Today’s families are increasingly reliant upon working mothers as breadwinners or co-breadwinners. (see Figure 1) The past four decades have brought about dramatic changes in how women—and men—navigate their workplace responsibilities, caregiving needs, and personal lives. Four in five U.S. families with children are headed by either two working parents or a single working parent, and thus most families have to navigate issues such as costly or inadequate child care, a lack of paid family leave, and the persistent wage gap, just to name a few.

While social and economic changes created this new reality, political decisions have shaped the struggles so many families now face. All working women deserve a fair day’s pay, but they also need to have time to actually live their lives and do what is important to them without fear of losing their jobs or ruining their careers. Our nation’s lawmakers, however, have failed to craft public policies that effectively address today’s challenges and make this possible. Working women are especially disadvantaged by the lack of policy solutions, in part because they continue to take on a larger share of the family caretaking responsibilities—for both the young and elderly members of their families—and because the hurdles they face in the workplace and at home, such as those outlined below, only compound over time, setting them back economically in ever-worsening ways over the course of their lifetimes.

For more on this topic, please see:

• A Woman’s Agenda for the 21st Century by Heather Boushey and Jane Farrell

See also: Proposals to Bring Student-Loan Interest Rates Under Control by David A. Bergeron and Tobin Van Ostern

In this column, we analyze and compare some of the major proposals currently on the table in Congress regarding student-loan interest rates.

SOURCE: AP/Seth Perlman

The Payday Loans store in Springfield, Illinois, is shown open for business in June 2006.

Two federal bank regulators, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, recently requested comments on their “Proposed Guidance on Deposit Advance Products.” Read the full comment letter to the FDIC here and to the OCC here.

The Center for American Progress applauds the FDIC and OCC’s efforts to examine deposit-advance products. A deposit-advance loan is a short-term loan for bank customers who use direct deposit to automatically add income to their accounts. The loan is then repaid directly from their next deposit. This product is very similar to payday loans that are generally made by nonbank financial institutions such as check cashers. Because of their high fees and predatory nature, about one-third of all states ban payday loans. But state payday-lending laws do not always apply to bank products such as deposit-advance loans.

In April the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, released a white paper on payday loans and deposit-advance loans based on new analysis of data from lenders. The analysis found that deposit-advance loans made by banks clearly resemble the controversial, high-cost payday loans made by nonbanks. In both cases, interest rates could be quite high—with annual interest rates above 300 percent. Meanwhile, states that ban high-cost payday lending cap interest and fees at 36 percent per year, and the same cap exists for most short-term loans made to military service members and their families. The CFPB white paper also reaffirmed past research that showed borrowers often needed to take out loans again and again, suggesting larger financial distress.

The proposed guidance by the FDIC and OCC would go a long way toward reining in high-cost deposit-advance loans. First, it labels these loans as potentially risky to banks because they may be harmful to consumers and may not be promptly repaid. Second, it requires banks to assess each consumer’s ability to repay. This involves looking at account behavior over the past six months to determine how much money he or she could borrow and reasonably pay back. And third, it adds a cooling-off period for borrowers, who would need to wait at least a month between paying off one deposit-advance loan and taking out another.

These provisions ensure that banks act responsibly when making deposit-advance loans, rather than making loans that consumers may not be able to repay and that may trap consumers in debt. But two additional recommendations would strengthen this proposed guidance.

1. The FDIC and OCC should both set a specific fee cap. The proposed guidance acknowledges that products must be affordable but does not set specific limits on fees. Limiting all fees on deposit-advance loans to an annual interest rate of 36 percent would be a useful starting point. This is consistent with the FDIC’s 2007 Affordable Small-Dollar Loan Guidelines, with many state laws that ban payday lending, and with the 2006 Military Lending Act, which governs high-cost loans made to service members and their families. To be effective, this cap must include all fees. As noted in a column published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on February 4, 2013, for example, Virginia has a 36 percent annual interest cap on payday loans, but once two additional fees are included, the annual interest rate rises to 282 percent.
2. The FDIC and OCC should encourage the other financial regulators to adopt the same guidance. The Federal Reserve released a policy statement recognizing that deposit-advance loans may be harmful, and the National Credit Union Administration is looking into credit unions that make high-cost, short-term loans. But regulators should adopt uniform guidance whenever possible. Consumers deserve the same financial protections regardless of which regulator oversees the bank or credit union where they have an account.

By applying new standards to deposit advances that ensure banks only make loans that can reasonably be repaid, the FDIC and OCC will be able to prevent the spread of high-cost, short-term loan products that can lead financially distressed consumers into a cycle of debt.

Joe Valenti is the Director of Asset Building at the Center for American Progress.

President Obama’s speech today is a necessary step toward a broader-based and more sustainable U.S. counterterrorism strategy that looks beyond the wars of the last 12 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. President Obama offered a new and much-needed policy perspective that protects Americans as well as their freedoms and liberties from both the threat of terrorism and prospect of permanent war. To be sure, the defeat of Al Qaeda central must be sealed and the threat of terrorism against the United States and its citizens dealt with. But the United States can now begin to move forward in devising a counterterrorism policy that protects its citizens, upholds our values, and removes the specter of endless conflict.

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“Today’s public policies are not just out of step with the realities working American women face – they’re oftentimes non-existent,” said Heather Boushey, author of the analysis and CAP’s Chief Economist. “America is lagging dangerously behind other nations on too many fronts that are important to ensuring women’s economic security. This issue brief provides a comprehensive overview of policies we can, and should, adopt to support individuals so that they can be good workers and good care-givers without having to choose between the two.”

Fifty years ago unmarried women in more than half of the United States were not allowed access to contraception, and married women in some states couldn’t sit on juries, get a job without their husband’s permission, or keep control of their property and earnings. Today, that world is now a distant memory, but social and economic changes as well as the political decisions of our nation’s lawmakers have shaped 21st-century struggles for women and families. Leaders can begin to address these challenges and substantially improve women’s lives and economic security by adopting the following policies:

• Paid family and medical leave insurance: The United States is the only developed country that does not have national paid family and medical leave. This policy has been found to be a “non-event for businesses,” but significantly impacts workers and families.

• Rehire teachers and public-sector workers laid off in the Great Recession and end the sequester: This is a woman’s issue—public-sector workers were hit especially hard by the recession; 6 out of 10 state and local government employees and three out of four primary and secondary public-school teachers are women. Rehiring the teachers and other workers laid off during the recession would bring women back into solid, middle-class jobs while also helping to better educate young people.

• Promote pay equity: Even though 4 in 10 mothers are their family’s breadwinner, too many don’t earn a breadwinning wage. Women earn, on average, just 77 cents for every dollar that men earn, and this gap hasn’t budged in more than a decade.

• Ensure that women who want to join unions can do so: Increasing unionization rates among home health aides and child care workers would be especially beneficial to women’s economic security since these jobs are not only growing rapidly but are female dominated and among the lowest-paid jobs in the U.S. economy.

• Paid sick days for all workers: In the United States, unlike in every other developed country, workers do not have the right to stay home from work when they are sick. While many good employers do offer this benefit, women are less likely than men to hold the high-quality jobs that provide paid sick days.

• Provide universal child care and pre-kindergarten: The prohibitively high costs of private child care and the lack of quality, accessible public provid­ers means that parents are often left to choose between the lesser of two evils: low-quality care or forgoing needed wages to stay at home and care for a child themselves.

• Fully implement the Affordable Care Act and expand Medicaid in the states: The Affordable Care Act addresses the problem of historical discrimination by insurance companies against women and ensures no-cost coverage for contraception and other preventive services for women. It also increases the affordability of health care coverage and will end discriminatory exclusions for the coverage of so-called pre-existing conditions such as breast cancer, domestic violence, and Cesarean sections.

• Increase workplace flexibility and predictable scheduling: Women, like men, need the ability to have some control over their schedules, or at least have schedules that they can count on. Most women, however, don’t have that. Despite the fact that women spend twice as much time providing child care, they actually outnumber men—57 percent to 43 percent—in having no access to any form of paid leave or workplace flexibility.

• Raise the minimum wage: For families to be economically secure, women need to earn a fair day’s pay. More than 60 percent of minimum-wage workers are women, yet making ends meet on today’s minimum wage is nearly impossible.

• Improve and enforce antidiscrimination laws: We may think that we have come a long way, but the reality is that discrimination still exists. In 2011 nearly one-third of the 100,000 employment-discrimination charges filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, involved allega­tions of sex discrimination.

• Ensure access to family-planning services: Having the ability to control the timing and spacing of pregnancy and childbirth is essential for women to be able to participate fully in education and paid employment.

• Strengthen Social Security and retirement plans: Social Security is key to women’s economic security in retirement, and it is especially important for widows, who rely on it for an average of eight years after their spouses have died.

The trends of the past half-century are unlikely to reverse. Women will continue to play an expanding role in our workplaces and homes, our economy, and our families. But until we craft policies aligned with this reality—policies that make it possible to be both a good mother and a good worker, policies that erase fears about whether a woman is being compensated fairly or whether she can afford basic health services—the United States will be at a competitive disadvantage. Legislation that promotes women’s economic security helps not just women but also their families and children. The poli­cies outlined above are investments in future generations, and they are ones we cannot afford to postpone any longer.

Read “A Woman’s Agenda for the 21st Century.”

Related resources:

• Lessons Learned: Reflections on 4 Decades of Fighting for Families by Judith Warner
• Investing in Our Children: A Plan to Expand Access to Preschool and Child Care by Cynthia G. Brown, Donna Cooper, Juliana Herman, Melissa Lazarín, Michael Linden, Sasha Post, and Neera Tanden
• Our Working Nation in 2013: An Updated National Agenda for Work and Family Policies by Heather Boushey, Ann O’Leary, and Sarah Jane Glynn
• Comprehensive Paid Family and Medical Leave for Today’s Families and Workplaces: Crafting a System that Builds on the Experience of Existing Federal and State Programs by Heather Boushey and Sarah Jane Glynn

To speak with CAP experts on this issue, please contact Madeline Meth at mmeth@americanprogress.org.

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Carmel Martin released the following statement:

Congress should move forward with a long-term solution that ensures students do not have to pay rates out of sync with the market and protects them from unmanageable debt. This long-term solution should not tax students to pay down the federal debt. If consensus on a long-term solution is unattainable in the next six weeks, however, Congress must act now and pass a short-term solution to prevent interest rates from doubling.

The decision by the House of Representatives to approve Rep. Kline’s proposal is a step in the wrong direction for students and the economy. Rep. Kline’s bill taxes students to pay down the deficit. Congress should act to stop rates from doubling and build in protections for students to help them manage their debt. The House measure would divert $3.7 billion from the program to deficit reduction and result in an increase in student debt of close to $4 billion over what borrowers would pay under current law.

Anne Johnson, Director of Campus Progress, released the following statement:

We continue to see the economic ripple effects of student debt, and Rep. Kline’s bill would only make things worse. Instead of bringing relief to the millions of hardworking students and families who rely on these loans, the proposal would actually make them more expensive and exacerbate the student debt crisis. Rep. Kline’s bill also leaves out essential protections such as expanding income-based repayment and allowing current borrowers to refinance their loans. Young Americans need a solution that will make college more affordable and put them on a path to economic security, not make the problem worse.

To speak with a CAP expert on this topic, please contact Abraham White at awhite@americanprogress.org.

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SOURCE: AP/Jim Young

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem to discuss a restart of the Middle East peace process after more than four years of hardly any talks.

Secretary of State John Kerry arrives today in Jerusalem on his fourth visit to the region since accompanying President Barack Obama in March. Secretary Kerry will continue his efforts to establish a framework for negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, having repeatedly made clear his view that an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is a key interest of the United States. “So much of what we aspire to achieve and what we need to do globally, what we need to do in the Maghreb and South Asia, South Central Asia, throughout the Gulf, all of this is tied to what can or doesn’t happen with respect to Israel-Palestine,” Secretary Kerry said during his Senate confirmation hearing.

A key component of Secretary Kerry’s peace process strategy over the past several months has been an effort to reintroduce the Arab Peace Initiative, which he has long believed could serve as a starting point for a comprehensive regional solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a 2009 speech at the Brookings Institution, then-Sen. Kerry called the peace initiative “The basis on which to build a Regional Road Map that enlists moderate Arab nations to play a more active role in peacemaking and to paint a clearer picture than ever before of the rewards peace would bring to all parties.”

Origin of the Arab Peace Initiative

Saudi Arabia’s Crown-Prince Abdullah, now the king, promulgated the Arab Peace Initiative at the 2002 Beirut summit of the Arab League. The text of the declaration called upon Israel to:

• Complete its withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories, including the Syrian Golan Heights to the June 4, 1967, line and from the territories still occupied in southern Lebanon
• Attain a just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees to be agreed upon in accordance with the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194
• Accept the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital

In return, the Arab states committed to:

• Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict over, sign a peace agreement with Israel, and achieve peace for all states in the region
• Establish normal relations with Israel within the framework of this comprehensive peace

The Arab Peace Initiative was unanimously reaffirmed at the March 2007 Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia, during which all 22 Arab member states except Libya were present, and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, the militant group that now governs the Gaza Strip, abstained from the vote. Earlier that month, Jordan’s King Abdullah II delivered a speech before a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, highlighting the continued salience of the conflict in the region’s politics and calling on lawmakers to support U.S. efforts at peacemaking.

The Israeli response

When the Arab Peace Initiative was first introduced, Israeli leaders reacted extremely cautiously if not outright negatively to it. They claimed the initiative, which came during a particularly violent moment of the Second Intifada, put the onus for peace entirely on Israel. In a statement at the time, then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres recognized the Arab Peace Initiative as an important step but one “liable to founder if terrorism is not stopped.” Other Israeli leaders rejected what they saw as the non-negotiable nature of the proposal. “If the Arab initiative is take it or leave it, that will be a recipe for stagnation,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said in response to the peace initiative’s re-adoption in 2007.

Other Israeli leaders had a problem with the initiative’s framing of the Palestinian refugee problem, stating that a return of Palestinian refugees to Israel in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 would threaten Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. “If 300,000-400,000, or maybe a million, Palestinians would invade the country, that would be the end of the state of Israel as a Jewish state,” said Likud Party spokesman Zalman Shoval in 2007.

Some Israeli officials attempted to reach out to Arab officials to start a discussion on the proposed Arab Peace Initiative. Former Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who was an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002, for example, recently told the Times of Israel that he had attempted to meet with a representative of the Saudi government in Washington, D.C., in 2002 in order to assess the seriousness of the peace initiative but that the Saudi representative had reneged on the planned meeting. Reports in 2007 and 2008 indicated that the Israeli government was considering a response to the Arab Peace Initiative, but as yet there has been no formal counter-proposal.

In remarks introducing former Sen. George Mitchell (D-ME) as his administration’s special envoy for Middle East peace in 2009, President Obama said the initiative “contains constructive elements that could help advance these efforts.” Mitchell later said that the administration intended to “incorporate” the peace initiative into its policy, but there did not seem to be a strong public effort to do so.

Speaking in 2011, former President Bill Clinton questioned the lack of Israeli response to the peace initiative. “The King of Saudi Arabia started lining up all the Arab countries to say to the Israelis, ‘if you work it out with the Palestinians … we will give you immediately not only recognition but a political, economic, and security partnership,’” Clinton said. “This is huge. … It’s a heck of a deal.”

In late March 2011 a group of prominent Israelis, including former heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet security services, put forth the Israeli Peace Initiative, a response to the Arab Peace Initiative with the goal to generate popular support for greater Israeli peace efforts. It called on the Israeli government to recognize the Arab Peace Initiative “as a historic effort made by the Arab states to reach a breakthrough and achieve progress on a regional basis, and sharing the API statement ‘that a military solution to the conflict will not achieve peace or provide security for the parties.’”

“We looked around at what was happening in neighboring countries and we said to ourselves, ‘It is about time that the Israeli public raised its voice as well,’” said Danny Yatom, a former head of Mossad and a signer of the Israeli Peace Initiative. “We are isolated internationally and seen to be against peace,” said former Shin Bet head Yaakov Perry, another of the document’s supporters. Perry continued, “I hope this will make a small contribution to pushing our prime minister forward. It is about time that Israel initiates something on peace.” Perry is now a member of the Knesset and the number-two man in Yesh Atid, the centrist party that made a surprisingly strong showing in Israel’s January elections.

A 2012 paper by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies called on Israel’s leaders to re-examine the Arab Peace Initiative. Warning that the Arab Peace Initiative “will not survive indefinitely,” the paper’s authors, Gilead Sher and Ilai Alon, argue:

Precisely now, in light of developments in the Arab world and the relative fluidity inherent in every revolution, the possibility of influence is greater and the price Israel will eventually have to pay to reach its national goals and attain peace with the Arab world may be lower.

Kerry’s efforts

In late March, shortly before President Obama’s Middle East visit, Israeli media reported that Secretary Kerry would seek to revive the Arab Peace Initiative as a starting point for future talks. In early April it was reported that the Obama administration had informed the Palestinian Authority that its new approach to peace negotiations would be based on the Arab Peace Initiative and that President Obama had discussed the matter with the Palestinian leadership during his March visit to Ramallah.

Palestinian sources later said that, in discussions with Secretary Kerry, the president had proposed two small changes to the initiative to make it more palatable to Israel: the 1967 lines could be modified through mutual agreement, along with stronger security guarantees for Israel.

After meeting in Washington in late April, the Arab League agreed to support limited, mutually agreed-upon land swaps as part of a peace deal. “The Arab League delegation affirms that agreement should be based on the two-state solution, on the basis of the 4th of June 1967 line” with the possibility of a “comparable and mutual agreed minor swap of the land,” said Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, speaking on behalf of the Arab League.

Moreover, al-Thani told reporters that the Arab League delegation understood that “peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis is … a strategic choice for the Arab states.” Shortly thereafter, the Fatah Central Committee accepted the Arab League’s proposal on land swaps and welcomed U.S. efforts to revive peace negotiations with Israel.

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh rejected the move, saying the Arab League was not authorized to make such concessions on behalf of Palestinians. “The so-called new Arab initiative is rejected by our people, by our nation and no one can accept it,” Haniyeh said. “The initiative contains numerous dangers to our people in the occupied land of 1967, 1948 and to our people in exile.”

New developments in Israel

The Israeli response to the amended Arab Peace Initiative was mixed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that the conflict is not about land but about the Palestinians’ refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, ignoring the fact that the Palestinian Liberation Organization officially recognized Israel in 1993. Dani Dayan, a former head of the Yesha Council—an umbrella organization of municipal councils of West Bank settlements—dismissed the amended peace initiative, writing that land swaps “were never obligatory and are no longer practical.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on the other hand, criticized the government’s failure to embrace the Arab Peace Initiative. “We are speaking of an opportunity that must be seized to renew the diplomatic process. … It’s a very important development,” he said and urged Israeli leaders to “stop making excuses.” Israeli Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovich likewise called on Netanyahu to pursue the initiative, as did Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who officially handles the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations file.

There is some evidence that Israel may now be prepared to respond more positively to the Arab Peace Initiative than it has in the past. Just this past January two prominent signers of the Israeli Peace Initiative, Yaakov Perry and Merav Michaeli, were elected to the Knesset, the legislative branch of the Israeli government. And this month saw the establishment of a pro-two-state caucus headed by Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Hilik Bar of the Labor Party in partnership with the Israeli Peace Initiative and the grassroots One Voice movement.

Conclusion

Amid turmoil of the ongoing transitions in the Middle East, it is significant that Arab leaders remain publicly committed to the Arab Peace Initiative and have signaled that the proposal could serve as a basis for negotiations rather than demanding a take-it-or-leave-it offer. In particular, the demand for Israel’s withdrawal from the Golan Heights will likely have to be re-examined in light of Syria’s continuing civil war.

A durable solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must be one that involves as many regional stakeholders as possible. With the recent adjustments, the Arab Peace Initiative is consistent both with multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions relating to the conflict, with the policy of multiple U.S. administrations, and with the overwhelming international consensus regarding the creation of two states for two peoples. As a recent Pew poll showed, Israelis and Palestinians have very different views regarding the other side’s commitment to peace, but one thing they agree on is the necessity of U.S. involvement in achieving that outcome.

For the past two decades, the United States has worked to achieve a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Secretary Kerry’s attempt to revive a broader regional framework for negotiations is an important component of the strategy to create a more favorable environment for supporting peace in the Middle East. At a time of great uncertainty in the region, these efforts should be encouraged.

Matthew Duss is a Policy Analyst and Director of Middle East Progress at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/Susan Walsh

In this June 2012 picture, President Barack Obama looks back at students as he calls on Congress to stop interest rates on student loans from doubling. One year later, Congress must again act to keep rates low.

On July 1, 2013, interest rates on federal subsidized Stafford student loans, which are provided to low- and middle-income students, are scheduled to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Congress acted to prevent an identical rate hike from going into effect on July 1, 2012, and is preparing to act to keep rates low again this year. There are key differences, however, between the various proposals to do so and unfortunately some of the proposals are worse than the status quo.

This column analyzes the potential interest rates in coming years under the key proposals—by President Barack Obama; Rep. John Kline (R-MN), whose proposal the House of Representatives approved today; and several proposals introduced in the Senate.

Determining student-loan interest rates

The goal of the student-loan program is to help increase access to postsecondary education, as education beyond high school remains critical for millions of students and their families as they seek to move into or remain in a part of the middle class. Recent reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics now show that college graduates are nearly twice as likely to find work as those with only a high school diploma. An advanced degree provides individuals with a clear path to the middle class, a higher likelihood of gainful employment, and life-long financial and personal benefits. College education also provides for a skilled workforce that is crucial to rebuilding the entire American economy.

The best solution for determining student-loan interest rates is a long-term plan that is variable and would allow borrowers to take advantage of today’s historically low interest rates. A variable plan, however, must also include a cap that protects students against high interest rates in the future. Such high interest rates on student loans could discourage some students from enrolling and persisting in postsecondary education. The add-on interest rate amount should be as low as possible and avoid additional deficit reductions that shift the national debt onto students.

In addition, expanding protections such as Pay As You Earn—which lets borrowers limit their monthly payments to an affordable percentage of their income—to include all borrowers, along with the addition of a refinancing mechanism, would further strengthen the federal student-loan program. The PAYE expansion—outlined in the president’s budget for fiscal year 2014—would ensure that all federal student-loan borrowers could cap their monthly loan payments to 10 percent of their income so that the payments are affordable and achievable. A refinancing and loan modification mechanism would provide borrowers the option to switch their loans from their current interest rate model into the new system.

We recognize that a short-term fix may ultimately be necessary to prevent interest rates from increasing for subsidized student-loan borrowers. This is far from ideal, however, and Congress should only consider a short-term fix if competing priorities interfere with the passage of high-quality, long-term legislation. It is also critical that any savings needed to pay for the short-term fix should come from sources other than the federal student aid system.

Key variables

The first key variable is whether the interest rate should remain a fixed rate set by Congress or should instead become tied to a market variable that rises and falls according to market conditions. Fixed interest rates can quickly fall out of sync with the market, and this is especially unfair to students in the context of the historically low rates currently being provided for other forms of debt. Today, for example, a borrower can receive a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 3.6 percent or a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage at 2.75 percent—significantly lower than the rates of 6.8 percent and higher than student borrowers would have to pay in the absence of student-loan legislation.

An easy market variable to employ would be the rate the federal government pays for borrowing money. Since student loans are generally repaid in about 10 years, using the 10-year Treasury note, which currently has an interest rate around 2 percent, seems to be a straightforward option. Another option would be to use the 91-day T-Bill rate, the rate that the federal government pays for short-term borrowing, which is currently around 0.5 percent. The 91-day T-Bill rate, however, tends to be more volatile. A variable rate approach could be structured to have the rates for all loans made after July 1, 2013, change annually, or it could be used to determine the interest rate that would be fixed for all loans made that year.

The second key policy decision is to determine the level at which to set interest rates if they remain fixed—or what percentage of interest to add to the 10-year Treasury note or 91-day T-bill. This is known as the add-on and determines whether the student-loan proposal is budget neutral, costs money, or actually generates savings. By charging a higher interest rate, more money is generated, but students accumulate more debt. The lower the add-on or interest rate, the less debt the students accumulate.

Third, for variable-rate proposals, policymakers must decide whether to include a ceiling on which interest rates can be charged. This is to ensure that even if the variable that the interest rate was based on hit higher levels, such as 8 percent, the interest rate being charged to students could not surpass the given cap. This is an especially important protection for a complete variable model where the interest rate on all loans reset from year to year.

Fourth, some of the proposals also introduce various other protections to students or changes to the program that are more structural in nature—for example, including a refinancing provision to allow existing borrowers to move into the new interest rate model or expansions of repayment tools such as Pay As You Earn.

Primary student-loan interest rate proposals

There are three major proposals currently on the table regarding student loans that have been gaining momentum.

President Obama’s proposal

In his budget, President Obama used a variable model to determine loan rates at the point they are issued. After that time, the interest rate remains fixed for the duration of the loan. The president’s model also expands Pay As You Earn and sets the interest rate to the 10-year Treasury note plus an additional 0.93 percent for subsidized Stafford loans, 2.93 percent for unsubsidized Stafford loans, and 3.93 percent for PLUS loans, which are awarded to parents of students and to graduate school students. Under Congressional Budget Office projections, that would result in 2013-14 interest rates of 3.43 percent for subsidized Stafford loans, 5.43 percent for unsubsidized Stafford loans, and 6.43 percent for PLUS loans. It unfortunately does not include a cap on interest rates. The proposal is intended to be budget neutral and neither costs new money nor generates new savings.*

Rep. John Kline’s proposal

Rep. John Kline (R-MN), chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, recently put forth his own student-loan interest rate proposal. It is a completely variable proposal, meaning that the rates on all loans fluctuate from year to year. It is tied to the 10-year Treasury note, adds an additional 2.5 percent to both subsidized and unsubsidized Stafford loans, and adds 4.5 percent to PLUS loans. It also includes a fairly high cap on interest rates—8.5 percent for Stafford loans and 10.5 percent for PLUS loans. Unfortunately, the 2.5 percent and 4.5 percent add-ons are more than necessary and result in $3.7 billion in additional revenue, which would go toward paying down the federal debt. It does not include the PAYE expansion or a refinancing mechanism. Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-NC) have a similar proposal with a 3 percent add-on for all Stafford and PLUS loans. The Coburn-Burr proposal is more generous to the PLUS borrowers, however, than any other proposal.

Sen. Tom Harkin, Sen. Harry Reid, and Sen. Jack Reed’s proposal

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, put forth legislation with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) to extend current student-loan interest rates for two years. The legislation, which has 20 co-sponsors, proposes that subsidized Stafford loans would remain at 3.4 percent for two years, and other interest rates would be unaffected. This legislation would cost $8.3 billion but is fully paid for through a package of three non-education offsets. This is designed to provide additional time to determine the best long-term solution through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has also introduced a proposal that is a one-year plan to set subsidized Stafford loan interest rates at a lower rate than it is currently. She accomplishes this by tying interest rates to the Federal Reserve discount rate, which is the rate they charge their member banks for borrowing money. Sen. Warren is also a co-sponsor of the two-year extension.

Conclusion 

Congress should move forward with a long-term solution that ensures students do not have to pay rates out of sync with the market and protects them from unmanageable debt. This long-term solution should not tax students to pay down the federal debt. If consensus on a long-term solution is unattainable in the next six weeks, however, Congress must act now and pass a short-term solution to prevent interest rates from doubling.

David Bergeron is the Vice President for Postsecondary Education at the Center for American Progress. Tobin Van Ostern is the Deputy Director of Campus Progress. Carmel Martin and Anne Johnson also contributed to this column.

* The Obama administration created its proposal based upon analysis of costs provided by the Office of Management and Budget and was designed to be budget neutral. It has been scored differently by the Congressional Budget Office as actually generating a savings. The administration has indicated that it intends to modify the proposal to make it budget neutral under CBO scoring rules.

SOURCE: AP/Richard Drew

Marjorie Hill, second on the left, CEO of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, addresses the Women for Paid Sick Days rally on the steps of New York's City Hall, Wednesday, July 18, 2012.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF of this issue brief.

Today’s families are increasingly reliant upon working mothers as breadwinners or co-breadwinners. (see Figure 1) The past four decades have brought about dramatic changes in how women—and men—navigate their workplace responsibilities, caregiving needs, and personal lives. Four in five U.S. families with children are headed by either two working parents or a single working parent, and thus most families have to navigate issues such as costly or inadequate child care, a lack of paid family leave, and the persistent wage gap, just to name a few.

While social and economic changes created this new reality, political decisions have shaped the struggles so many families now face. All working women deserve a fair day’s pay, but they also need to have time to actually live their lives and do what is important to them without fear of losing their jobs or ruining their careers. Our nation’s lawmakers, however, have failed to craft public policies that effectively address today’s challenges and make this possible. Working women are especially disadvantaged by the lack of policy solutions, in part because they continue to take on a larger share of the family caretaking responsibilities—for both the young and elderly members of their families—and because the hurdles they face in the workplace and at home, such as those outlined below, only compound over time, setting them back economically in ever-worsening ways over the course of their lifetimes.

By addressing longstanding and ongoing gender disparities in pay and access to benefits; beefing up family supports such as universal child care, paid sick days, and paid family and medical leave; combating unemployment; and empowering employees to fight discrimination, policymakers could substantially and rapidly improve women’s lives and build family economic security.

We need to promote economic security for women and their families by ensuring that every woman can earn a fair day’s pay and by creating institutions that support families as they are, not as we imagine them to be. Here are 12 good policies that lawmakers can get started on today to better promote women’s economic security for themselves and their families.

Paid family and medical leave insurance

Women—and men—who work need time off for family reasons, but the United States is the only developed country that does not have national paid family and medical leave. California and New Jersey, however, are leading the way. Research on California’s program has found that it’s good for workers, good for families, and good for women. It also found that it has been a “non-event” for businesses, with 9 in 10 businesses reporting that the implementation of the program had no noticeable effect or a positive effect on productivity (89 percent), on profitability (91 percent), and on turnover (93 percent). A 2012 study from the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University found that women who used paid leave were 39 percent less likely to receive public assistance and 40 percent less likely to receive food stamps in the year after a child’s birth.

Congress can follow the lead of these states and introduce legislation fashioned after the Center for American Progress’s Social Security Cares model for a social insurance program that would allow workers to earn up to 12 weeks of paid leave after the birth of a child, the worker’s own serious illness, or the serious illness of a family member. In the meantime, Congress can also do more to help other states implement paid-leave-insurance programs by approving funds to help with startup and other costs.

Rehire teachers and public-sector workers laid off in the Great Recession and end the sequester

Many workers lost their jobs due to the Great Recession, and public-sector workers have been hit especially hard. (see Figure 3) This is a woman’s issue: 6 out of 10 state and local government employees and three out of four primary and secondary public-school teachers are women. Rehiring the teachers and other workers laid off during the recession would bring women back into solid, middle-class jobs while also helping to better educate young people. This is also critical for our economy more generally, as having an educated workforce is critical for economic growth.

Sequestration, however, is the wrong way forward. Based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, the U.S. economy will create 142,000 fewer jobs each month for the rest of the year due to the combined effect of the payroll tax increase (800,000 fewer jobs in 2013) and sequestration (750,000 fewer jobs from March to December 2013). Most of these jobs will be lost in the second and third quarters of this year, so we are now only seeing the initial effects. We should aim for smart government rather than slash-and-burn policies that unfairly cut the jobs that women are more likely to hold and that
impair government effectiveness.

Promote pay equity

Even though 4 in 10 mothers are their family’s breadwinner, too many don’t earn a breadwinning wage. Women earn, on average, just 77 cents for every dollar that men earn, and this gap hasn’t budged in more than a decade. The gap in pay is even worse for women of color: Latinas earn 90 percent of what Latinos earn and about half of what white men earn. African American women also earn just 90 percent of what African American men earn and 69 percent of what white men earn. (see Figure 4)

Policymakers can take steps to ensure that every woman earns a fair day’s pay by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act. This law would hold discriminatory employers accountable and empower women to find out if they are being discriminated against and to subsequently negotiate for the salaries they deserve.

Ensure that women who want to join unions can do so

Women make up about half of all union workers, and union membership improves their wages and benefits. Unions enable workers to negotiate for fair wages and benefits and help ordinary citizens get involved in the political process, all of which also strengthen the middle class. Increasing unionization rates among home health aides and child care workers would be especially beneficial to women’s economic security since these jobs are not only growing rapidly but are female dominated and among the lowest-paid jobs in the U.S. economy.

To ensure that every woman who wants to form or join a union has the ability to do so, Congress should pass comprehensive labor-law reform that:

• Creates a fair process for workers to decide on union representation so that more workers are provided the right to organize and union coverage expands
• Establishes meaningful penalties and remedies for workers who are fired or discriminated against for exercising their right to organize
• Includes measures to promote productive bargaining between workers and companies

Congress should also make the right to join a union a civil right. This would give workers who are discriminated against for exercising their right to organize a private right to sue, just as workers have a right to sue if they face other forms of workplace discrimination.

Paid sick days for all workers

In the United States, unlike in every other developed country, workers do not have the right to stay home from work when they are sick. While many good employers do offer this benefit, women are less likely than men to hold the high-quality jobs that provide paid sick days. As a result, only half of women have access to this important benefit, which protects them from losing their jobs when they are ill.

Congress can close this gap immediately by passing the Healthy Families Act. This law would allow workers in firms with 15 or more employees to earn one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked—up to seven days of earned sick time per year.

Provide universal child care and pre-kindergarten

Most families do not have a full-time stay-at-home caregiver, which means that they need affordable and high-quality care options for their children while they are at work. The prohibitively high costs of private child care and the lack of quality, accessible public providers, however, means that parents are often left to choose between the lesser of two evils: low-quality care or forgoing needed wages to stay at home and care for a child themselves.

In addition to the positive long-term impacts that high-quality child care and early childhood education have on children and the economy, these programs also provide important benefits to working parents, especially working mothers. Increasing the share of child care costs offset by the federal tax credit to 50 percent and raising the amount that a parent can claim to $6,000 per child would help low-income working parents and mothers. We need to make these programs accessible by investing federal dollars to enable more lower-income families to afford child care for children ages 0–3 and to make preschool accessible to all 3- and 4-year-olds, as investments in these programs help cultivate our future workforce, secure long-term economic competitiveness, and develop our nation’s future leaders.

Fully implement the Affordable Care Act and expand Medicaid in the states

Both men and women need access to health care, but insurance companies in the individual market have a long history of discriminating against women, charging them more than men for the same benefits and refusing to cover maternity care in 88 percent of plans. The Affordable Care Act addresses those problems and ensures no-cost coverage for contraception and other preventive services for women. It also increases the affordability of health care coverage and will end discriminatory exclusions for the coverage of so-called pre-existing conditions such as breast cancer, domestic violence, and Cesarean sections. (see Figure 7)

The Affordable Care Act also expanded eligibility for Medicaid for individuals and families living up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line. The Supreme Court decision upholding the health care law, however, allowed states to opt out of the expansion, leaving coverage uncertain for nearly 17 million Americans—including at least 7 million women. While many states have agreed to adopt the program, nearly 4 million women live in states that have yet to expand coverage. To make matters worse, these states also have the highest rates of uninsured women. States that have opted not to expand their programs or have yet to decide should act quickly and expand coverage to eligible low-income Americans.

Increase workplace flexibility and predictable scheduling

Women, like men, need the ability to have some control over their schedules, or at least have schedules that they can count on. Most women, however, don’t have that. Despite the fact that women spend twice as much time providing child care, they actually outnumber men—57 percent to 43 percent—in having no access to any form of paid leave or workplace flexibility. In addition, millions of women struggle with unpredictable schedules that wreak havoc on their child care arrangements and anything else they want to do with their time. (see Figure 8)

There are ways to remedy this problem that can give women the ability to have more control over their schedules. One way is to pass Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s (D-NY) Working Families Flexibility Act (H.R. 4106), which would grant employees the right to request flexibility and predictability in their schedules and help protect those who make such requests against employer retaliation. Rep. Maloney’s Working Families Flexibility Act is not to be confused with the Republican bill of the same name, which would give workers comp time that they could use about as easily as their frequent flyer miles, which are notoriously difficult to use when you want and need them.

Raise the minimum wage

For families to be economically secure, women need to earn a fair day’s pay. More than 60 percent of minimum-wage workers are women, yet making ends meet on today’s minimum wage is nearly impossible. A woman working full time, year round, and earning the minimum wage brings home just more than $15,000 a year, enough to cover only housing and transportation, depending on where she lives.

More than 13 million women would have higher wages if we increased the minimum wage to $9 an hour. (see Figure 9) This would have enormous benefits for families and our economy as a whole. If women’s earnings increased, they would also spend more, giving a much-needed boost to local businesses and employers.

Improve and enforce antidiscrimination laws

We may think that we have come a long way, but the reality is that discrimination still exists. In 2011 nearly one-third of the 100,000 employment-discrimination charges filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, involved allegations of sex discrimination. Women also filed the bulk of the largest category of charges: allegations of retaliation for complaining about discrimination.

Congress can address this by ensuring that enforcement agencies have the resources they need to uphold the law as vigorously as possible. Unfortunately, the sequester resulted in employee furloughs and approximately $20 million in cuts to the EEOC’s budget, which may lead to a 40 percent growth in the current backlog of workplace-discrimination cases. Congress can also take steps to pass laws to strengthen enforcement, such as the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Employment Non- Discrimination Act.

Ensure access to family-planning services

Having the ability to control the timing and spacing of pregnancy and childbirth is essential for women to be able to participate fully in education and paid employment. It is well documented that when the pill became widely available in the 1960s and 1970s, women joined the workforce in droves, becoming more economically independent and contributing more across every sector of our economy. But a recent study by the University of Michigan has put numbers to the narrative, estimating that the pill alone can account for 10 percent of the convergence of the gap between men and women’s salaries in the 1980s and 30 percent in the 1990s. The study also found that the younger women were when they obtained access to the pill, the more they earned over the course of their lifetimes.

Policymakers should:

• Protect access to family planning through Medicaid, which is the largest public provider for family-planning services.
• Increase funding for Title X family-planning services, which help support a vast network of family-planning providers nationwide and have faced significant cuts in recent years.
• Ensure compliance with implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s guarantee of no-cost coverage for all FDA-approved methods of contraception.

Strengthen Social Security and retirement plans

Social Security is key to women’s economic security in retirement, and it is especially important for widows, who rely on it for an average of eight years after their spouses have died. (see Figure 10) Since women earn less over the course of a lifetime, however, they receive less than men from Social Security, as well as from pension and 401(k) plans more generally.

Congress should reject any proposals to cut retiree benefits or privatize Social Security. Expanding access to employer-based retirement plans would also increase the likelihood of women having access to additional retirement income beyond Social Security benefits. This can be achieved through the development of the Secure, Accessible, Flexible, and Efficient Retirement Plan, which takes the best practices from traditional pensions and 401(k) plans, and by opening the federal Thrift Savings Plan, the 401(k) for federal employees, to nongovernmental workers.

Conclusion

The trends of the past half-century are unlikely to reverse. Women will continue to play an expanding role in our workplaces and homes, our economy, and our families. But until we craft policies aligned with this reality—policies that make it possible to be both a good mother and a good worker, policies that erase fears about whether a woman is being compensated fairly or whether she can afford basic health services—the United States will be at a competitive disadvantage.

Women make up half of the U.S. workforce, and the vast majority of U.S. women—81 percent—will become mothers by ages 40 to 44. Legislation that promotes women’s economic security helps not just women but also their families and children. The policies outlined above are investments in future generations, and they are ones we cannot afford to postpone any longer.

Heather Boushey is a Chief Economist with the Center for American Progress. Jane Farrell is a Research Assistant for Economic Policy at the Center.

SOURCE: AP/Gail Burton

Feminist author Betty Friedan, left, is seen with former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) at the Feminist Expo 2000 in Baltimore.

The Center for American Progress is hosting a forum today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The forum participants include CAP President Neera Tanden, current New York Times pundit Gail Collins, former New York Times pundit Anna Quindlen, and CAP Senior Fellow Judith Warner. As the event description notes, when The Feminine Mystique was originally published in 1963, “[m]arried women in some states couldn’t sit on juries, get a job without their husband’s permission, or keep control of their property and earnings.”

One telling historical note from the same year that has always impressed me—and my students when I recount it—involved the marriage of Katharine Meyer to the journalist Philip Graham. Meyer’s father, Eugene, owned The Washington Post Company, where his daughter and his new son-in-law both worked. On the occasion of their marriage, Eugene Meyer simply handed over ownership of the family’s flagship newspaper to Mr. Graham. Mrs. Graham noted in her autobiography, titled Personal History, that, “Far from troubling me that my father thought of my husband and not me, it pleased me. In fact, it never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper.”

As it happened, Mr. Graham suffered from alcoholism and mental illness, and before committing suicide, he sought to divorce his wife for a much younger woman with whom he had conducted a quite open affair around Washington. Had the divorce gone through, Mrs. Graham would likely have lost not only her family’s newspaper but also her livelihood, to say nothing of the incredible career she eventually forged after becoming publisher of the Post and president of its parent company in 1963 upon Mr. Graham’s suicide—all because her father did not think a man should have to work for his wife. Suffice it to say that after the publication of The Feminine Mystique that year, fewer and fewer people—both men and women—were thinking that way anymore.

Few works in all of American history have enjoyed a greater impact, whether measured in political, cultural, or psychological terms, than Friedan’s combination historical novel, manifesto, and cri de coeur. Born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, in 1921, she was raised by immigrant Jewish parents. From an early age, she drifted toward journalism, starting a literary magazine that was too controversial and thus went unpublished in her high school. She then set out for Smith College—the famed New England women’s school—in 1939, where she took a class with the wife of future Sen. Paul Douglas (D-Il), Dorothy Wolff Douglas, who opened her mind to the problem of female oppression. Goldstein planned to continue her studies at the University of California, where she had won a fellowship, but she felt compelled to turn it down when her success made her then-boyfriend nervous.

As a one-time supporter of former Vice President Henry Wallace, Goldstein gravitated toward Marxism and landed a job as a left-wing labor journalist. But after getting married and becoming “Betty Friedan,” she quit her job and attempted to settle down into a life of peaceful suburban domesticity. Deeply unhappy, she got back in touch with a number of her college classmates from Smith and discovered she was not alone in her feelings of dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment. So Friedan set out to name the disease ailing her and her friends. The result was The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. It was a “spirited intervention in a particular time and place,” as the prominent historian of feminism Christine Stansell aptly noted—it was “a flag planted by an outrider on a battlefield where armies were starting to assemble.”

Friedan’s book was originally published during a four-month newspaper strike in New York City and, as a result, made its way into the world without much advertising or book reviews. The editors of both McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal were fortunately willing to step away from their usual domestic fare and offer excerpts of the book to their combined readership of 36 million. The book’s publisher, W.W. Norton, arranged for a book tour—which was unheard of then for an unknown author—and soon enough, the first paperback printing sold 1.4 million copies. Friedan immediately began receiving letters that read, “I feel, today, as though I had been filled with helium and turned loose,” and “Like light bulbs going off again and again,” and “I understood what I was feeling and felt validated!!” And a movement was born.

The book began with Friedan attempting to describe her “sense of dissatisfaction” that sprung from a question asked by a housewife: “Is this all?” The “problem that has no name,” as her first chapter was entitled, centered around this vague sense of unhappiness that Friedan had discovered in interviewing numerous women from Smith and elsewhere. “I just don’t feel alive,” one woman told her. Friedan noted the pressure on women to return to domesticity after World War II, believing it was exerted through magazines and popular culture. She made clear that the problem went beyond material concerns into a terrain of life that was more psychic and spiritual. “Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings,” she wrote, drawing upon the teachings of the psychologist Erik Erikson, whose classes she took at the University of California

This sensible argument, though, turned sour toward the end of the book, where she rather crazily compared the life of a postwar suburban American housewife to that of an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp. She insisted that, “The women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.” Even so, she struck a chord with millions of women when she called on women to find “creative work of [their] own” outside the home, proposing a kind of female G.I. bill that would let women go back to college and get a degree so they could find work. Quoting the president of Mills College, Friedan said women “should be educated so that they can argue with their husbands.”

Although Friedan’s book suggested to some that she was calling for a revolutionary form of politics—by citing problems that were not material but more diffuse and spiritual and by invoking the legacy of the Holocaust—her actual politics were quite conventional. She was just a liberal who wanted to extend the rights that women enjoyed, just as liberal civil rights leaders wished to do for African Americans and later for LGBT individuals.

As the feminist historian Ruth Rosen notes, Friedan sturdily resisted pressure to link feminism with issues of sexual freedom, particularly free love or separatist lesbianism. She tried to steer the National Organization for Women—the organization she helped establish—in a middle-class, respectable, reform direction, making it simply a logical extension of liberalism. And in this respect, she succeeded magnificently by achieving a degree of success in her challenges of the comfortable thought and life patterns of an entire country that few authors had achieved since Thomas Paine published Common Sense in 1776.

A half-century later, we remain in her debt.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, from which the information about Friedan above is drawn and is being released in paperback this week.

See also: Memorial Day Driving by the Numbers by Jackie Weidman and Daniel J. Weiss

Big Oil will be making huge profits off Americans’ travel expenditures on fuel while producing less oil and opposing health safeguards.

SOURCE: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

President Barack Obama signs the Affordable Care Act in the East Room of the White House in Washington on March 23, 2010.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this issue brief.

Nearly 35 million Americans are expected to travel 50 miles or more this Memorial Day weekend to visit family and friends and enjoy the outdoors, according to AAA. Nearly 90 percent of them will likely to drive to their destination, filling up their tanks with expensive gasoline or diesel fuel before hitting the road.

Gasoline prices averaged $3.66 per gallon nationwide on May 21, 2013, which is 2 cents per gallon lower than they were a year ago when the price per gallon was $3.69. But experts predict that prices will plateau or increase throughout the summer, providing little relief at the pump for American families during this vacation season. These high prices enable the five biggest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—to reap huge profits even though they are producing less oil worldwide than this time last year.

For more on this topic, please see:

• Memorial Day Driving by the Numbers by Jackie Weidman and Daniel J. Weiss

In a strong 13-to-5 vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee cleared another hurdle in the drive to pass immigration reform legislation. The vote margin is emblematic of the committee proceedings, masterfully led by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), where over 200 amendments were thoughtfully debated, and the majority that passed were with bipartisan support over multiple committee sessions. Advancing smart policy has replaced hurling partisan potshots, and I applaud Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Richard Durbin (D-IL), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) for their work in moving the ball forward on this issue.

On the merits, the legislation is not perfect, but it is a substantial step forward in overhauling our nation’s immigration policies and creating a road map for our nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants to earn the privilege of citizenship. The Senate bill will grow the economy, stabilize families, and strengthen the middle class. I am hopeful that those priorities will motivate the Senate to move efficiently to pass this bill. The American public continues to support the kind of common-sense reform in S. 744, and it’s in everyone’s best interest—the country at large, future generations, and Congress—to turn this bill into law. There is still work to be done. The bill, as any compromise, has shortcomings. It diminishes the benefits of family immigration and fails to address discrimination against binational same-sex couples, issues that we will continue to improve as the bill goes forward. But last night’s vote was nonetheless a watershed moment in creating a brighter future for our country.

For additional information, please contact Crystal Patterson at 202.478.6350 or cpatterson@americanprogress.org.

Washington, D.C. — As the population of the United States becomes increasingly racially and ethnically diverse, it is imperative that the administration in Washington, policymaking entities, and people of color themselves take a more proactive approach to ensuring the diversity trends of the country are reflected in all tiers of policymaking.

This is the central argument made by Dennis Vega, a graduating Fellow from the current class of the Center for American Progress Leadership Institute, who in his column released on May 21, 2013, titled “Race and Beyond: We Need to Increase Diversity in Policymaking,” urges policymakers to seek out innovative ways to engage constituents and draw a diversity of perspectives and facilitate nuanced approaches to challenges.

“It is critically important that the people who develop public policies come from all of the diverse communities that those policies will affect,” says Sam Fulwood III, a Senior Fellow and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. “That is why the Leadership Institute is important. We are helping a new generation of people of color find their way in a professional environment that has been either closed or mysterious to them.”

In an effort to explore the subject further, the Center for American Progress hosted Sen. William “Mo” Cowan (D-MA) and Laura Murphy, Washington legislative office director of the American Civil Liberties Union, on Wednesday, May 22, for a discussion titled “The Case for Diverse Voices in Public Policy.” The event, which took place at the Center for American Progress was livestreamed and also featured CAP Leadership Fellows Patricia Campos-Medina, founder and president of Campos Strategies Group; Kumar Rao, attorney at The Bronx Defenders office; Christine Soyong Harley, policy analyst at the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations; and Ramatu Bangura, program director of the Sauti Yetu Center for African Women. It was moderated by Faith Leach, fiscal policy manager at the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, or OSSE, in Washington.

The keynote speakers and panelists explored topics brought up in Vega’s column and addressed realistic and active ways in which the communities of color affected by the development and implementation of progressive public policy can demand inclusion in the policy machinery in a formal way. The panel also discussed Vega’s argument that organizations must play a key role in engaging with and introducing younger generations of people of color to policymaking whenever possible.

“So many of the people who do policy work have found their way through networks, and the Leadership Institute is trying to broaden those networks to include people of color,” says Fulwood.

Gasoline prices averaged $3.66 per gallon nationwide on May 21, 2013, which is 2 cents per gallon lower than they were a year ago when the price per gallon was $3.69. But experts predict that prices will plateau or increase throughout the summer, providing little relief at the pump for American families during this vacation season. These high prices enable the five biggest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—to reap huge profits even though they are producing less oil worldwide than this time last year.

Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.

Here is a by-the-numbers look at what Big Oil will cost us this holiday weekend:

An expensive holiday weekend ahead for travelers

• 690 miles: Average distance Americans will travel this Memorial Day; 7 percent higher than the 2012 average.
• $105: Gasoline cost for an average trip this Memorial Day weekend.

Big Oil profits increase as Americans face high prices at the pump

• $30.2 billion: Earnings for the first three months of 2013—about $336 million per day—for the five biggest publicly traded oil companies: BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell.
• $1 trillion: Combined profits from 2001–2011 for the five biggest oil companies.
• $2.4 billion: Special federal tax breaks received by the big five oil companies in 2011.
• One minute: Big Oil makes more in one minute than what 95 percent of American households earn in an entire year.
• One-third: Proportion of the Big Oil profits used to repurchase their stock, which only serves to pad the pockets of senior executives and the largest shareholders.
• -2 percent: Reduction in worldwide oil production by the big five oil companies compared to one year ago.

Big Oil’s influence machine

• $71 million: Total direct federal campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry in the 2012 election cycle.
• 90 percent: Proportion of direct federal campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry that went to Republican candidates.
• $140 million: Total lobbying expenditures by the oil and gas industry in 2012.
• $50 billion: Total lobbying expenditures by the big five oil companies in 2012.

New Jersey’s tourism sector is essential for state’s economic growth

• $34.7 billion: New Jersey’s annual tourism revenue.
• 62 percent: Estimated percentage of tourism dollars that were spent at the Jersey Shore in 2008.
• 500,000: Number of Americans employed by New Jersey’s tourism industry.
• $1,420: Estimated additional annual tax that each New Jersey household would have to pay in the absence of state tourism dollars, in order to maintain current government revenues.

Climate-change fueled extreme weather impacts tourism

• 94 percent: Proportion of New Jersey beaches and dunes that were damaged by Superstorm Sandy.
• 27 million: Number of cubic yards of sand that the Army Corps of Engineers will replace along the New Jersey and New York coastlines to restore storm-damaged beaches. Thomas Herrington, professor of ocean engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, said the amount of sand lost to Superstorm Sandy is “unprecedented” and equal to what is typically lost over the course of a decade.
• 4: Number of states with significant wildfires in their national and state forests as of May 20, 2013. (The states: California, Florida, Minnesota, and Montana.)
• 3,800: Number of acres currently burning through the Los Padres National Forest in California. As of May 20, 2013, the fire was only 25 percent contained.
• 1 million: Estimated annual visitors to the Los Padres National Forest between 2005 and 2009.

Big Oil behaving badly, again

• 210,000: Total number of gallons of tar-sands oil spilled by a pipeline leak in Mayflower, Arkansas, in March 2013. The failure of the nearly 70-year-old pipeline owned by ExxonMobil forced 83 people to evacuate their homes.
• 126,000: Number of gallons ExxonMobil had yet to recover as of early May. The same pipeline ruptured a second time on May 1, 2013 in Ripley County, Missouri, spilling 42 gallons of oil.
• $14 billion: Estimated minimum cleanup costs for BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 that killed 11 oil-rig workers and gushed 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
• $75 million: Limit on liability that oil companies currently face for future offshore-oil blowouts regardless of actual damage.

Keystone XL pipeline won’t lower gasoline prices

• 0 (zero, nada, none): Guaranteed percentage of oil transported by Keystone XL to Gulf Coast refineries that will remain in the United States after refining into gasoline or diesel fuel.
• 0 (zero, nada, none): Impact of Keystone XL pipeline on U.S. gasoline prices. Christopher Knittel, professor of energy economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified on May 16, 2013, in the House that, “There will be no appreciable changes in the world oil price, certainly not enough to base policy decisions on it.”

Read the full analysis: Memorial Day Driving by the Numbers by Jackie Weidman and Daniel J. Weiss

To speak with a CAP expert on this topic, please contact Anne Shoup at 202.481.7146 or ashoup@americanprogress.org.

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In the fifth installment of our podcast series examining the state of the reproductive health, rights, and justice movement in the United States on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we speak with Miriam Yeung, the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum and a next-generation leader in the fight for reproductive justice. Ms. Yeung discusses how she came to the movement, why Roe is important for Asian and Pacific Islander women, and how reproductive rights relates to other progressive movements such as immigrant rights and LGBT rights.

Jessica Arons: Roe v. Wade—how does it relate to the right to build and maintain a family of one’s choosing?

I am Jessica Arons, the Director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress. We are joined today by Miriam Yeung, the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, or NAPAWF. NAPAWF is the country’s only national, multi-issue progressive organization dedicated to social justice and human rights for Asian and Pacific Islander women and girls in the United States. Prior to NAPAWF, Miriam held many positions during her 10-year career at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center in New York City. She is here to discuss with us the intersections and implications of Roe on her work across social justice movements. Welcome.

Miriam Yeung: Thanks for having me.

JA: We are happy to have you here. So you were born after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, and you grew up in the post-Roe era. What brought you to this work, and why is it important to you?

MY: I was born a little bit after the Supreme Court ruling. I guess you and I are of the same age. Personally, what brings me to this work is I came out as a lesbian—as a queer woman—in 1991. I was in high school. And though that’s just one experience of coming out, it was a really formative one about sexual liberation and being able to be honest about your life—about being able to choose who you love and what to do with your body. And that felt at that time also intimately tied to whether or not that was approved of or whether or not that was supported.

I really cut my activist teeth in the early ‘90s as well as a queer sexual health activist really formatively through my experiences working in the HIV movement. And this was before Protease Inhibitors, right? And this was really at the height of ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power]. And there was a sense of urgency in the work that we were doing, where all of a sudden all the freedom and excitement and authenticity that we knew could come from our sexual liberation was also met by this devastating illness and disease that we saw in our community—and then the interplay of whether or not society and government helped people in this.

All of that I think is part and parcel to the larger reproductive rights conversation that we have been having. And certainly Roe v. Wade is a critical part of that. So for me, I was really brought to this work knowing that Roe v. Wade was a critical first step in what I see as a broader sexual liberation agenda that really is at the cornerstone of what gender liberation and gender justice would look like.

JA: Well thank you, great. As we celebrate Asian Pacific Heritage month, can you tell us about how Roe has been important for the rights of Asian and Pacific Islander, or API, women in particular?

MY: So a little bit about NAPAWF. As you mentioned, NAPAWF is the nation’s only multi-issue progressive organization—policy/advocacy organization—for Asian Pacific Islander women and girls in the United States.

We were founded in 1996, and there was a critical meeting the year before this in 1995 at the U.N. conference on women in Beijing, where about 100 Asian American activists got all the way to Beijing and organized a meeting for themselves. And at this meeting they realized that though we had experts and all of these fierce social justice leaders working in different fields of work at the time, there was no organized voice and official way for Asian American women to participate at this U.N. meeting, even though they were Asian American women in this Asian country at this meeting about women. So NAPAWF was founded after that.

Asian Americans have been an important part of America and have been a growing part of America. Currently there are more than 17 million Asian Americans living in this country. We are a very highly diverse community of many ethnicities and speak many languages. So the Asian American community is one that can’t be easily encapsulated.

So specifically about how Roe has been important for the rights of API women and girls: You know in our community, like many other women of color communities, there are unfortunate stories about violations of API women’s reproductive justice. There are well-documented stories of sterilization in our communities in the Pacific Islands—for example, Japanese women during internment over and over—that others have been deciding for Asian and Asian American women their reproductive path and their reproductive freedom. So Roe is critically important in that it firmly states and gives the authority for reproductive decision making firmly in the hands, and the minds, and the hearts of the women. And I think that has absolutely been an important part of what Asian American and Pacific Islander women have needed and have asked for.

JA: NAPAWF has been deeply involved in fighting bills that ban abortions that purportedly are motivated by the sex or race of the fetus. Can you tell us a little bit about that ongoing fight?

MY: Where do you want me to begin? (laughs) Okay, so first let me describe: There have been a number of bills proposed both on the federal level and across the states that have been named some version of the “Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act” or, as it was originally proposed in the federal government, the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.”

Essentially all of these bills operate the same way, which is that they would criminalize doctors or nurses for providing abortions that they suspect are motivated by the race or sex of the fetus. And they use very social-justice-oriented and human-rights-oriented language in the bill findings. Essentially, they say, they are being more gender equal and civil rights oriented by using this bill, using the argument that of course they are the vanguards of gender equality and civil rights.

Now, many of these bills include a race-based abortion piece, which we just have to debunk. It’s just a made-up concept, and it’s made up in particular to target Planned Parenthood. It’s made up in particular to target and twist some of the demographics we know about health inequalities and disproportionate unintended pregnancies in some communities of color. So race is made up, and there are many other women of color who have said it better than I, but it’s not like a woman of color wakes up one day and goes, “Oh my gosh, my fetus is a kid of color?” No Asian woman would be like, “Oh, I’m carrying an Asian fetus. Like, oh my gosh.” It’s never a surprise, right?  So it’s a ridiculous concept.

The sex-selective abortion piece is a little bit more difficult to unpack. It is obviously of huge concern to us in an international context and has gathered a lot of attention. We understand that sex-selective practices, which include preconception and postconception practices, are a result of son preference, which is really a result of gender inequality, right? So we really provide an analysis that goes back to some of the core roots.

These bills would have, of course, a terrible impact for all women because all of a sudden, any woman’s motive for seeking an abortion becomes suspicious and becomes something that you have to answer an additional question about at this moment where you should be establishing a relationship of trust and openness with your provider.

This particularly has an impact on Asian American women because essentially we believe that bills of this sort would dictate that Asian American women would be somewhat racially profiled in the doctor’s office. And we think that racial profiling has no place in American society, not the least of which is at your doctor’s office. These kinds of bills—PRENDAs [Prenatal Non-discrimination Acts] or Sex Selective Abortion Bans—all purport to use this logic about supporting Asian women really by taking away our rights, which is why we call them “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

More to the point of this conversation is that this is a direct challenge that we have documented in the antiabortion movement, or lobby, spelling out over the last 30 years because these bills, if they become law, would be a direct challenge to Roe and the line in the sand that Roe has already put about viability and abortion.

JA: Thank you. That’s a very helpful overview of this very complex issue. I want to shift gears just a little bit. This is still quite related though, I think. NAPAWF has been deeply involved also in the campaign for immigration reform. Roe talks about not just the right to have an abortion but the right to decide whether and when to become a parent. And in that way, it is connected to the right to be a parent and to build a family of one’s choosing. So I’d like to hear from you a little bit about how immigration reform might affect that spectrum of rights.

MY: So fundamentally I think the reproductive and immigrant rights movements are both about self-determination and freedom. For women to be completely free, we have to be able to chart the course of our own lives and that means determining not just whether and when to create a family, but I also think where to create a family and where to be able to raise a family with dignity and security and opportunity.

Immigration laws are literally laws about controlling bodies. Which bodies can enter? It is about which bodies are considered legitimate, which bodies are considered American.

Asian American women actually have a particular slice of this history. We have the dubious distinction of being the first class of people singled out in an anti-immigrant law. This was the first immigration law ever written, the Page Law,* which prohibited Asian women from immigrating to this country. Many of these Asian women were seeking to reunite with their husbands in the United States, but they were miscategorized or slandered as prostitutes. And so the Page Law was the first anti-immigrant law prohibiting the entry of women—and Asian women at that. Of course, then we have this other history of the Chinese Exclusion Act soon after that and then the pre-1965 immigrant laws, which basically excluded people from immigrating from a number of specific countries, and this had a disproportionate impact on Asians in particular.

We are at a moment, I think, where our country can live up to our principles of family unity and our family values, if I want to take that term and mean it a different way. In fact, it’s really up in the air right now. Immigration policy reform gives us an amazing opportunity on one hand to fix some of the ways that the system is broken and tears families apart.

For example, there about 5 million children here who are U.S. citizens with one or more undocumented family member. There are about 5,000 kids in foster care right now because they’ve had a parent or two deported or detained. And routinely every day we see families being totally ripped apart and torn apart. That is not a reproductive justice value obviously. The immigration enforcement policies right now that we have are reproductive injustice in that way if you are tearing families apart. So immigration policy reform has an opportunity to fix some of those atrocities.

We also have 4.5 million family members waiting to be reunited with their loved ones here in the United States in the so-called family visa backlogs. So how we deal with these big policy questions, I think, absolutely falls into that spectrum of parenting, of family, of community, and really determining what are the core values that our country will stand for.

JA: Do you want to talk a little bit about the work that NAPAWF is doing to raise and address these issues in immigration reform?

MY: Yeah. NAPAWF is part of a number of key organizations and campaigns working at the intersection of women and immigration policy reform, one of which is called the “We Belong Together” campaign, which we co-anchor with the National Domestic Workers Alliance. In addition to having our own handy theme song, the We Belong Together campaign’s goal is to organize women from around the country for common-sense immigration policy reform because we see immigrant rights and immigration reform as a women’s issue. When you look at these policies through a gender lens, when you talk to women immigrants, or when you talk to the women neighbors of immigrants, we know that you can’t divorce this issue of gender and immigration. And that in fact, women across the country know that when women come together, we build stronger families, we build stronger communities. And in effect, that’s the goal of this campaign, which is to bring women together to fight for common-sense immigration policy reform because we currently know what’s happening isn’t working. It doesn’t serve any of our communities.

We’re also a co-steering committee member of the National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights, which is providing some particularly deeper analysis about immigration reform and how it impacts the health of immigrant women. Some of the current proposals would have people wait 15 years before they are eligible for any federal benefits or subsidies in the Affordable Care Act. I think that’s a big problem that we have to address.

JA: So not only is there a lot of work to be done in immigration reform and how that relates to women’s health needs, but we’ve also had marriage equality in the news a lot lately with two major cases recently argued in front of the Supreme Court. And the right to marriage, the right to abortion, and the right to sexual intimacy, as you know, all spring from the same foundational right to privacy. How do you see reproductive rights and LGBT rights as intertwined and interdependent?

MY: They are completely intertwined and interdependent. When I worked at the LGBT Community Center, one of the projects that I oversaw in the end in my last couple of years was called the “Causes in Common” project or campaign. And that campaign was really aimed at bringing the LGBT liberation movement into closer alignment and working relationships with the reproductive rights, health, and justice movement.

The genesis for that project really started with the stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people that we worked with within the center’s family program. “Center Kids” was the name of the center’s family program. And in the early days there were literally empty rooms where we set up chairs in circles and LGBT people would come and talk about their longing and desire for family and to have children.

And these support groups started as ways for LGBT folks to brainstorm ways that they could create family. And through those conversations it was obviously really clear that family formation and the barriers that LGBT people face were the same ones and the same issues that were being addressed by the reproductive rights, health, and justice movement.

So Causes in Common was created to provide some analysis of how our movements are really intertwined, and we put together a policy paper that outlines some of our key similarities. We have the same enemies, you know, at the very basic level—the same people who hate abortion are the same people who hate LGBT people, so at the very base level there. But secondly, it really is about this idea of where reproduction and sexuality fit in our lives, and we know that sexuality and reproduction are profound and intimate parts of our experience. And that reproduction is a choice that evolves out of sexuality, and it doesn’t have to be an unavoidable consequence of sexuality.

This all falls down to individual human autonomy in the conduct of our sexual lives, whether that be sleeping with the person you love—regardless of gender—or deciding when and where to have kids and if to have kids. They’re all underpinned by the same concept about sexual liberation and self-determination. And, as you pointed out, Roe v. Wade undergirds the majority of the LGBT rights legal wins that we’ve had. Lawrence v. Texas was decided with Roe v. Wade really at the heart of it. So all of the gains that the LGBT movement has made I think owes a debt to the feminist movement that created Roe v. Wade.

JA: Forty years from now, what legal or policy decision do you hope we’ll be celebrating?

MY: We really are at a nexus of figuring out as a country if and how we support families and communities. Or are we really just for a single rugged, individualist kind of vision of this country? And I think we see this play out at the heart of all the exciting social movements NAPAWF is a part of, but that the progressive movement is really grappling with. The LGBT movement has made incredible gains in thinking about family, and love, and commitment, and unity. The anti-immigration movement right now wants to undo some of the family-based values that have always underpinned our immigration policies.

And I think that’s a mistake. We are a nation that is not made up of just individuals. In fact, what makes us great are the communities and societies we build. And you can’t do that just by lifting up individual experiences or just by sending people out and imagining that they can make do all on their own. In fact, 40 years from now, my hope is that we have a kinder, more caring version of politics that knows and lifts up the fact that all of our stories are intertwined, that no one struggle is unique, and that we are a more successful country when we care about each other.

JA: Thank you so much for your time today and for coming to speak with us.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

Jessica Arons is the Director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress.

* The correct name of the measure is the “Page Act.”

SOURCE: AP/Gregory Bull

Chris King fills up his truck at a gas station displaying a price of $4.59 for a gallon of self-service regular gas on Friday, February 22, 2013, in San Diego, California.

Nearly 35 million Americans are expected to travel 50 miles or more this Memorial Day weekend to visit family and friends and enjoy the outdoors, according to AAA. Nearly 90 percent of them will likely to drive to their destination, filling up their tanks with expensive gasoline or diesel fuel before hitting the road.

Gasoline prices averaged $3.66 per gallon nationwide on May 21, 2013, which is 2 cents per gallon lower than they were a year ago when the price per gallon was $3.69. But experts predict that prices will plateau or increase throughout the summer, providing little relief at the pump for American families during this vacation season. These high prices enable the five biggest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—to reap huge profits even though they are producing less oil worldwide than this time last year.

According to the Energy Information Administration, or EIA, the price of crude oil makes up 63 percent of the retail price of regular gasoline. Even though domestic oil production is booming, it has done little to protect Americans from rising gasoline prices because prices are set on the world market led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, cartel.

While U.S. oil production has grown significantly in recent years, domestic refiners are exporting more refined petroleum products so these fuels are unavailable to American drivers. U.S. refiners are currently exporting an average of 2.8 million barrels of petroleum products overseas every day, compared to 1.6 million barrels per day in 2008—less than half of today’s exports. The latest four-week export average included 828,000 barrels per day of “distillate fuel oil,” also known as diesel fuel, and 485,000 barrels per day of gasoline. Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service, told the Chicago Tribune that “higher U.S. oil production and lower U.S. demand are being canceled out by exports.”

This Memorial Day weekend is the first big beach weekend since Superstorm Sandy damaged 94 percent of New Jersey’s beaches and dunes nearly seven months ago. Many communities, especially along the New Jersey coastline, are still rebuilding homes, schools, and critical infrastructure. A recent report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found that 39,000 families in New Jersey remain displaced by the storm.

As a result, coastal communities are scrambling to prepare for visitors who are expected to head to New Jersey’s beaches this holiday weekend. A recent report commissioned for the state’s division of travel and tourism noted that “infrastructure damage to key visitor areas [is] substantial” and that access “is still limited in some areas.” The tourism industry—which brought in $34.7 billion to the state’s economy last year could be impacted by fewer visitors this year as communities are still rebuilding and some beaches have not reopened.

Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.

Here is a by-the-numbers look at what Big Oil will cost us this holiday weekend:

An expensive holiday weekend ahead for travelers

• 690 miles: Average distance Americans will travel this Memorial Day; 7 percent higher than the 2012 average.
• $105: Gasoline cost for an average trip this Memorial Day weekend.

Big Oil profits increase as Americans face high prices at the pump

• $30.2 billion: Earnings for the first three months of 2013—about $336 million per day—for the five biggest publicly traded oil companies: BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell.
• $1 trillion: Combined profits from 2001–2011 for the five biggest oil companies.
• $2.4 billion: Special federal tax breaks received by the big five oil companies in 2011.
• One minute: Big Oil makes more in one minute than what 95 percent of American households earn in an entire year.
• One-third: Proportion of the Big Oil profits used to repurchase their stock, which only serves to pad the pockets of senior executives and the largest shareholders.
• -2 percent: Reduction in worldwide oil production by the big five oil companies compared to one year ago.

Big Oil’s influence machine

• $71 million: Total direct federal campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry in the 2012 election cycle.
• 90 percent: Proportion of direct federal campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry that went to Republican candidates.
• $140 million: Total lobbying expenditures by the oil and gas industry in 2012.
• $50 billion: Total lobbying expenditures by the big five oil companies in 2012.

New Jersey’s tourism sector is essential for state’s economic growth

• $34.7 billion: New Jersey’s annual tourism revenue.
• 62 percent: Estimated percentage of tourism dollars that were spent at the Jersey Shore in 2008.
• 500,000: Number of Americans employed by New Jersey’s tourism industry.
• $1,420: Estimated additional annual tax that each New Jersey household would have to pay in the absence of state tourism dollars, in order to maintain current government revenues.

Climate-change fueled extreme weather impacts tourism

• 94 percent: Proportion of New Jersey beaches and dunes that were damaged by Superstorm Sandy.
• 27 million: Number of cubic yards of sand that the Army Corps of Engineers will replace along the New Jersey and New York coastlines to restore storm-damaged beaches. Thomas Herrington, professor of ocean engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, said the amount of sand lost to Superstorm Sandy is “unprecedented” and equal to what is typically lost over the course of a decade.
• 4: Number of states with significant wildfires in their national and state forests as of May 20, 2013. (The states: California, Florida, Minnesota, and Montana.) 
• 3,800: Number of acres currently burning through the Los Padres National Forest in California. As of May 20, 2013, the fire was only 25 percent contained.
• 1 million: Estimated annual visitors to the Los Padres National Forest between 2005 and 2009.

Big Oil behaving badly, again

• 210,000: Total number of gallons of tar-sands oil spilled by a pipeline leak in Mayflower, Arkansas, in March 2013. The failure of the nearly 70-year-old pipeline owned by ExxonMobil forced 83 people to evacuate their homes.
• 126,000: Number of gallons ExxonMobil had yet to recover as of early May. The same pipeline ruptured a second time on May 1, 2013 in Ripley County, Missouri, spilling 42 gallons of oil.
• $14 billion: Estimated minimum cleanup costs for BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 that killed 11 oil-rig workers and gushed 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
• $75 million: Limit on liability that oil companies currently face for future offshore-oil blowouts regardless of actual damage.

Keystone XL pipeline won’t lower gasoline prices

• 0 (zero, nada, none): Guaranteed percentage of oil transported by Keystone XL to Gulf Coast refineries that will remain in the United States after refining into gasoline or diesel fuel.
• 0 (zero, nada, none): Impact of Keystone XL pipeline on U.S. gasoline prices. Christopher Knittel, professor of energy economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified on May 16, 2013, in the House that, “There will be no appreciable changes in the world oil price, certainly not enough to base policy decisions on it.”

Jackie Weidman is a Special Assistant to the Energy team at the Center for American Progress. Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center.

See also: The Real Scandal in Libya: A Security Vacuum and New Terrorist Threats by Brian Katulis and Peter Juul

The attempts to conjure a political scandal out of the Benghazi tragedy prevent an honest debate about how to advance stability in Libya and the risks America should be asking its diplomats to take.

Coming out of the 2012 presidential election, women’s role in determining its outcome—the so-called gender gap—was a dominant narrative. Women played a large part in President Barack Obama’s re-election, with 55 percent voting for him compared to 44 percent supporting his Republican rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

A parallel narrative last November was that of the potential of the rising electorate—the demographic populations that are increasingly becoming larger segments of the voting-eligible population—influencing election outcomes. Women of color are a particularly important demographic because they stand at the center of the intersection between the rising electorate and the women’s vote.

For more on this topic, please see:

• A Dual Disenfranchisement: 2013 Update by Liz Chen