The survey results followed a report released late last month by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Economic Policy Institute that suggests leaving the field could lead to a pay boost. Sylvia Allegretto, a senior economist at CEPR and research associate at EPI, found that “in 2025, the teacher pay penalty stood at an estimated 25.2%—meaning teachers earned about a quarter less than comparable college graduates in other professions.”
Common Dreams
September 3, 2026
The average cost of child care is $15,394 a year in New York, the sixth-most expensive state in the nation, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute. A typical family in New York would have to spend 39.8% of its income on child care for an infant and a 4-year-old, according to the report. Child care costs in New York City are even higher.
The Center Square
September 3, 2026
The Social Security Administration’s actuaries analyze the trust fund’s solvency over a 75-year period. When policymakers implemented the 1983 amendments to the program, the actuaries knew the changes would help keep the program solvent, “but they knew eventually it would need changes,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
MarketWatch
September 3, 2026
More and more stuff just seems to be out of their grasp, because their wages have not kept up,” Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, …
Bangor Daily News
September 3, 2026
Billions of Alabama tax dollars are being spent on mass deportation. It’s enough to fund nearly 10,000 new teacher salaries in the state, or 12,000 firefighters, or 8,000 nurses.
That’s according to a new tool from the Economic Policy Institute. Its Cost of Deportations Calculator shows how much federal tax money from nearly every area in the nation is set to be spent on mass deportation during President Donald Trump’s second term.
AL.com
September 3, 2026
Definitions of what makes a working-class voter differ depending on who you ask. If it’s education — those who have less than a bachelor’s degree — then nearly half of the working class is women; in parts of the country, most of them are also people of color, said Valerie Wilson, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute who has studied working-class people. If working-class voters are those working low-wage jobs, then they are already majority women, who occupy two-thirds of the 40 lowest-paid occupations.
“The sort of traditional view of ‘working class’ was a White man in a hard hat, a construction worker, maybe someone who was in manufacturing,” Wilson said. That’s gone now as those jobs have disappeared and service-sector jobs dominated by women have become the primary field for people without college degrees.
19th News
September 3, 2026
A new Economic Policy Institute report finds workers in the 26 states with right-to-work laws earn nearly 7% less on average than those in states without them, a gap that has more than doubled over the last decade.
“Right-to-work is kind of a misnomer,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute who co-authored the report.
Gould said these laws do not offer workers any job protections.
“Instead, what they do is prohibit any requirement that workers covered by union contract either join the union or contribute toward the cost of union representation,” she said.
Marketplace
September 3, 2026
The signatories range from environmental, labor, and legal groups to those focused on faith, housing, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom, and more. They include the ACLU, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Drug Policy Alliance, Economic Policy Institute, Giffords, Greenpeace USA, Human Rights Campaign, Indivisible, National Education Association, Oxfam America, Public Citizen, and Union of Concerned Scientists.
Common Dreams
September 2, 2026
The Economic Policy Institute projected in July 2025 that if deportations reach the scale Trump promised, millions of citizen workers will in fact lose their jobs along with deported immigrants, due to the economic interdependence of citizens and noncitizens in the workplace. If 3.3 million immigrant jobs are destroyed, the EPI argues, 2.6 million citizen jobs will be too. Construction and child care labor sectors would especially decline.
Brooklyn Rail
September 2, 2026
2,$358 is what it costs each American taxpayer on average to finance this analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Putting that amount into perspective would mean, according to the same institute, funding more than 925,000 teachers or healthcare for more than 5 million veterans or Medicaid for almost 12 million people.
N+ Univision
September 2, 2026