Social Security remains most boomers’ hope for retirement income. On average, U.S. workers are beginning to take their Social Security benefits at age 63.8. That average fell by more than five years between 1945 and 1970. After that, though, the average has stayed fairly stable, noted Monique Morrissey, an economist who wrote “The Myth of Early Retirement” last year.

But Morrissey cautions against measuring “retirement” by Social Security take-up rates alone. Forty-five percent of eligible Social Security households continue to earn money from a job or jobs.

“Who is expected to gain confidence from rising share prices? Presumably the dreaded one-percenters — the most likely group to personally own stocks. Or maybe we should expand that to the ten-percenters, who, according to the Economic Policy Institute, own 81 percent of our stock market.”

EPI health policy director Elise Gould explained to Kaiser Health News’s Phil Galewitz how health reform has been essential to reducing the uninsurance rate among young adults, as it allows them to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26. “I have no other explanation for that decline than the health law because the economy has not been particularly kind to that age group, and it’s not likely that they all got great jobs,” said Gould.

“Politicians of both parties have supported bills aimed at ending Chinese currency manipulation. The topic also could appeal to an electorate hurting for jobs. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimated earlier this month that the U.S. had lost more than 2.7 million jobs over 10 years as a result of its trade deficit with China.”

In a video segment for Reuters, EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey commended the United States for filing another trade case against China, with the latest complaint focused on China’s illegal subsidies to exporters of auto parts. “Waiting any longer [to take action] would have been bad for U.S. workers,” said Eisenbrey.

Health experts credit a provision in the federal health law which took effect in September 2010, which allows families to keep adult children on their health plans until age 26. The Obama administration said about 3 million people have gained coverage from this provision.

“I have no other explanation for that decline than the health law because the economy has not been particularly kind to that age group, and it’s not likely that they all got great jobs,” said Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute.

“Austerity will increase poverty both through cuts in programs, like unemployment insurance extensions, and through job loss,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank based in Washington.

For a more detailed examination, see the Economic Policy Institute’s new edition of The State of Working America (pp. 99-106). The authors attribute fully one-third of the one percent’s doubling of U.S. income share since 1979 to the shift from capital to labor. That’s money that used to go to working people.

“We got just enough job growth to keep up with population growth, but not enough to start digging us out of the hole left by the Great Recession,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research center.

The recent unemployment rate among 20-to-24-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees was 9 percent. And the Economic Policy Institute found that 19.1 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed — meaning they’ve settled for part-time work or jobs far below those they expected to get with a bachelor’s degrees.

Middle-income workers have endured a “lost decade” of stagnant wages and are teetering on the brink of another, the consequence of both the recent recession and a long series of policy choices that have eroded their leverage in the job market, according to a report.

In its 12th edition of the “State of Working America,” the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, points out that inflation-adjusted pay has slipped for most workers — including college graduates — over the past decade.

With the nation’s unemployment rate at 8.1 percent and projected to remain unusually high for several years, there will be little pressure for employers to increase pay for many workers, the report added.

The rich are getting even richer as most other Americans fall behind.

Households in the wealthiest one percent were 288 times richer than the median American household in 2010, possessing an average net worth of $16.4 million. In contrast, the median American household had a net worth of $57,000 in 2010. That’s according to “The State of Working America,” a report released Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, reprises all the familiar findings about how the working class can’t keep up these days. But it also contains some important findings related to economic mobility—the ability to improve your own socioeconomic standing—which is something that anybody worried about the fragile state of the middle class ought to be paying attention to. The availability of opportunity and the belief in self-improvement are core tenets of the American Dream, and Americans have long found ways to get ahead, no matter what the aggregate data say.

Except, perhaps, for now. The EPI report includes data showing that more Americans are staying stuck in the socioeconomic stratum they’re born into, which means fewer people are moving up and those at the top are staying put. This might not be much of a problem if incomes were rising substantially at every level, and overall living standards were improving. But that’s not what’s happening.

A new report shows that the One Percenters have grown even further removed from the rest of America.

The report, from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, shows that the average wealth of the top one percent is now 288 times the median wealth for Americans.

That number is up more than 50 percent since 2007, up 85 percent since 1989 and nearly double the levels of 1962. The chart uses Federal Reserve data and analysis from Edward Wolff, the wealth expert and economics professor at NYU.

The Economic Policy Institute today releases online the 12th edition of its invaluable survey text, The State of Working America, by Lawrence Mishel, Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, and Heidi Shierholz. EPI is a liberal nonprofit, but its economic analysis is respected by mainstream academic economists who follow trends in employment, income, and income inequality, and the new volume, like previous editions, is full of interesting information and persuasive analysis. (My only quibble would be that it ought to include educational failure among the government-caused—or at least government-unsolved—problems contributing to income inequality. Like EPI, I consider the U.S.’s elevated income inequality relative to other nations to be largely the result of government policy.)

The wealth gap between the richest Americans and the typical family more than doubled over the past 50 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

It found that the top 1% had 125 times the net worth of the median household as of 1962. But by 2010, the disparity reached 288 times.

The institute cited two trends: More wealth finding its way to the high end of the demographic spectrum, while people in the middle class were seeing their cash grow more scarce.

According to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest 1 percent of American households had a net worth 288 times as large as the median household wealth of $57,000 in 2010. This constitutes a huge increase from 1962, when the ratio was 125-1:

Between 1921 and 2008, the top 10% and the bottom 90% shared income gains equally. The split was 50-50 exactly, according to a new fun interactive graphic built by the Economic Policy Institute with data from economist Emmanuel Saez.

But between 1971 and 2008, real income declined for the bottom 90%. All the growth went to the top 10%, and more than half went to the top percentile.

Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, said that’s been an especially big problem in the past few years, because jobs have been so scarce.

“If you lost your job in 1999, you were pretty much able to find a job that was similar to the one you lost,” she said. “But right now, if you lost your job in the Great Recession or its aftermath, you just got slammed in your wages.”

The unemployment rate for young adults rose to 16.8% from 16.4% in July.

“I don’t think they’re more lazy. It’s that there are less opportunities for them,” said Heidi Shierholz, labor economist, at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “They have it rough.”

The job market is “still so weak that it kicks people out or discourages people from coming into the labor force,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

All in all, a higher minimum wage would probably lead to a rise in pay for lower-income workers in general and a decline in inequality.
The 1980s help make that case in reverse. The federal minimum did not change from 1981 to 1990, causing its inflation-adjusted value to fall 30 percent during that time. Wages in the bottom of the income distribution fell sharply, even more sharply than they have in the last decade. The inflation-adjusted wage of a worker at the 20th percentile of the distribution dropped 9.5 percent from 1981 to 1990, according an analysis of government data in the forthcoming book “The State of Working America, 12th Edition,” by the Economic Policy Institute.

Workers across the country experience a “union premium” — an increase in wages for workers who belong to a labor union compared to workers who are not organized. That premium amounted to $1.24 per hour last year, a 17.3 percent premium. And according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, union membership is even more important for African American and Latino workers, whose union premiums exceed that of white workers.

Race, apparently, is a factor in the unemployment rate of college graduates as well. Figures from the Economic Policy Institute state that, while improving over the last year, the unemployment rate for Black college graduates is still nearly 11 percent, compared to 8.7 percent for white graduates.

From 1948 to 1973, the productivity of all nonfarm workers nearly doubled, as did average hourly compensation. But things changed dramatically starting in the late 1970s. Although productivity increased by 80.1 percent from 1973 to 2011, average wages rose only 4.2 percent and hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) rose only 10 percent over that time, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute.

The average household income for working families headed by someone under 65 has been on a downhill slide for more than a decade. The data, which can include multiple wage-earners but excludes people living alone, comes from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank whose annual “State of Working America” will be released next week.

“The labor market never really recovered during the 2000s,” said Josh Bivens, the chief labor market economist at EPI. “Unemployment may have reached 4 ½ percent by 2007, but if you look at the employment to population ratio, it never reached its late 1990s peak.”

And that was before households got hammered by the downturn. Average income fell by more than seven percent or nearly $5,000 between 2007 and 2010. Though data for households isn’t available for last year, there’s no way families made up much of that ground with unemployment stuck above 8 percent, Bivens said.

Josh Bivens looks at stagnant income growth for working-age families. “Median income for working-age families… measures the income of the household that is in the exact center of the income distribution; they have higher income than half of all working-age families and lower income than the other half. The chart focuses on working-age households because they are the ones most affected by the wage stagnation and eroded employment opportunities that have been evident over this decade. The poor labor market performance of the last decade has clearly damaged the incomes of these working-age families. These incomes never recovered their 2000 peak during the recovery and expansion that followed the 2001 recession. They then fell precipitously following the onset of the Great Recession, declining more than 7 percent ($4,926) between 2007 and 2010.”

But the remaining 4.7 million jobs and another 5 million that would have been created in an otherwise sound economy mean that the country is operating at a deficit of 9.7 million jobs, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research center.

A worker on minimum wage earns $15,080 a year, far below the federal poverty threshold of $19,090 for a family of three. It’s true that the low-wage workforce includes teenagers and people who live in households with other income earners. But a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute found that fewer than one-third of low-wage earners live in households with incomes over $50,000.

The winners instead have been the nation’s top 1 percent, who between 1979 and 2007 saw their annual earnings grow 156 percent, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. In 1980, compensation for chief executives at some of the nation’s largest companies was 42 times the pay of the average worker; now it’s more than 300 times.