Both Dean Baker and Josh Bivens weigh in Robert Samuelson’s outburst at the New York Times for saying that the government can too create jobs. (He went so far as to call it “flat-earth” thinking). Sadly, Samuelson’s attitude is widely shared — even, at least rhetorically, by Barack Obama.

“I don’t think people are going to come flooding back anytime soon,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “We’re just not going to quickly generate the job growth that would draw people in.”

That means the trickle of people re-entering the workforce is likely to be overwhelmed by the wave of retirees leaving it. If job growth picks up, the participation rate could tick up slightly, but only for a year or two, until demographic factors catch up.

The economic policy institute said that green jobs are growing faster than the overall economy and they are accessible to those without a college education.

Many economists agree that slashing government spending too quickly hurts economic growth. State and local austerity has deprived the economy of 2.3 million jobs over the past three years, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

“Growth rates this low will not reliably lower joblessness in the years to come,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director for the Economic Policy Institute.

Josh Bivens, research and policy director a the Economic Policy Institute, called the 2 percent, “too slow to support solid job growth.”

While almost everyone in politics, from presidential candidates to local elected leaders, takes the opportunity to praise teachers, it’s obvious they are rich on words but stop short when it comes to providing fair compensation. A 2011 Economic Policy Institute study revealed that teachers make 14 percent less, on average, than people in other professions requiring similar levels of education. This disparity would stand even wider if the study were to somehow quantify the exceptional level of dedication that teaching requires. This unfair dynamic is largely responsible for high turnover among quality teachers, and a devastating recruitment challenge when it comes to filling the big shoes left empty at the front of our classrooms.

Democrats are fighting for a tax “cut,” while Republicans are pushing for a tax increase. CNBC’s Hampton Pearson explains. Andrew Fieldhouse, Economic Policy Institute policy analyst; and Alex Brill, American Enterprise Institute, weigh in.

First, has China really stolen U.S. jobs? The numbers say yes. Since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, the U.S. trade deficit with China “eliminated or displaced more than 2.7 million U.S. jobs,” according to a report published in August by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank.

In a recent study, Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., pointed out that in the three years following the recessions of 1990 and 2000, the government sector added jobs. In the three years following the Great Recession, 627,000 government jobs were cut.

“These public-sector losses are dominated by austerity at the state and local level, with federal employment contributing only about 6 percent of this entire gap,” the researchers wrote. Jobs being cut as budgets tighten include those of police officers, firefighters or even the 293 teaching positions eliminated this school year in the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

Despite having enjoyed the benefit of government jobs her entire career — whether in the district attorney’s office and now as governor — Martinez hasn’t seemed to understand that, yes, government can, and should, create jobs. In fact, The New York Times quoted an Economic Policy Institute study in a recent editorial, “If not for state and local budget austerity, the report found, the economy would have 2.3 million more jobs today, half of which would be in the private sector.” Forget jobs, New Mexicans. We need to have another debate about driver’s licenses. And that, citizens, is two years wasted, a textbook case of opportunity cost.

No swing state has seen its economy hammered as hard as Ohio’s since the U.S. joined the WTO in 1994, with employment in the manufacturing sector plunging by one-third, according to the consumer protection nonprofit group Public Citizen. According to a study by economist Robert Scott with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think-tank, Ohio shed 91,800 jobs between 2001 and 2010 due to the rising trade deficit with China.

That means the economy suffers when government cuts back. A report by the Economic Policy Institute examined the effect of recent cutbacks at the state and local level — including direct loss of government jobs and indirect loss of suppliers’ jobs; the jobs that should have been added to keep up with population growth; and the reduction in purchasing power from other cutbacks. If not for state and local budget austerity, the report found, the economy would have 2.3 million more jobs today, half of which would be in the private sector.

“Labor is on the defensive,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Insitute, a liberal research and policy organization in Washington, D.C. “This could very well be a turning point if the people of Michigan affirm collective bargaining.”

The Economic Policy Institute also estimated the holiday’s expiration would deliver one of the fiscal cliff’s biggest hits to economic growth next year. In fact, EPI’s analysis found it does more damage to the economy per dollar than to the budget. For most parts of the fiscal cliff, the opposite was the case. So by keeping some parts of the fiscal cliff while canceling others — such as the payroll tax holiday expiration — damage to both the economy and the budget could be minimized.

EPI acknowledged that the payroll tax cut as it stands is not optimal stimulus. But it added, “optimal policy responses are hard to come by these days.”

“The initial stimulus deserves very high marks, but it could have been more effective with fewer tax cuts,” said Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization. “In some ways, it has to do with Obama’s political tactic of incorporating things he thinks the opposition wants thinking they would say yes. But, as we saw, they didn’t.”

According to the Economic Policy Institute, poverty is on the rise in the U.S. and the “poor are getting poorer.”  Despite great strides for poverty alleviation in Mexico (Slim’s home), a large part of the workforce, informal workers — defined as non-salaried workers who are self-employed — remain in poverty and are considered a “basic challenge to the country’s development.”

Is your job green?

Compared with the local, state and private sectors, the federal government has the highest percentage of green jobs.

That’s the word from the Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics data. EPI says 5.3 percent of federal jobs are considered green, compared with 4.9 percent of state jobs, 3.4 percent of local government jobs and 2.1 percent of private-sector gigs.

But what is a green job?

The EPI paper says green jobs “produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources.” But finding out if your job is green isn’t easy. Ethan Pollack, the report’s author, said BLS data indicate that public administration accounts for 82 percent of federal green jobs, leisure and hospitality about 9 percent and utilities about 6 percent.

Unfortunately, the report doesn’t give specific examples of green federal jobs.

“Public administration jobs can be office jobs, but not exclusively,” Pollack said by e-mail. “Remember, public administration is an industry rather than an occupation, so it doesn’t define what workers do on a day-to-day basis so much as it defines the types of organizations they work for.”

According to the Economic Policy Institute, households in the wealthiest 1 percent of the U.S. population now have 288 times the amount of wealth of the average middle-class American family.

A new study by the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, a research group in Washington, has found that the top 1 percent of households now hold a larger share of overall wealth than the bottom 90 percent does.

Seniors, especially, feel the effects of that, said Ross Eisenbrey, a labor- and employment-law expert and a vice president of the Economic Policy Institute. The CPI is used to calculate cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits, but it fails to account for the fact that a big portion of senior spending goes to health care, he said.

“Anyone who has the goal of having a better measure—a more technically accurate measure—of what the effects of inflation are on the Social Security population would want to much more heavily weigh health than the CPI-U does,” he said.

Some economists even have found that Romney’s budget plan would destroy jobs, not create them, when taking into account his plan to slash government spending by 18 to 26 percent. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that Romney’s budget plan would destroy 1.9 million jobs over the next two years. The left-leaning Center for American Progress estimated in a report released Tuesday that Romney’s plan would destroy at least 360,000 jobs next year alone.

In addition, median middle-class income decreased by 5 percent in the last decade, while total wealth dropped 28 percent. According to the Economic Policy Institute, households in the wealthiest 1 percent of the U.S. population now have 288 times the amount of wealth of the average middle-class American family.

Ethan Pollack, senior policy analyst, Economic Policy Institute – Obama’s biggest challenge is to reclaim the label of change. At the last debate he really came across as the status quo, while Romney came across as a change agent. Obama must do a better job of linking Romney to past failed policies (i.e., Bush) and presenting a coherent second-term agenda. The agenda doesn’t need to be ambitious, but Obama just needs to sound excited when talking about it.

Romney needs to build on his momentum by making few mistakes (i.e., no $10,000 bets) and continuing his relentless attacks on Obama while still sounding more disappointed than angry.

The report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, attributes the widening gap between top and average incomes in Michigan to a decline over the same period in collective bargaining. It comes as Michigan weighs a ballot initiative — Proposal 2 — to protect collective bargaining rights in its constitution.

History has demonstrated that investment in higher education is indeed sound. The unemployment rate for young high school graduates last year was just over 31% compared to just over 9% for young college graduates, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And the U.S. Census reports that lifetime earnings of college graduates exceed those of high school graduates by more than a million dollars.

“I don’t see choice as a panacea,” says Richard Rothstein of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. He says Obama has hitched his education agenda to privately run, publicly funded charter schools, despite their poor record.

“We know now that charter schools for disadvantaged children don’t perform any better on average than regular public schools … in fact, they perform slightly worse on average,” Rothstein says.

Andrew Fieldhouse, an analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, dismissed Ryan’s economic prescriptions as “supply-side snake oil.” He noted that Ryan held fast to the ticket’s repeated claim that its tax cuts and elimination of taxes wouldn’t lead to a bigger deficit, tax increases for the middle class, or tax cuts for the wealthy.

“This combination of promises is demonstrably mathematically impossible, and the onus remains on the Romney-Ryan campaign to prove their tax cuts will not blow a bigger hole in the deficit,” he said.

The recession was especially tough for low-wage earners, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Low-wage workers are “replaceable, essentially,” she said. They “need a tight labor market to negotiate for higher wages.”

As the Economic Policy Institute points out in the latest edition of The State of Working America, “Productivity grew 80.4 percent between 1973 and 2011, when, as noted, median worker pay grew just 10.7 percent.” However you feel about President Obama’s economic policies, they are unlikely to have done very much damage to the wages of workers in the 70s. Instead, wages have suffered in thanks in large part to policies which the Republican Party still vigorously supports: namely, keeping the minimum wage low and suppressing the power of unions.