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President Obama plans to sign an executive order requiring that janitors, construction workers and others working for federal contractors be paid at least $10.10 an hour, using his own power to enact a more limited version of a policy that he has yet to push through Congress.

After a year of strikes and protests there’s a victory for many federal workers demanding that their government to pay them a living wage. President Obama in tonight’s State of the Union address will announce plans to sign an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay workers at least $10.10 an hour. The action affects workers currently earning less and will apply to new federal contracts.

Low-wage, federally-contracted janitors and construction workers will have a new minimum wage of $10.10 per hour, under an executive order announced by the White House Tuesday. Advocates said the full scope of the order, which will be formally announced during tonight’s State of the Union address, remains unclear, but could include hundreds of thousands of employees under future federal contracts. [...]

President Obama's promised executive order to raise the minimum wage for some government contract workers would likely affect less than half a million people and may face legal challenge.

What Obama is hoping is that his relatively narrow move will spur Congress to follow suit for all low-wage workers in the country.

During his State of the Union address tonight, President Obama will announce plans to issue an executive order giving a raise to low-wage workers on new federal contracts, a move that affects thousands of people in the Washington area, the White House says.

One of the more concrete actions President Obama can take tomorrow is announcing an executive order to raise the wages of federal contractors. As my colleagues, Amy Traub and Robbie Hiltonsmith found the federal government is the nation’s leading low-wage employer, with nearly two million private sector employees paid through federal contracts, grants, loans, concession agreements and property leases were paid $12 or less per hour.

Earlier this month, the New York Times and other media reported on a new study by Harvard financial economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. It concludes that the duration of the recovery from the 2007/08 recession and financial crisis is similar to historical recessions that were linked to financial panics. The recovery period is measured by a return to levels of GDP per capita in various countries over a long historic period.

When it comes to income inequality, Emmanuel Saez and Raj Chetty are two of the most important academics in the field. With professional clout, access to the best data, and a renewed public interest in the topic since Occupy Wall Street, the release of the Saez et al.