EPI in the news

• Top five economic issues facing middle class ahead of 2020 elections

  The slow growth in wages is the single biggest economic issue hampering middle-class families, according to Elise Gould, a senior economist at the left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute.

  “Many families are still feeling the after-effects of the Great Recession,” Gould told ABC News, referencing the downturn following the 2008 financial crash. “We’ve seen the economy grow greatly. … We’re still not seeing a full recovery in terms of wages and living standards.”

  “Most American families get their income from work,” she added. “So I think we need to strengthen work and the wages that they get.”

  WJNT | February 20, 2020
• How America’s retirement dream became a nightmare

  A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) makes it clear: The 401(k) plans Americans rely upon for retirement income are “inadequate and unequal,” and have increased gaps in retirement preparedness based on income, race, ethnicity, education and marital status. Moreover, the net worth of households approaching retirement fell by half in wake of the Great Recession and has only slightly improved since then.

  Greenwich Time | February 20, 2020
• SEC greenlights Dodd-Frank pay-ratio rule, backs internal whistleblowers

  However, proponents such as Economic Policy Institute President Lawrence Mishel said the rule is an important step toward greater corporate transparency.

  TechTarget | February 20, 2020
• Tom Steyer says sanders and Buttigieg can beat Trump but ‘I can take him down on the economy’

  “Last week’s GDP data showed that for the first time since the Great Recession [of 2008], investment has declined for three straight quarters,” Hunter Blair, a budget analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a February 4 blog post. “Given that boosting business investment was the primary stated goal of the TCJA, this seems like an unambiguous policy failure for working people, benefiting only the rich and corporations.”

  Newsweek | February 20, 2020
• Here is the tax burden on the richest 1% in every state

  And that’s just the federal share of taxes. To find the total tax burden on the top 1%, GOBankingRates analyzed 2019 data from the Tax Foundation on federal and state income tax rates for single filers and married couples filing jointly. The average annual income of the top 1% was sourced from the Economic Policy Institute. GOBankingRates then calculated both the effective and marginal tax rates on the top 1% in every state using an in-house calculator. The study also found how much the top 1% spends on sales taxes by looking at information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center. Property tax was excluded due to the lack of consistent data for home values of the top 1% in every state.

  GoBankingRates | February 20, 2020
• Kickstarter hired a law firm that advertises ‘maintaining a union-free workplace’

  “Not all management firms engage in the same kind of flagrant union busting practice that some large firms have developed,” Celine McNicholas, labor counsel at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a non-partisan economic policy think tank in Washington, DC, told Motherboard. “The good news is that the firms that do this work most aggressively tend to advertise and tend to be the firms you see attacking workers’ rights over and over again before the NLRB and in federal court.”

  “Like with all matters, if an employer wants to work with its workers and respect their rights, it can easily do so. It is not impossible to identify legal counsel to assist in that effort,” McNicholas, the labor counsel at EPI, continued.

  VICE | February 20, 2020
• Wells Fargo ends mandatory arbitration for sexual harassment claims

  The use of forced arbitration more than doubled from the early 2000s through 2018, with over 60 million Americans bound by it, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute; about 65% of firms with 1,000 or more workers use it.

  ThinkAdvisor | February 20, 2020

More EPI in the news