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Four Better Ways to Spend the $55 Million Wasted on Votes to Repeal the Affordable Care Act (Think Progress)

House Republicans will vote to repeal Obamacare for the 37th time today because they still haven't found a genie to grant their wish, but Bryce Covert and Adam Peck write that instead of paying them to pretend to work, we could pay for things we actually need.

Sequestration Cuts Taking Money Out of People's Unemployment Checks (HuffPo)

Arthur Delaney notes that 2 million long-term unemployed are seeing their benefits cut as a consequence of the sequester. Now that money can be put toward reducing the already rapidly shrinking federal deficit instead of being wasted on, say, a family's dinner.

The global epidemic of underemployed youth (Reuters)

Shane Ferro highlights a report from the International Labor Organization that finds fewer than 20 percent of young people in high- or low-income countries are fully employed, with the rest either hustling, studying, or just waiting around and wondering when life starts.

IRS Fallout: The Real Scandal Is Secret Money Influencing US Elections (The Nation)

While some critics are mad that the IRS dared to question the legitimacy of a bunch of guys in Thomas Jefferson costumes, Ari Berman argues the bigger problem is that they didn't even bother to question what the guys in the expensive suits and ties were up to.

Europe's endless recession, in one chart (WaPo)

Brad Plumer notes that the euro zone economy has now contracted for the sixth consecutive quarter, making it the longest recession the euro zone has ever experienced and, based on how its members are souring on the project, quite possibly the last.

The Fed's Credibility Problem (ProPublica)

Jesse Eisinger argues that while it might be fun to point and laugh at the hedge funders who have been complaining that the Fed doesn't know what it's doing, they kind of have a point, even if it's by accident: the central bank's track record is pretty abysmal.

Why Won't the SEC Rein in the Firms That Tanked America's Economy? (MoJo)

Erika Eichelberger writes that a handful of credit rating agencies helped blow up the economy by telling banks for a fee that the piles of toxic junk they were selling smelled like roses, but the SEC still isn't sure it sees anything wrong with that scenario.

Guerrillas in the Boardroom (TNR)

David Dayen writes that shareholder activists are learning to work the system, winning 66 percent of proposal votes this year and engineering the ouster of a Fortune 500 CEO. Now they're on the verge of making Jamie Dimon take his ball and go home.

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Mexico's Lucky to Have Just One Man Blocking Internet Equality. We've Got a Bunch (Wired)

Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford writes that Carlos Slim uses his Mexican telecom monopoly to extract billions from customers. In America, we'd never let one man have all that power -- companies like Comcast and Verizon have already called dibs.

Why Washington Saved the Economy, Then Permanently Destroyed the Labor Market (The Atlantic)

Derek Thompson argues that while the government's swift response to the financial meltdown saved the economy from depression, the long-term unemployed have been abandoned because they don't have the kind of money needed to buy a lawmaker's time.

Half of All Jobs Created in the Past 3 Years Were Low-Paying (HuffPo)

Mark Gongloff highlights a new study reinforcing the evidence that the so-called recovery is creating a ton of low-wage retail and hospitality jobs. Even if you're able to find work, the closest you may get to making a living is by stealing from the cash register.

The Care and Feeding of Small Business (NYT)

Nancy Folbre writes that instead of going hunting for jobs by handing out subsidies and incentives to big corporations, states should pursue an economic gardening strategy and invest in local small businesses that will set down roots while the herd moves on.

The Partial Faith and Dubious Credit Act (WSJ)

Alan Blinder looks at the problematic House GOP bill designed to prioritize Treasury debt payments and Social Security checks in case someone gets the crazy idea to force the U.S. to hit the debt ceiling. But really, what are the odds of that happening... again?

Labor's Plan B (Prospect)

Abby Rapoport writes that as collective bargaining dies off along with dues-paying union membership, organized labor is pursuing experimental new strategies to achieve policy change. It could destroy unions as we know them, but time was doing that anyway.

Millions of Americans live in extreme poverty. Here's how they get by. (WaPo)

Dylan Matthews notes that while the global extreme poverty rate has been cut in half since 1990, research shows that 1.65 million U.S. households are still living on less than $2 a day per person. Without the safety net, they'd be on an all-chewing-gum diet.

This Week in Poverty: Twelve Things You Can Do to Fight Poverty Now (The Nation)

Greg Kaufmann talks to leading anti-poverty activists like Sister Simone Campbell and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers about what the average American can do to get engaged in fighting poverty while many elected leaders are busy fighting the poor.

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What's Wrong With the U.S. Job Market? (Businessweek)

Peter Coy tries to answer the million-dollar question from the supply and demand angle, also noting solutions like Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick's call for companies to pay workers enough to buy their own products. Built-in marketing!

Economists See Deficit Emphasis as Impeding Recovery (NYT)

Jackie Calmes and Jonathan Weisman report that the Serious People are starting to corroborate what the filthy hippies have been saying for four years, as economic growth reports consistently include regretful footnotes about what Washington's up to.

Bernanke, Blower of Bubbles? (NYT)

Paul Krugman argues that there's little evidence of a bond or stock bubble emerging despite the misgivings of Ben Bernanke's critics, who wish the Fed would forget the unemployment thing and focus on other problems, even if they don't actually exist.

Congress Moves to Weaken Dodd-Frank Reforms That Officials Want Strengthened (Think Progress)

Travis Waldron notes that the House Financial Services Committee has advanced a package of six bills that would weaken derivatives regulations and ensure that federally insured banks don't feel like we're asking too much in exchange for our money.

Unions to Banks: Pay Up (Prospect)

Sarah Jaffe highlights a new plan embraced by labor leaders fighting cuts to public employees' pensions: close state budget gaps by making banks pay back what they stole through LIBOR-rigging and shady muni deals. Better check the silverware, too.

Fed says some were underpaid in U.S. foreclosure settlement (Reuters)

First the initial round of checks issued to victims of foreclosure abuse bounced. Now it turns out that about 96,000 checks issued in the second round were made out for less than what borrowers were owed. Go home, Rust Consulting. You're drunk.

How colleges are wooing the rich and sticking the poor with the bill (WaPo)

Dylan Matthews notes that while colleges are receiving massive federal subsidies intended to make higher education more affordable, a new report suggests they're shifting that money around to lure in future wealthy alumni rather than needy students.

The Price of Safety: Why Cheap Regulation Creates Expensive Crises (The Atlantic)

James Kwak writes that when it comes to airplane inspections or financial chicanery, regulators lack the resources to provide adequate oversight, and leaving it up to firms to monitor their own risk is like letting a four-year-old come up with his own meal plan.

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Budget austerity proved a joke, but the US and Europe won't change course (Guardian)

Dean Baker writes that despite recent setbacks, deficit hawks are making two arguments against a policy shift: the recovery's getting stronger on its own (there, did you see? It twitched a little bit) and no one knows how to spend money to create jobs (sorry, FDR).

Extended Benefits Didn't Keep People from Taking Jobs (WSJ)

Many conservatives have taken it as an article of faith that unemployment benefits encourage people to be lazy and let those fat $300 checks roll in, but Amy Schatz notes that a new study by the San Francisco Fed shows they keep workers in the job market longer.

Churn, baby, churn: The labor market won't be healthy until people feel like they can quit their jobs (WaPo)

Neil Irwin argues that while layoffs are stable, we won't know the economy is really back on track until a lot more people start moving freely between jobs, or to put it another way, until they stop clinging to their current jobs like a kitten dangling from a tree branch.

In the Long Run, Niall Ferguson, Keynes Was Right (Bloomberg)

Matthew C. Klein makes the case that despite the homophobic comments made by some of Keynes's critics, what really makes them uncomfortable is that they have no answers to immediate human suffering, not that gay economics will destroy the human race.

Yanking Broadband From the Slow Lane (NYT)

Eduardo Porter writes that while high-speed Internet access is the key to innovation, expansion and improvement of U.S. broadband networks has been about as slow as a dial-up connection, and monopolies are so strong that Google looks like a scrappy upstart.

Lew Slams Wall Street Deregulation Bills (MoJo)

If it ain't broke, don't fix it -- and if you can't tell, ask someone who knows what they're doing. As Erika Eichelberger notes, that's the message Jack Lew sent to the House Financial Services Committee this week as it considers nine (cough) "fixes" to Dodd-Frank.

No, the Gang of Eight Immigration Bill Won't Cost You $6.3 Trillion (Slate)

Matthew Yglesias writes that the Heritage Foundation's report on immigration reform makes some strange assumptions, like the idea that legal status itself has no economic value, which is too bad for Republicans who were hoping to make an informed decision.

Many Americans say they can't retire until their 70s or 80s (LA Times)

A Northwestern Mutual survey finds that most Americans are less financially secure than they thought they'd be and more than 40 percent expect to work past their 60s. We haven't raised the legal retirement age, but the mental retirement age is another story.