Research is increasingly demonstrating that investing in high-quality prekindergarten programs provides a wide array of significant benefits to children, families, and society as a whole, including job creation, inequality reduction, education and health care improvements, and reduced crime rates. The new EPI book, Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation: Public Investment in High-Quality Prekindergarten by Robert G. Lynch, examines the costs and benefits of either targeted or universal prekindergarten programs and shows the positive effects these programs have on the economy, federal and state budgets, crime, and the educational achievement of children and future earnings of adults.

NEW EPI STUDY: Costly Trade With China
The current U.S.-China trade relationship is bad for both countries. The rise in the U.S. trade deficit with China between 1997 and 2006 has displaced production that could have supported over 2 million U.S. jobs and was responsible for 42.6% of the United States’ total, non-oil trade deficit in 2006. While the United States piles up foreign debt, loses export capacity, and faces a more fragile macroeconomic environment, China has become dependent on the U.S. market to generate jobs, has suppressed its wages by repressing labor rights, and has held hundreds of billions of hard-currency reserves in low-yielding, risky assets. The new EPI Briefing Paper, Costly Trade With China by Robert Scott, details how this is by far the United States’ most imbalanced trading relationship.

• EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey participated in a press conference call on April 30 with Sen. Tom Harkin and the Campaign for America’s Future on how the Employee Free Choice Act will lead to greater health insurance and pension coverage for millions of U.S. workers.  Eisenbrey also had an op-ed, “Subsidizing downward mobility,” published by The American Prospect Online on April 17 detailing the problems with wage insurance.
• EPI economist Elise Gould contributed a lengthy article reviewing several new health policy books to the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The article, titled “The Health-Care Finance Debate Reaches a Fever Pitch,” appeared in the April 13 issue.
• EPI co-founder and former president Jeff Faux contributed an op-ed to The Hill on April 18 on the need for a pause on free trade.
• EPI President Lawrence Mishel testified about the importance of unions for American workers on March 27 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Agenda for Shared Prosperity forum
The next Agenda for Shared Prosperity forum will be held on May 24 with a focus on family-workplace policies. Audio, video, and printed reports for all of the previous forums can all be found on the site’s events page.