In the current political environment, it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to trade deficits, job losses and China. To help cut through all the noise, the Economic Policy Institute conducted an extensive study of U.S.-China trade data to determine the net amount of job losses across America. Data from the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb was conformed to Bureau of Labor Statistics industry classifications to determine the results, which were further parsed by state and by Congressional district.
GO Banking Rates
June 17, 2021
But there’s been pushback from economists like Heidi Shierholz of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, who wrote in the New York Times last week that states “cutting pandemic programs are weakening their own recoveries,” and that higher wages, not ending benefits, could solve perceived issues with worker shortages.
CNN Business
June 17, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO take-home pay grew by around 1,200 percent from 1978 to 2019. Meanwhile, the compensation for typical workers grew by 13.7 percent.
New York Magazine
June 17, 2021
But there’s another matter, which is pay. Some companies just aren’t ponying up enough to attract workers. Plenty of people, including Democrats, point to the $300 a week stimulus checks (on top of state insurance of course) as being a deterrent to workers coming back on payroll. “I do think unemployment insurance benefits could be having some effect,” says Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “We know low wage employers have a lot of capacity to suppress wages, and when workers have another option and aren’t totally desperate to take a job no matter how sh***y, unemployment insurance may be playing a role to some extent.”
Yahoo Finance
June 17, 2021
And the economy is not in our favor. Though we’re the largest part of the workforce, young Millennials own less than 5 percent of the wealth in the United States. When Baby Boomers were in their 20s, they controlled about 21 percent. According to the Economic Policy Institute, from 1979 to 2019, productivity rose 72 percent in the U.S. while hourly pay increased only roughly 17 percent.
The Atlantic
June 17, 2021
These permanent losses are likely to prolong the country’s economic recovery, our Megan Cassella has reported. While a furloughed worker is likely to get their job back with businesses returning to normal operations following widespread vaccination and relaxed health restrictions, “a permanently laid-off worker has to wait for an employer to create a new job, then apply and get matched with the right one,” Megan explained.
IN OTHER WORDS… “Those jobs, that labor demand, went away when those businesses closed,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department, told MS in an email. “It will take a little time for new businesses to be formed to take the place of businesses that were lost. So at this point, there are still not nearly enough jobs to go around; right now we still primarily have a labor demand problem.”
Politico Morning Shift
June 17, 2021
Getting workers in the right jobs, those that they’ll stay in, is better for them and for the economy. And, in most industries, “there are still more unemployed people than there are job openings,” said David Cooper with the Economic Policy Institute. One exception is leisure and hospitality, where businesses are struggling to hire. But he says that’s to be expected in a low-wage industry that’s seeing a surge in demand.
“Even in the best of circumstances, it’s going to take time for employers to staff up,” Cooper said.
NPR Marketplace
June 17, 2021
Obviously, it’s going to be a hardship for some. They are losing money that might have been helping to pay the rent or to buy groceries. In some instances, they might be forced into taking a job they don’t feel comfortable at and possibly missing out on a job that would be a better fit down the road. To be sure, some people might find jobs right now that are going to be very satisfying.
But Elise Gould, who’s with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, says she doubts this experiment is actually going to result in a lot more people going back to work more quickly than they otherwise would.
ELISE GOULD: Those workers and their families are all of a sudden going to lose a vital lifeline without really having any safety net behind them. I think it’ll be interesting to see what happens in terms of filling jobs in those states versus the states that have continued to provide that support to workers and their families. And I would be very surprised if we see much a difference.
NPR
June 17, 2021
Critics of sky-high CEO pay, like the Economic Policy Institute, say the enormous compensation packages are “a major contributor to rising inequality that we could safely do away with.”
“This escalation of CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally, has fueled the growth of top 1.0% and top 0.1% incomes, leaving less of the fruits of economic growth for ordinary workers, ” EPI said in a report released last year.
Business Insider
June 17, 2021