avert flight delays is actually raising the economic costs of aviation delays, by tens of billions of dollars:

The [Reducing Flight Delays] Act [of 2013] allowed the FAA to apply sequestration to the Airport Improvement Program (AIP), which had been exempt in the original sequestration order. […]

Cutting the AIP program slows FAA’s ability to meet construction needs. FAA estimates that development needs at eligible airports will exceed $42.5 billion over the next five years. The American Society of Civil Engineers 2013 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” rated our aviation system a “D,” estimating that the cost of congestion and delays to the economy will rise to $34 billion in 2020 (up from $22 billion in 2012), and that “D” grade assumes we continue to spend at current funding levels — before sequestration.

Even before Congress gave the FAA permission to halt all airport construction funding, America faced a $12 billion increase in the economic drag caused by aviation congestion. Now that cost is going to swell.

These can-kicking costs come on top of the more immediate damage sequestration will do to the economy: 700,000 fewer jobs and a 0.6 percentage-point reduction in GDP growth for the year. The Huffington Post reported several of the mechanical details of individual agency responses to the cuts contained in today’s House report, including 500 fewer firefighters at the Forest Service and a shrunken stockpile of vaccines at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Income inequality around the world increased more during the financial crisis that it did in the previous 12 years, according to new data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released on Wednesday. The United States has one of the largest gaps along with Chile, Mexico, Turkey, and Israel. The top 10 percent of the income scale fared better than the poorest 10 percent in 21 out of 33 countries.

In the United States, the top 10 percent of the income distribution had 15.9 times the income at of the bottom 10 percent in 2010, compared to 9.8 times for the OECD on the whole. The U.S. also has a higher Gini coefficient – a measurement of a country’s income inequality – and a higher share of the population living on less than half the median income.

But there is a silver lining: The numbers would look much worse without social spending. Nearly a third of the country’s population would be living on less than half of the median income without the social safety net, but taking it into account drops that number to 17.4 percent. The Gini coefficient also falls significantly, proving that social spending is doing a lot to bring down income inequality.

That could change as the U.S. continues to cut government spending. The report “warns that further social spending cuts in OECD countries risk causing greater inequality and poverty in the years ahead.” The U.S. is set to cut $1.5 trillion in spending over the next decade, and new CBO numbers show that the deficit has dramatically dropped thanks in part to falling public spending.

While much of the attention currently focused on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) surrounds the agency’s acknowledgement that non-profit groups using tea party keywords were targeted for extra scrutiny in 2012, technologist cum data liberator Carl Malamud is campaigning to convince the IRS to make it easier to track money and influence in non-profits.

Fresh off of a victory liberating the District of Columbia Code, Malamud’s Public.Resource.Org is on to a new transparency fight: Getting the IRS to release public financial records about non-profits in a useful format. In a memo last month, the organization noted that despite having Form 990 financial information about many non-profits in a machine-readable digital format, the IRS will only release the data in PDF form:

As you know, Public.Resource.Org has expended considerable effort to try to make the Form 990, the Public Reports of Nonprofit Corporations, more broadly available on the Internet. We’ve posted 6,821,105 PDF files, including all publicly released documents from 2002 to the present. Although all large nonprofits are required to e-file their returns, and many smaller nonprofits elect to do so, the IRS has not released the machine-processable e-file information, and has chosen instead to image the data onto forms and release the information as bitmap images, equivalent to a scan of a paper document.

If the documents were released in a machine-processable format, it would be much easier to analyze and see larger patterns across the non-profit sector. This could be particularly useful in understanding how dark money is being channeled through 501(c)(4) “social welfare group” non-profits engaged in political advocacy who aren’t required to disclose their donors, but are required to file a Form 990 with basic financial information.

Dark money exploded following the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling that allowed outside groups to make unlimited political expenditures. While 501(c)(4) groups are allowed to engage in some political activity and still maintain tax-exempt status, electioneering is not supposed to be their primary activity. However, dark money groups combined to spend $416 million on the 2012 election — 37 percent of all money spent by independent, non-party outside groups.

The White House announced an executive order aimed at making “open and machine readable” the default for newly created government data last week. However, as Malamud noted in a statement to ThinkProgress, that order will not by itself resolve the IRS situation:

The new executive order on “Making Open and Machine Readable the Default for Government Information” is a good first step. But, it is important that we remember that we need to do more than set out principles for new government databases and web sites, we need to fix the ones we already have on-line. Some of our existing databases, such as the federal procurement database or the IRS form 990s, are in bad shape and are crucial economic engines, affecting not only the operation of government, but large sectors of the economy that depend on this information to operate efficiently and transparently.

If we’re serious about creating jobs and making our economy grow, government data is important part of making that happen. When the US Patent Office, for example, started to release machine-redable data for US Patents, that information became immediately more useful. Likewise, when the SEC started releasing information on public corporations in their EDGAR database, our markets became more transparent and more accessible.

Note: ThinkProgress is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF), which has been recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(4) organization. CAPAF does not endorse candidates, nor does it fund “independent expenditures” or any other kind of candidate-related advertising.

Two weeks after announcing a record high unemployment rate, Europe’s official economic analysts today revealed another first for the currency union: The Eurozone’s ongoing recession is now the longest in the 14-year history of the euro. The Guardian notes the European economy has now shrunk a full percentage point over the past year:

The eurozone has slumped into its longest recession ever, after economic activity across the region fell for the sixth quarter in a row. […]

France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands all saw their economies shrink as the economic crisis in the eurozone continued to hit its largest economies.

Eurostat’s figures showed that the eurozone economy has now contracted by 1% over the last year, putting further pressure on leaders as unemployment climbs to new record highs.

The 0.2% contraction in the first quarter of 2012 was an improvement on the 0.6% drop recorded between October and December, but analysts warned that the eurozone’s economic outlook is darkening.

This is the second ugly bit of record-setting in two weeks, after the Eurozone’s unemployment rate hit 12.1 percent at the end of April. It was the 23rd consecutive month of record-breaking unemployment, with 26.5 million people out of work.

These records seem to have created some space for European policymakers to begin at least discussing an end to austerity. For example, French finance minister Pierre Moscovici reacted to the news that France’s economy had contracted for the second straight quarter by calling for pro-growth policies to return across the Eurozone.

So far, however, the damagingly aggressive reduction in deficits is projected to continue in Europe. And American deficits are now projected to dip even more dramatically than those in Euro countries.

The drop in aggregate Eurozone deficits looks alarmingly similar to the rapid decline in U.S. deficits CBO now projects for 2013. According to European Commission projections for 2013, the countries that use the euro will have cut their combined deficits to 2.9 percent of GDP by the end of the fiscal year, down from 6.4 in 2009. The new CBO figures predict U.S. deficits are shrinking even more dramatically, to 4 percent this fiscal year from over 10 percent in 2009.

In other words, as Europe’s deficit-slashing fever produces a record contraction, American policymakers are learning they’ve outdone their Old World colleagues. But where Europe’s outright contraction may be forcing a policy reversal, slow but steady economic growth in the U.S. seems to be obscuring the lessons from bad headlines across the Atlantic.

After six major European retailers announced on Monday and Tuesday that they would sign onto a broad safety upgrade agreement in Bangladesh, American companies Walmart and Gap announced that they would not sign on. Gap has been the most outspoken about its opposition, reports the New York Times:

By far, Gap has been the most vocal company opposed to the plan, expressing concerns that overzealous American lawyers could seize on the agreement to sue American companies on behalf of aggrieved factory workers in Bangladesh — perhaps in the event of a factory fire. Gap said it supported much of the plan, but it proposed changes that would greatly limit any legal liability for a company that violated the plan.

Walmart cited “requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms” in the agreement as its reason not to sign on, saying they are “appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government, and are unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals.”

The company plans to instead use its own safety plan. It began its own factory inspections of 279 Bangladesh facilities this year after the fire in November that killed 110 and it will release the names and inspection information as well as provide fire safety training for every worker in the factories that produce its goods. The inspection results will be posted on June 1.

Labor groups criticized Walmart’s plan, which is voluntary. The broader plan signed by the other companies is legally binding. Labor groups characterized Walmart’s proposal as merely aspirational.

Meanwhile, documents provided to the New York Times show that Walmart sourced clothing from the collapsed factory that killed 1,127:

The Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity has provided The New York Times with photos of several documents not disputed by Wal-Mart that were recovered in the building’s rubble, showing that a Wal-Mart contractor from Canada had produced jeans last year at the Ether Tex factory, which had been situated on the fifth floor of the collapsed Rana Plaza building.

The only American company to sign onto the agreement thus far is PVH, owner of Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Izod. A handful of smaller European companies also signed on Tuesday: Benetton, Marks & Spencer, and El Corte Inglés.

The budget deficit will shrink to its smallest level since before the Great Recession in 2013, and it will continue shrinking through 2015, according to revised estimates from the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday. In reality, the deficit is even smaller than the CBO predicts, since its “current law” projections assume that funding for the war in Afghanistan and federal disaster relief for states hit by Hurricane Sandy will continue in perpetuity. But that funding isn’t endless, and it will bring the deficit down to even smaller levels.

Still, under CBO’s projections, the deficit is now half as large as it was in 2009, the year President Obama took office:

If the current laws that govern federal taxes and spending do not change, the budget deficit will shrink this year to $642 billion, CBO estimates, the smallest shortfall since 2008. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit this year—at 4.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—will be less than half as large as the shortfall in 2009, which was 10.1 percent of GDP.

The deficit is shrinking so rapidly because of spending cuts and new revenues and because CBO continues to revise down projected health spending. But that the deficit is shrinking so rapidly isn’t necessarily good news — as U.S. News and World Report’s Pat Garofalo put it, it is instead “one more piece of evidence showing that the economic discussion that has gripped Washington recently is absurdly backwards.”

Despite smaller deficits, congressional Republicans remain focused on spending reductions, and the most recent round of cuts has kicked children out of preschool, left cancer patients without needed screenings, and gutted programs that help low-income Americans in a variety of ways. Those cuts have also threatened to derail the economic recovery, which has sputtered along despite the headwinds created by a consistent focus on deficit reduction. In past recessions, increased government spending has pulled the U.S. to recovery. In this one, it has only made recovery harder.

The crisis the U.S. is facing isn’t the deficit. It’s that the unemployment rate is still 7.5 percent, and more than 4 million of those workers have been off the job for at least six months. A shrinking deficit might be good news in the long-term, but it isn’t putting people back to work or sparking a robust economic recovery. And yet, even with evidence that stimulus policies like the American Jobs Act would help, and despite the fact that the deficit continues to subside, congressional Republicans aren’t just ignoring the devastating impacts of sequestration — they are pushing for even more spending cuts in the immediate future.