Elsewhere, Mike Konczal and Emily DiVito at the Roosevelt Institute, Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, and staff at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have all highlighted the important ways in which the American Rescue Plan significantly improved the lives of working families and achieved an historic economic recovery. And yet, each of these analyses also remind us that we cannot stop here.
Washington Center for Equitable Growth
March 18, 2022
Studies show that every unit of reduction in equality leads to a similar reduction in GDP. Economic Policy Institute research found income inequality slows U.S. economic growth by reducing demand by 2 percent to 4 percent. The Calvert Institute determined that a 1 percent increase in inequality leads to a 1.1 percent per capita GDP loss. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco researchers calculated that gender and racial gaps created $2.9 trillion in losses to U.S. GDP in 2019. And, Citi research concluded that eliminating racial disparity would add $5 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next five years.
Proxy Preview
March 18, 2022
The failure to adjust the minimum wage for inflation has eroded its value over time. Indeed, the Economic Policy Institute reports that as of 2021, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, was 21 percent lower than in 2009 and 34 precent lower than it was at its peak value in 1968. The minimum wage section of the American Rescue Plan Act was dropped before passage, but the proposal renewed the economic and policy debate about the situation of low-wage workers and the projected effects of increasing the minimum wage.
Nonprofit Quarterly
March 18, 2022
Given our current economic trajectory, you may find yourself wondering if your household is even in the middle class. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonprofit think tank that focuses on middle-income earners, has two tools that can help answer the question for you.
Fast Company
March 18, 2022
The updated document from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that teachers and school staff, bus drivers, firefighters, police and other local government workers – many of whom are women and/or people of color – benefit from having strong unions that represent them and their interests on the job. In other states that curtail public sector collective bargaining, however, larger wage gaps persist.
Teamsters
March 18, 2022
To compile the list, the researchers employed the “50-30-20” budget formula made popular by Senator Elizabeth Warren, in which 50 percent of income is allocated for unavoidable “needs,” like rent, groceries and utilities; 30 percent goes to “wants,” like eating out, alcohol and entertainment; and 20 percent goes to savings. The median costs of “needs” were culled from census surveys and the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator; “wants” came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey; and starter-home prices were derived from Zillow.
The New York Times
March 18, 2022
Still, Summers’s prediction that we’re headed for stagflation does seem pretty nuts. “He’s doing some damage to the history,” Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, told me. Stagflation was, practically speaking, a one-time event. There was a momentary recurrence during the first half of 2008, when oil prices spiked at the start of the Great Recession, but that “was so short that no one remembers,” Bivens said. (A consumption boom in China coincided briefly with falling Saudi production.) What people remember about the Great Recession isn’t inflation, but years and years of high unemployment and low wages.
The New Republic
March 18, 2022
Governors have certainly made trade-offs during the pandemic between the health of their populations and economic growth, said David Cooper, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Cooper noted that seven of the 10 states with the highest per capita deaths from Covid-19, including Oklahoma, had Republican governors.
The New York Times
March 18, 2022