It’s a matter of saying this is a critical part of our infrastructure. It’s necessary to support families, it’s necessary to support our economy, and it’s necessary to make sure the people doing this work are not worried about feeding their own families. The problem is getting movement on that, getting the general public, and our legislators to support that in full.
Some of my colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute have done some estimates to help us understand what the harm is and what the loss is for not doing that. They’ve estimated that parents are foregoing $30-$35 billion in income and lost household income because they either have to leave the labor force, or reduce their hours.
KQED
July 30, 2021
Congress members disagree on how to pay for the bill, according to Rob Scott, Senior Economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
“The problem has been a reluctance to spend, a reluctance to tax, a desire to prioritize tax-cutting over all other priorities,” Scott said.
KSNT
July 30, 2021
Recent action “signifies a shift that I hope will then launch into a much broader proactive agenda,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, who served as the Labor Department’s chief economist during the Obama administration.
The Wall Street Journal
July 30, 2021
Nationwide, fewer young people are pursuing teaching careers. From 2008 to 2015, the number of college students earning education degrees fell 15 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Teacher retention may be an even bigger hurdle, with the turnover rate for teachers of color surpassing that of white teachers by 20 to 30 percent.
Boston Globe
July 30, 2021
As the Obama years drew to a close, the Economic Policy Institute observed astutely that the country had “suffered from rising income inequality and chronically slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans.”
The erosion of the middle class that has been in the making at least since the 1970s — when American workers stopped seeing their wages grow at a pace with their increasing productivity — was continuing. By August 2016, EPI reported that from 1973 until 2015, while productivity increased by more than 73%, hourly pay for workers went up only 11% — in other words, productivity grew by more than six times the rise in wages earned by workers.
Salon
July 30, 2021
During that time, wages rose with productivity. However, over the last 40 years, despite advancements in automation and technology, which increased worker productivity by nearly 70%, wages have increased less than 12%, the Economic Policy Institute has found.
Kent Ravenna Record-Courier
July 30, 2021
A recent report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute finds that the federal minimum wage is worth 21% less than it was in 2009.
Business Insider
July 30, 2021
In 2020, the data shows, the average C.E.O. of an S. & P. 500 company made $15.5 million—two hundred and ninety-nine times as much as the median-paid employee. Although we do not have directly comparable numbers going back in time, a forthcoming study by Lawrence Mishel and Jori Kandra of the Economic Policy Institute tracks the average C.E.O.’s pay and the average worker’s pay (and the ratio of one to the other) for the three hundred and fifty largest public companies in the United States. They estimate that, in 1978, the average C.E.O. made $1.7 million, adjusted for inflation, which was 31.4 times the average worker’s pay. Since that time, the share of all wages and salaries collected by the highest-earning one per cent of Americans has almost doubled, reaching its current level of about thirteen per cent. Roughly forty per cent of the people who make up that one per cent are executives, and their escalating compensation, Mishel and Kandra argue, has spilled over to other top managers in for-profit firms and large nonprofits alike. The power of example aside, today’s corporate executives frequently derive financial benefit from actions (outsourcing, downsizing, merging, defeating union drives) that directly or indirectly reduce pay and opportunity further down the line. In this way, too, executive pay has arguably been a significant driver, and not just a symptom, of rising inequality. That insight has led a growing number of local, state, and federal lawmakers to develop policy proposals that would reward or penalize companies based on their pay ratios.
The New Yorker
July 30, 2021
Cites EPI chart on retirement savings.
Washington Post
July 30, 2021