The United States added 175,000 jobs last month, just above the median forecast in a Reuters poll, Labor Department data showed on Friday.

The unemployment rate ticked a tenth of a percentage point higher to 7.6%, with the increase actually giving a relatively hopeful sign as it was driven by more workers entering the labor force.

Still, after a winter in which the economy seemed to be turning a corner, May was the third straight month that payrolls outside the farm sector increased by less than 200,000.

That could heighten concerns government austerity this year is sapping vigor from the economy, and might dampen speculation the Fed might soon trim bond purchases aimed at lowering interest rates and boosting employment.

“The labor market may not be as strong as we thought,” Kevin Cummins, an economist at UBS in Stamford, Conn., said ahead of the data’s release.

Officials at the U.S. central bank have intimated they could be close to reducing bond purchases despite modest economic growth, which is not expected to pick up until late in the year when the sting from government spending cuts begins to fade.

Budget cuts have led to hiring freezes at many government agencies, and attrition could be slowly reducing payrolls. Government payrolls declined by 3,000 in May.

About 4.4 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months, roughly 3 million more than pre-recession levels. The longer workers are out of a job, the greater the risk they become essentially unemployable. That could deal lasting damage to the economy and has lent urgency to the Fed’s efforts to stimulate growth.

Still, May’s pace of job growth is right around the average for the prior 12 months. Over that period, the jobless rate fell about half a percentage point and the ranks of the long-term unemployed declined by about 1 million people.

“It’s progress that’s too slow, but it’s progress nonetheless,” Guy Berger, an economist at RBS, also in Stamford, said before the data was released.

Even the increase in the unemployment rate had a bright side. The share of the population in the labor force – which includes people who are either employed or looking for work – rose to 63.4%. That was driven by 420,000 workers entering the work force. That is good news because some of the recent drop in the jobless rate has been due to workers leaving the labor force, either because they retired, went back to school or gave up looking for a job.

The report showed the length of the average workweek held steady at 34.5 hours, although total hours worked in the economy ticked 0.1% higher.

At the same time, U.S. factories are feeling the pinch from Europe’s debt crisis, which has sent a chill over the global economy. Manufacturing employment declined by 8,000 jobs last month.

After barely growing in the last three months of 2012, the U.S. economy expanded at a moderate 2.4% annual rate in the first quarter but lost momentum as the quarter drew to a close. Most economists look for growth of around 1.5% in the current quarter.

Fed officials next meet June 18-19 and are widely expected to keep purchasing $85 billion in bonds a month. Many economists don’t expect the job market to be strong enough for the Fed to begin scaling back its bond purchases before December.

• How bad’s the economy in Europe? So bad that the Northern Irish town hosting next month’s G8 summit is putting up fake stores to make the place a little sunnier. Seriously, you have to check out these pictures: (Irish Times)
• Funny? For a second, and then you realize the horror that implies: After three-plus years of “austerity”, Europe now is suffering record unemployment. (Reuters)
• Even Germany is finally admitting that, maybe, Prussian-style austerity is killing southern Europe. (Der Spiegel)
• Of course, that’s because Germany’s austerity chickens are coming home to roost. (Bloomberg)
• And so — with all that evidence you’d think Republicans would wise up. You’d think that, wouldn’t you? (Jonathan Weisman)
• Instead, austerity continues to take a bite out of our “best of a bad lot” economy (Reuters)
• Consumers, however, are bullish. In fact, more so than economists thought (and Republicans hope). (Business Insider)
• And if you’re surprised, you’re not paying attention. (Joseph Weisenthal)
• Of course, this bullish attitude assumes you have stocks and/or real estate that’s increasing in value. (National Journal) (Bloomberg)
• What? You don’t have a stock portfolio and/or real estate increasing in value? Well, just be glad you don’t live in Conserv-istan, i.e. North Carolina. (The Washington Post) and (Think Progress)
• Krugman: “Estimates from the consulting firm Moody’s Analytics suggest that each dollar spent on food stamps in a depressed economy raises G.D.P. by about $1.70.” (Paul Krugman)
• The RNC’s answer to the “jobs” question? The Keystone pipeline and only the Keystone pipeline —> (RNC)
• “Boehner said jobs are his top priority. After 183 votes, The House has held only 1 vote on jobs legislation.” (Ari Melber)
• Polls are pretty clear, too: Voters are “meh” on the various scandal investigations when compared to the ” jobs” question. (Talking Points Memo)
• So what does the GOP need to do? Well, for starters it needs to become more than — as one conservative puts it — “the party of heroic entrepreneurs and tax cuts” (James Pethokoukis)

Legislation passed last year set subsidized Stafford Loan rates at 3.4%, but that deal expires on July 1. If Congress and the president can’t agree on a plan before then, rates will double to 6.8%.

“Higher education cannot be a luxury for a privileged few,” the president said, while flanked by college students in a Rose Garden address.

The average student borrower would have to pay $1,000 more next year if loan rates were to double, according to the White House’s estimate. But while Washington battles over the best way to rescue students from that additional burden, little is being done regarding the $26,000 which the average recent graduate already owes.

The president himself noted the “déjà vu” of the political fight over student loans, which resulted in the partisan showdown around the same time last year–months before the 2012 election.

Obama also denounced the new GOP House plan passed last week, which would set the new interest rate at 5% and link it to the variable rate on 10-year Treasury bonds. That legislation “fails the test,” because it would not keep the loan rate locked in at 3.4% for the remainder of the year, he said. Furthermore, it could wind up costing students even more in the long run.

“The House bill isn’t smart and it’s not fair,” he said. “I’m glad the House is paying attention to it, but they didn’t do it in the right way.”

But the band-aids proposed by Democrats and Republicans alike might only make things worse in the long run, according to The Century Foundation’s Ben Landy.

“[N]either the president’s nor the Republican plan are a good deal for students in the long run,” Landy told MSNBC via email. That’s because both plans rely on a basic philosophy of “tying the educational and financial futures of our youngest and most vulnerable generation to the volatility of the ‘free market.’”

Instead of using a variable rate, the most recent White House budget includes a provision to set the fixed interest rate annually. This new fixed rate would also be based on the interest rate of 10-year Treasury bonds, but for at least the first year the rates for subsidized loans would stay at 3%. Because the White House plan does not include a cap on how high interest rates could go, five groups representing young voters—including the National Campus Leadership Council and Rock the Vote—released a joint statement condemning the plan in April.

“Students have never taken out federal student loans without a cap on how high interest can go,” they said in the joint statement. “The President stood with us by investing in higher education during his first term, and we’re concerned that his budget does not deliver the same investment this time around.”

Responding to the president’s Friday speech, House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement that there was plenty of room for compromise between the White House and Congress.

“The differences between the House plan and the president’s are small, and there’s no reason they cannot be overcome quickly,” the Ohio Republican said. “But today, rather than working to resolve the issue, the president resorted to a campaign stunt to try to score political points.”

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because Washington had a similar fight last year. That was when Congress first extended the law which keeps student loan rates fixed at 3.4%, after President Obama made an issue of it during the 2012 campaign. Though that law did lighten students’ debt burden a bit, it did little to slow the years-long explosion in student debt. This year, total student debt passed the $1 trillion milestone.

The massive debt burden a generation that is “not able to participate in consumer society in the way we’ve seen in previous generations,” said Landy in a separate phone interview. This creates a “sort of drain or drag on the economy.”

“They’re not being cars, they’re credit rating is so bad that they can’t do the things they want to … they’re not starting families, they’re not starting businesses,” he said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has proposed a third piece of legislation to deal with federal student loan rates. Called the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act, her bill would force the government to loan to students at the same rate that the Federal Reserve loans to banks: A rate currently as low as 0.75%.

American households lost $16 trillion in the recession, but have only recovered 45% of that wealth.

Younger, minority families suffered the most and have recovered the least, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found, whereas wealthy families with more significant savings recovered more easily.

For more on the report and families’ recovery, watch below.

“Yes, I am somewhat disappointed,” Frank said when asked by Alex Wagner if he was upset by recent efforts by conservatives and financial industry lobbyists to gut parts of the bill. ”On the other hand I think there is more progress being made, I think, than people sometimes realize and I am confident of this–we will have a good set of rules in place.”

Two recent magazine articles in The Nation and Washington Monthly have shone a spotlight on the efforts of industry lobbyists to scale back regulatory efforts.

When Alex Wagner noted that the banks are now bigger than ever before–the top four U.S. commercial banks: J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo own $7.8 trillion in assets, or about half the size of the entire U.S. economy–Franks said the size isn’t what mattered.

“Yes, they have gotten bigger, but in fairness to them they have gotten bigger in part because the government asked them to,” he said, noting that the Bush administration pushed for J.P. Morgan’s acquisition of Bear Stearns and Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch during the 2008 financial crisis.

“The critical statistic here is not how big they are, but how well regulated they are and how well capitalized they are,” he said. “ They are much better capitalized than they were before.”

“We’re going to talk about the need to increase wages,” he said. “We’re going to talk about growing inequality, the growing concentration of wealth at the top, and how that growing concentration is not just economic but also translates into political influence.”

This is the second time Ellison and other members of the Progressive Caucus have gone on tour to promote these issues. In the summer of 2011, the caucus launched the “Speak Out For Good Jobs Now” tour, in opposition to Republican-supported spending cuts. Citing lessons learned from the tour, Ellison re-introduced the Put America to Work Act in late June of that year. The legislation, intended to provide a $350 billion boost to state and local job creation efforts, died in committee.

This year, the tour will begin in the midst of what one Detroit-area organizer promised would be a “long, hot summer” for low-wage worker activism. Over the past six months, workers in low-wage retail and fast food jobs across the country have initiated an historic series of strikes against American business giants like Walmart and McDonald’s. While Ellison emphasized that the Progressive Caucus’ campaign was being planned before the first major fast food strike occurred in New York, he emphasized that he and his colleagues share a common cause with the striking workers in New York, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and other cities.

In March, Ellison co-sponsored the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which would raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour. While that’s more than the $9 minimum wage that President Obama has proposed, it doesn’t match the $15 base wage demanded by striking fast food workers. Speaking to MSNBC, Ellison said he would like to peg the minimum wage in private companies to the level of pay their CEOs and executives receive.

“If you look at the trends impacting the middle class,” Sanders said on Jansing & Co. Wednesday. “Median family income in this country has gone down by about $5,000 and most of the new jobs being created today are not good paying jobs, they’re low paying jobs, and perhaps more frightening, is we’re seeing more and more income and wealth inequality in America.”

Watch the full interview with Sanders here:

This week in Capitol Hill testimonies, Apple CEO Tim Cook found himself in front of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations answering questions about Apple’s subsidiary in Ireland that has managed to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Harris-Perry will dive into corporate money tactics with Stephen Lerner, organizer of the Wall Street Accountability campaign, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, author of The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use “Plain English” To Rob You Blind, and Yves Smith, the founder and creator of the blog Naked Capitalism.

We will also bring you the latest from tornado-stricken Moore, Oklahoma and delve into the politics behind our national response to disasters. We are a country not unaccustomed to the devastation left behind by natural disasters, from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to Hurricane Sandy’s effect on the eastern seaboard to last year’s tornado in Joplin, Missouri, and now the damage from this week’s EF-5 tornado, we know that the most important part of rebuilding is getting the necessary funds. Melissa will discuss the politically divisive process of getting these funds, FEMA and how we can better prepare out citizens for disasters.

Saturday’s show will also highlight a protest held this week held in front of the Justice Department’s headquarters by homeowners demanding the criminal prosecution of financial institutions involved in the foreclosure crisis. The protest resulted in close to 30 arrests and the use of Tasers on some of the participants. The housing crisis may be improving, but the demonstration of law enforcement this week is a telling reminder that not all is solved.

Be sure to read what we’ve linked above, and watch Melissa Harris-Perry Sunday at 10 a.m. EST on MSNBC. Also, don’t forget to join us on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #nerdland!

It’s not that women aren’t capable, Jones said in April at a University of Virginia panel discussion in front of students, “they are very capable,” but babies are a “killer” to a trader’s focus.

Jones posited that having children hurts the success of women just as traumatic emotional events, like divorce, affect male traders.

“As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it,” Jones said, recalling two women who worked with him in the late 1970s. “They both got married,” he said, “and then they both had—which in my mind is as big of a killer as divorce is—they both had children.”

The billionaire who tops the Forbes 400 list at number 108 said men aren’t affected by their children in this way.

“Every desire to understand what is going to make this go up or go down is going to be overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience,” he said, “which a man will never share, about a mode of connection between that mother and that baby.”

A video of a panel discussion obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“The emotional distraction that comes from divorce is so overwhelming,” he said. “You can just automatically subtract 10- to 20% from any manager if he is going through a divorce.”

Jones responded to the newspaper, saying “my off-the-cuff remarks at the University of Virginia were with regard to global macro traders, who are on-call 24/7 and of whom there are likely only a few thousand successful practitioners in the world today. Macro trading requires a high degree of skill, focus and repetition. Life events, such as birth, divorce, death of a loved one and other emotional highs and lows are obstacles to success in this specific field of finance.”

The Morning Joe panel discussed the comments with a panel of powerful women. Watch below.

In the United States, we’ve seen notable growth since the recession. We are very sluggishly moving back from the lows of the financial crisis. Even that modest progress stands in stark contrast to the rest of the world, which is, by and large, still suffering.

The major flaw of our recovery has not been the pace, although certainly it could have been much faster. Instead, the major flaw is distribution. The economy is growing, but corporations and the richest Americans are capturing the lion’s share of the proceeds from that growth. You’ve likely heard a lot about the one percent–in the first year of the recovery, they captured 93% of the income gains—but the story of America’s corporations is even more troubling.

We’ve seen systemic inequality in our country growing for decades, even before the latest financial crisis. Between 1979 and 2007, income for the top 1% grew by nearly 300%, while it grew by just 18% for the bottom quintile of earners. This is, of course, worrisome in itself, and not just as an economic problem. Our founders feared the political consequences of yawning inequality and class conflict, of allowing wealth to aggregate in the hands of the few. Referring to people who own property and those who don’t, James Madison wrote in 1787:

The most difficult of all political arrangements is that of so adjusting the claims of the two classes as to give security to each, and to promote the welfare of all.

We are seeing the consequences of systemic, growing inequality play out now in our politics. Inequality has been slowly corroding the basic project of collective governance for three decades. A more recent and perhaps even more troubling problem, though, is the aggregated prosperity of American corporations.

Neoliberal economic theorists will tell you that keeping corporate taxes low is good for the economy. The more money corporations have, they say, the more they will be able to reinvest in the economy, make new things, create new jobs and grow opportunity broadly for all. But that’s not what’s happening right now. Since the early 2000s, corporations are gobbling more cash than ever before, and rather than reinvesting it, they’re just sitting on it.

No one knows quite why. There are a number of plausible theories. Paul Krugman told Up in February that it may be as simple as this: corporations are “making so much money, they don’t know what to do with it.” At the end of 2012, for example, Apple had accumulated nearly $140 billion in cash, and was doing absolutely nothing with it.

In a consumption-based economy,  this trend is untenable. When people make money, they buy things; demand for products goes up, so companies make more products, hire more people, and so forth. That is the basic model upon which our economy is founded. But right now it is broken. A cog somewhere is not turning, but no one knows which cog it is.

In the meantime, corporate profits continue to soar. The higher corporate profits soar and the more cash corporations hoard, the less they reinvest in the economy. Workers, meanwhile, make less and less. The divergence between employee compensation and corporate profits, as illustrated in the chart above, is at an all-time high.

The economic and political consequences of this divergence cannot be overstated. One simple first step would simply be to try to re-capture some of those aggregated profits by raising taxes on corporations, and by taxing off-shore profits. Right now, we have a peculiar system that taxes the profits corporations make here on American soil, but allows them to pay only foreign taxes on profits they make overseas. Which brings us back to the story of Apple.

The moneyed class and their patrons in Washington are arguing that we can fix the corporate tax problem not by taxing off-shore profits, but by allowing corporations to repatriate those profits back to the U.S. without having to pay American taxes. They argue that bringing that money back to the U.S. will allow corporations to reinvest it in the economy. We may lose some potential tax revenue, they say, but we’d make up for it in all the new jobs and economic activity we would get.

Except, of course, the experience of the last decade or so tells us otherwise.

Apple argues that its off-shore profits should only be subject to off-shore taxes. As if those off-shore profits had nothing to do with America. Of course, they do. Apple may sell products across the world, but the company is based in America for a reason. Apple enjoys, indeed exploits, countless legal and economic benefits by operating in America, benefits Apple wouldn’t enjoy anywhere else: basic legal protections, a judiciary that safeguards and enforces the rule of law, an intellectual property regime that affords generous—in fact, overly broad—protections for new ideas and innovations, a world-class system of higher education, a (somewhat) open immigration policy, reliable security, an advanced infrastructure for business development, and countless other benefits  from operating in a functional, developed society with a genuine social contract.

As Elizabeth Warren famously put it, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” In the same way, there is no company in this country that got rich on its own. Corporations like Apple are hampering the economy and corroding our political system by hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. They owe the American people back payments.

Sal Gentile is a senior producer for Up w/ Steve Kornacki.