A recent report from the Education Sector, a think tank, shows that 30 percent of college students who took out loans eventually dropped out. As Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, noted, this is a problem because of the severe drop in earning potential that occurs when a student leaves school without a degree:

“In the end, it’s about money and time,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. “There’s almost a synergy between the two that will knock you out of school.”

The cost to the economy is roughly half a trillion dollars, he said. Although college dropouts make more than those with only a high school diploma, he said they earn about a million dollars less than college graduates over their careers.

Among 18 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “the United States finished last (46 percent) for the percentage of students who completed college once they started it.”

In 2010, the total cost in lost earnings and tax revenue due to college dropouts in America was $4.5 billion. In California alone, “college dropouts are losing nearly $15 billion in earnings over their work lives, costing the federal government more than $3 billion in lost income taxes.”

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has indicated that the GOP is ready to reenact the debt ceiling debacle the next time the nation comes close to its borrowing limit. But as economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers write, the economy was significantly setback during the last showdown, which they call “an act of economic sabotage“:

High-frequency data on consumer confidence from the research company Gallup, based on surveys of 500 Americans daily, provide a good picture of the debt-ceiling debate’s impact (see chart). Confidence began falling right around May 11, when Boehner first announced he would not support increasing the debt limit. It went into freefall as the political stalemate worsened through July. Over the entire episode, confidence declined more than it did following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008. After July 31, when the deal to break the impasse was announced, consumer confidence stabilized and began a long, slow climb that brought it back to its starting point almost a year later. [...]

Growth in nonfarm payrolls decelerated to an average 88,000 a month during the three months of the debt-ceiling impasse, compared with an average of 176,000 in the first five months of 2011 (see chart). Payroll growth subsequently recovered and has averaged 187,000 jobs a month since. Despite the rebound in job growth, employment is likely still below where it would otherwise have been.

Despite numbers like this, House Republicans evidently desire to deal the still fragile economic recover another body blow.

• Wages for manufacturing workers aren’t keeping pace with inflation. [Wall Street Journal]

• The Federal Reserve is preparing to handle the fallout from Europe’s continuing economic problems [Wall Street Journal]

• The housing market this spring is on pace to be the strongest since the housing bubble burst. [Reuters]

• Spain’s prime minister says his country will not need international help to hold its banking system together. [Financial Times]

• Terence Flynn, a Republican member of the National Labor Relations Board, resigned amidst allegations that he leaked information to a person with ties to the Romney campaign. [Politico]

• In a sign that the U.S. labor market is improving, more workers are going on vacation. [Bloomberg]

• Lobbyists are gearing up for the farm bill, which is scheduled to come to the Senate floor in June. [The Hill]

Louisiana’s legislature is now considering a similar bill to preempt local efforts at requiring paid leave for workers, as Half in Ten and the National Partnership for Women and Families noted:

S.B. 521, legislation that would take away Louisianans’ right to enact local paid sick days policies, is about to be voted on by the House — one of the last steps to enactment. Currently, more than 600,000 workers in Louisiana don’t have paid sick days, and if this bill becomes law, cities and parishes would lose the chance ever to put common-sense paid sick days standards in place…Louisiana already prohibits municipalities from setting their own minimum wage and can’t afford another anti-worker policy.

Just a few cities in the country — Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle — along with the state of Connecticut require that workers receive paid sick leave. The United States is all alone in the industrialized world in not requiring some form of paid leave as a matter of national policy. Each year, the U.S. economy loses $180 billion in productivity due to sick employees attending work and infecting other workers.

However, Rodriguez and her daughter will get to stay in their home, thanks to some help from Occupy Wall Street protestors:

Desperate, Rodriguez contacted several community groups including Occupy Fights Foreclosures — the battle to save the Rodriguez home began. Suzanne O’Keeffe, with Occupy Fights Forclosures, says the bank didn’t treat the Rodriguez family right. She charged they not only didn’t fill out the proper paperwork to foreclose, they waited too long. [...]

Now, [Rodriguez] is determined not to look back. “It’s time to look forward,” Rodriguez said. “Thank God the bank listened.”

As ThinkProgress reported back in December, Bank of America is taking the Occupy movement’s foreclosure prevention actions seriously, warning employees to be prepared should Occupy make an appearance. Occupy protesters have successfully prevented foreclosures across the country, from Rochester to Minneapolis to Los Angeles.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin

Douglas Holtz-Eakin is one of the Republican Party’s top economic pundits. He served as a top advisor to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) 2008 presidential campaign. He organized an amicus brief which the Eleventh Circuit relied on heavily in its decision striking down the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that his brief is riddled with factual errors and miscalculations. And he is one of the nation’s top evangelists for the idea that we can solve our economic woes simply by saving rich people from the crushing burden of having to pay their fair share of taxes.

Before Holtz-Eakin began his second career as a salesman for Republican economic policy, however, he actually was a serious economist. In 2004, Holtz-Eakin served as Director of the Congressional Budget Office, and he was asked to analyse the impact on the federal budget of eliminating the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and extending marriage equality throughout the nation. According to the top Republican economist, opposition to marriage equality cannot be squared with the GOP’s supposed devotion to deficit reduction, as marriage equality slightly reduces the deficit:

The potential effects on the federal budget of recognizing same-sex marriages are numerous. Marriage can affect a person’s eligibility for federal benefits such as Social Security. Married couples may incur higher or lower federal tax liabilities than they would as single individuals. In all, the General Accounting Office has counted 1,138 statutory provisions—ranging from the obvious cases just mentioned to the obscure (landowners’ eligibility to negotiate a surface-mine lease with the Secretary of Labor)—in which marital status is a factor in determining or receiving “benefits, rights, and privileges.” In some cases, recognizing same-sex marriages would increase outlays and revenues; in other cases, it would have the opposite effect. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that on net, those impacts would improve the budget’s bottom line to a small extent: by less than $1 billion in each of the next 10 years (CBO’s usual estimating period). That result assumes that same-sex marriages are legalized in all 50 states and recognized by the federal government.

According to last night’s federal court decision holding DOMA unconstitutional, Holtz-Eakin’s economic analysis is not simply an interesting historic artifact — it’s also a body blow to the forces trying to protect anti-gay discrimination from the Constitution. In defending the law, anti-gay Members of Congress proposed four reasons why they believed excluding gay couples from their constitutional right to marry is somehow justified, among them a claim that DOMA “is justified as an enactment designed to conserve scarce government resources.” Holtz-Eakin’s analysis refutes this claim, and the district court relied upon it in explaining why DOMA must go down.

In many ways, the resurrection of Holtz-Eakin’s days as a non-partisan economist is a metaphor for why conservative efforts to cling to anti-gay discrimination are doomed to failure. The most intriguing line in yesterday’s opinion is when it characterizes DOMA as an attempt to “establish[] an across-the-board federal definition of marriage limiting it to heterosexual couples, and preempting any opportunity to test the impact of state laws evolving to recognize same-sex marriage.” When marriage equality was nothing more than an idea, conservatives could scare the nation with warnings that gay couples would recruit your children, raise your taxes and destroy your marriage. Now it is a reality in many states — even if the federal government still needs to extend benefits to these couples — and the parade of horribles that anti-gay groups predicted never made it out the gate.

Holtz-Eakin’s memo demonstrates, however, that anti-gay discrimination was doomed even before America got its first taste of marriage equality. Reality leaks through, even if Congress does everything in its power to keep it away.

Over the past two weeks, a couple of charts — one from yours truly and one from Rex Nutting at MarketWatch — have really riled up conservatives and confused a fair number of DC establishment media types. For the past three years, it has been an article of faith among those folks that President Obama went on some kind of spending binge. And a casual glance at yearly spending figures does appear to support that charge. But what my chart and Rex’s chart show is that, once you account for the fact that most of the increase in spending from fiscal year 2008 to 2009 happened before President Obama even took office, then the “binge” utterly vanishes.

And this is the key point. The only way to show that spending has gone up dramatically under President Obama is to pretend like he had complete control over what was spent in fiscal year 2009. And that notion is utterly false.

First of all, recall that President Obama took office nearly four months into fiscal year 2009. That simple fact, all by itself, is enough to discount any “analysis” that merely compares fiscal year 2008 spending to fiscal year 2009, and tries to attribute the entire difference to President Obama.

But it actually goes beyond that. By the time President Obama took office, nearly all the dramatic increase in spending had already been baked into the cake. How do we know that? Well, in January 2009, before President Obama had even taken office, the Congressional Budget Office projected that federal spending would exceed $3.5 trillion for fiscal year 2009, half a trillion more than the government spent in 2008. Again, that was BEFORE President Obama event took office. It’s reasonable to use that number as our best guess at what spending would have been in FY2009 under ANY president. That’s what my chart from last week did.

Of course, the CBO’s projections aren’t perfect. They change as the economy changes and as laws change. Fortunately, CBO also tells us in subsequent reports how and why its previous estimates have changed. We can use that to understand how much of the total federal spending in fiscal year 2009 was attributable to legislative changes that occurred AFTER President Obama took office.

The answer is that out of a total of $3.5 trillion actually spent in FY09, only $165 billion, less than 5 percent, was the result of policy changes signed into law by President Obama.

In other words, probably the best baseline against which to judge spending under Obama is $3.5 trillion (the amount actually spent in 2009) minus $165 billion (the added amount Obama himself actually approved): $3.35 trillion. This year, the CBO expects that the federal government will spend $3.6 trillion. After accounting for inflation, that’s a growth rate of just 1.7 percent. By comparison, and using the exact same methodology, spending in President Bush’s first term was up nearly 15 percent.

Here’s the bottom line: there was a large increase in government spending in fiscal year 2009, but most of that that surge wasn’t President Obama’s doing. It would have happened no matter who was President. And since then, for better or for worse, spending growth under President Obama has been incredibly restrained. This doesn’t jibe with the conventional wisdom and it requires a touch more effort to understand than simply pretending President Obama inherited a blank fiscal slate. But it’s the truth.

I never thought my work would be featured in presumptive 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign literature. But the education policy white paper released by Romney earlier this week included a quote from a study of mine on educational productivity, saying that:

Even the liberal Center for American Progress acknowledged in a recent study that “the literature strongly calls into question the notion that simply investing more money in schools will result in better outcomes,” and reported from its own research that most states showed “no clear relationship between spending and achievement ” even after adjusting for other factors like the cost of living.

While the quotes are accurate, Romney’s paper misses the central point of my study and the overall role of funding in schools. It’s not that school funding does not matter. Rather, spending on education makes a difference only when it’s spent wisely.

In other words, if we want to reform our nation’s system of public education, we need to invest smartly in our schools and boost academic achievement. We should not be spending less; we can’t forget that many high-poverty schools don’t get their fair share of education dollars. As I wrote in the paper — right after the words quoted by the Romney campaign — “the literature also makes plain that school spending can make a difference in achievement; a large body of research shows that certain inputs such as teacher quality can significantly impact student outcomes.”

As Romney tours the nation talking about education reform this week, he is getting heckled, and it should come as no surprise. Observers understand that you can’t talk about education being a civil rights issue but also support the House Republican budget plan, which would cut federal education funding for disadvantaged students by as much as $2.7 billion dollars.

Boosting school productivity is not about slashing funds. Given the lackluster performance of many schools that would be a suicide pill for our nation’s future. We are already lagging behind in key indicators of academic success, and a federal report released earlier this month found that less than one-third of middle schoolers are performing at grade-level in science. Instead, we need real resources and real reform.

We need to transform our education system so that all schools produce students ready for college and the modern workplace. Or as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said: “It’s time to stop treating the problem of educational productivity as a grinding, eat-your-broccoli exercise. It’s time to start treating it as an opportunity for innovation and accelerating progress.”

HALPERIN: You have a plan, as you said, over a number of years, to reduce spending dramatically. Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?

ROMNEY: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course. What you do is you make adjustments on a basis that show, in the first year, actions that over time get you to a balanced budget.

This, of course, is the point that progressives have been making in response to the House Republican budget, which Romney supports. According to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute, the cuts in the House GOP budget — authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — would cost the economy 4.1 million jobs over the next two years due to the $400 billion in spending cuts for which it calls. As Esquire’s Charles Pierce, who flagged this particular exchange in the interview, wrote, “didn’t Romney, in saying that, pretty much blow up the entire rationale for over 30 years of Republican economics right there? Cutting government spending will throw us into a recession or depression?”

Europe is already struggling under the weight of austerity, with its economy contracting at the fastest pace in three years. Romney seems to understand the effect that cutting the budget indiscriminately in the short-term will have, yet he’s backing a budget that fails to acknowledge it.

But while CEOs may be reaping the rewards of higher profits and a growing stock market, very little of that achievement spreads as far as the average worker — or even the company’s stockholders:

Profit at companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index rose 16 percent last year, remarkable in an economy that grew more slowly than expected.

CEOs managed to sell more, and squeeze more profit from each sale, despite problems ranging from a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating to an economic slowdown in China and Europe’s neverending debt crisis.

Still, there wasn’t much immediate benefit for the shareholders. The S&P 500 ended the year unchanged from where it started. Including dividends, the index returned a slender 2 percent.

As the AP noted, “the typical American worker would have to labor for 244 years to make what the typical boss of a big public company makes in one.”

Growing CEO pay is contributing to the larger trend of increasing income inequality — CEO pay increased 127 times faster than the average worker pay over the last 30 years, and the average Fortune 500 CEO made 380 times what the average worker did last year. Fortune 500 companies made a record $824 billion in 2011.

• The Eurozone economy is contracting at the fastest pace in three years. [Financial Times]

• Bank lending fell in the last quarter, after almost a year of growth, while bank profits hit a five year high. [Wall Street Journal]

• More states are moving towards establishing independent tax tribunals to handle tax disputes. [Reuters]

• What would a Greek exit from the Eurozone mean for the U.S.? [Reuters]

• A top economists is pushing Congress to pass legislation that would help homeowners refinance their mortgages. [The Hill]

• Morgan Stanley will give refunds to some investors who overpaid for Facebook stock during the company’s initial public offering. [Associated Press]

• The Securities and Exchange Commission has completed its investigation into Lehman Brothers’ actions during the financial crisis and has decided not to move forward with fraud charges. [Bloomberg]

From GeorgeAllen.com

Front and center on his campaign website is a graphic comparing gas prices from the artificially low $1.85-per-gallon average from January 2009 (driven down by the economic meltdown) with the $3.87-per-gallon average of several weeks ago.

Throughout his campaign, Allen has promised lower energy prices, which he says can be achieved by pushing for more offshore drilling and more deregulation. The League of Conservation Voters called described him as having “one of the worst environmental records ever.”

In February, March, and April, Allen blamed the President for energy costs, complaining that “The Obama administration may not think rising gasoline and energy prices are severely straining budgets – but the families and small business owners of Virginia tell a different story.” The effort to pin rising gas prices on the President was echoed by Republicans across the country — though history consistently has shown gas prices have virtually nothing to do with any U.S. policy decision.

But according to AAA’s “Daily Fuel Gage,” the national average for a gallon of gas has dropped from $3.849 a month ago to just $3.676 today. And in Virginia, the state Allen hopes to again represent, it’s at an even-lower $3.485.

Allen has updated neither this graphic nor his rhetoric. Just yesterday, the campaign posted a comment from Allen’s wife Susan that Virginia entrepreneurs want “real change in Washington to get rid of burdensome regulations and create a real energy policy to alleviate the pain at the pump.” And a week ago, George Allen tweeted, “High cost of gasoline touches virtually every aspect of our economy. We need to unleash our American energy resources.”

When prices were going up, Allen and others on the Right, were all too happy to blame it on President Obama. Now that prices are going down, rather than give any credit to the Obama administration, they seem content to just ignore it. Allen owns between $108,009 and $370,000 in coal, oil, and other energy companies’ stock, received at least $15,000 in consulting and speaking fees from the dirty energy sector in the previous year, and was paid $20,000 for his work as chairman of the American Energy Freedom Center, a pro-dirty energy group which engages in global warming denial.

1. Facebook may have hid information about weak revenue growth: According to one lawsuit launched since the company went public, Facebook “concealed crucial information” regarding weak revenue growth, failing to disclose a revised revenue forecast, much like Wall Street banks failed to provide key information about mortgage securities they were peddling before the financial crisis.

2. Morgan Stanley alerted “preferred” investors to Facebook’s poor growth forecasts: Facebook’s Wall Street underwriters are facing scrutiny from regulators for only alerting certain “preferred” investors about Facebook’s declining revenue stream, leaving many potential shareholders in the dark.

3. Facebook stock dropped, Wall Street got rich: Facebook stock plummeted on its second day of trading and has continued its decline since, but Morgan Stanley and the other underwriters are still turning massive profits by “shorting” its stock. “In fact,” Fortune’s Steven Gandel wrote, “Morgan Stanley and the other banks who were selling Facebook shares to the public were positioned to make more money the lower Facebook’s shares went.” As of Tuesday, the group of Wall Street banks that underwrote the IPO could have topped more than $450 million in profits — on top of more than $170 million in underwriting fees.

4. Facebook will dodge billions in taxes after its IPO: Corporate tax law allows companies that issue stock options to make huge deductions to their tax liabilities, helping Facebook avoid $16 billion in taxes. CEO Mark Zuckerberg could possibly never pay taxes again, using a series of loopholes to avoid them after the initial hit he’ll take after selling shares.

5. Facebook is spending big on politics: Just like the Wall Street banks and other big companies that spend huge amounts of cash lobbying Washington, Facebook jumped into the fray, giving $119,000 in donations to lawmakers through March 31. The money went to leaders of both parties and those lawmakers who “serve on House and Senate committees that handle Internet and online privacy issues.”

As Reuters’ Felix Salmon simply put it, “Facebook was whispering in the ears of the lead managers of its investment banks, on the understanding that the results of those whispers would remain available only to select clients until after the IPO was over. That’s not cool.” But at the moment, it’s how big businesses and Wall Street banks operate.

ThinkProgress discussed the issue with the south Florida congressman on Tuesday following a town hall meeting. West argued that women who stay in the home to raise kids should be considered working mothers. But when asked whether mothers who are on welfare should be allowed to stay home and raise their children, West’s position was remarkably different. Instead of advocating for the work that poor mothers do at home raising kids, West decried the “growth of the entitlement or the nanny state.”

To West, the problem isn’t welfare-to-work, which requires mothers on welfare to work outside the home; it’s “people depending on the federal government”:

KEYES: Is there any question about whether or not stay-at-home moms who are raising kids, whether or not they should be considered working moms?

WEST: [...] Go to any military installation and go on that installation to a stay-at-home mom that is taking care of that family and that household why, or even a husband, a spouse, the primary person that’s deployed, and tell them that they’re not really working. I don’t think you’ll be walking off that military installation the same way that you walked onto it.

KEYES: What about mothers who are on welfare though? Do you think they should be allowed to stay at home and raise their children?

WEST: I think that what we need to do is how do we reduce the growth of the entitlement or the nanny state. Coming from the inner city, a good thing of the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson, I think now you’re talking about second and third and getting towards fourth generation of welfare. And as I showed up there, I don’t want more people depending on the federal government. I want more people to be out there and enjoying the American dream.

Staying at home and raising kids is absolutely work, as any parent will attest. The problem is that conservatives like West will only defend the work of stay-at-home moms when they live in financially secure homes, while backing welfare reforms that prevent lower income mothers from doing the same.

“Democrats believe that tax cuts for those earning over a million dollars a year should expire and that we should use the resulting revenues to pay down the deficit,” Pelosi said. Her plan, however, would cost the government billions in revenue compared to Obama’s plan, and though she has billed it as a tax cut for the middle class, half of its benefits would go to millionaires, according to analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice:

CTJ’s preliminary estimates show that Obama’s proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts for the first $250,000 or $200,000 of income a taxpayer makes would save between $60 billion and $70 billion in 2013 compared to the GOP proposal to extend all the tax cuts, depending on economic conditions. Leader Pelosi’s proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts for the first $1 million of income would save 43 percent less revenue than Obama’s proposal.

The additional tax cut that would result from Pelosi’s plan compared to Obama’s plan (the additional tax cut resulting from extending the Bush tax provisions for taxpayers’ first $1 million of income instead of “just” their first $250,000 or $200,000 of income) would not be targeted towards the “middle class.” In fact, 50 percent of this additional tax cut would go to taxpayers with adjusted gross income (AGI) in excess of $1 million.

Millionaires would continue to benefit under Pelosi’s plan because the tax cut applies to the first $1 million of their incomes, meaning their tax cut would still be substantially larger than it would be for actual middle class workers. And as a result, a large portion of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which blew up the national debt and failed to deliver on promises of job creation and economic growth, would exist in perpetuity.