The Economic Policy Institute notes that income inequality in the United States has been worsening for years: “From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5%. … In contrast, wages for the typical worker grew by just 11.9%.” Our level of income inequality is now closer to that of developing countries in Africa and Latin American than to our European allies.
The Washington Post
May 5, 2021
But are unemployment payments the culprit here? “It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as a real driving factor,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. “There is basically a lever employers can pull if they truly are facing a labor shortage of some kind: They can pay more to either attract new workers into the labor force or poach workers who are already in the labor force.”
Shierholz noted there have yet to be signs of significant wage growth in the industries where workers are purported to be in severe shortage, and that previous data during the pandemic and the 2008 economic recession demonstrated that expanded unemployment benefits had minimal to no impact on whether workers returned to work.
The American Prospect
May 5, 2021
“There are lots of anecdotal reports swirling around about employers who can’t find workers,” Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a Tuesday op-ed. “But a closer look reveals there may be a lot less to this than meets the eye.”
Shierholz said that while there may be bona fide labor shortages in some pockets of the country, there are still too few jobs for too many unemployed workers.
“In the latest data on job openings, there were nearly 40 percent more unemployed workers than job openings overall, and more than 80 percent more unemployed workers than job openings in the leisure and hospitality sector,” she said.
She added that those businesses should raise wages to attract more workers, particularly because service jobs “are inherently more stressful and potentially dangerous because workers now have to deal with anti-maskers and ongoing health concerns.”
The Hill
May 5, 2021
Biden’s plans amount to a massive gamble that Democratic efforts to double down on government redistribution of wealth and resources won’t trigger a backlash. Elise Gould, economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the pandemic revealed “a tale of two economies,” starting with the substantially higher infection and death rates of Black, Latino, and Asian people in the US compared with Whites.
“Just the sheer numbers of people who have died and gotten seriously ill and seeing the disparities in those numbers — I think makes it difficult not to do something and not to do something big to fix this.”
Business Insider
May 3, 2021
The U.S. and other market economies should create a “reciprocal” trade remedy program to combat unfair foreign trade practices, Casey said on Friday.
“We should consider working with allies to create a common defense against illegal subsidies from nonmarket economies like China,” the Senate Finance Committee member said at a virtual event hosted by the Economic Policy Institute. “This could mean establishing reciprocal remedies against trade distortions, such as illegal subsidies. Measures could be limited scope, such as anti-dumping or countervailing duties on goods from these nonmarket economies.”
Politico Morning Trade
May 3, 2021
In a virtual talk hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, Mr. Casey reiterated many of his long-standing policy issues — from addressing age discrimination to expanding Medicaid to blocking cheap Chinese imports — framed in the context of legislative action this spring.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
May 3, 2021
According to EPI’s research, CEO compensation jumped 14 percent from 2018 to 2019. Lawrence Mishel, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, said the increased CEO pay seen at various casino companies last year was largely due to the stock market’s rapid recovery over the course of the pandemic, since a majority of executive compensation comes from cashing out stock options or stock grants.
Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 3, 2021
- The unemployment rate is 10.3% among 20- to 24-year-olds, and 13.3% among 18- to 19-year-olds, compared with the 5.3% unemployment among those over 25.
“We’re still in a huge hole,” says Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute. “We are far from being recovered now.”
Axios
May 3, 2021
Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., applauds these programs because of the heightened risks that Black-owned businesses face.
“Even before the pandemic, Black-owned businesses had less of a cushion to withstand a downturn because their owners financed the businesses with their savings or funds from their families and friends,” Wilson says in a phone interview.
Although less than 10 percent of all U.S. businesses are Black-owned, they are more likely to be in vulnerable industries. One estimate, Wilson says, showed that 40 percent of the revenues of Black-owned businesses are earned in the five most vulnerable sectors—including leisure, hospitality, and retail—compared with 25 percent of the revenues of all U.S. businesses.
“Black-owned businesses also faced barriers in obtaining PPP loans because they didn’t have a relationship with a bank before the pandemic,” she explains. “Large, publicly traded corporations were the first to get the loans so that the $349 billion originally allocated was quickly depleted.”
The Progressive
April 30, 2021
The $15 minimum wage for federal contract work Nelson refers to comes via an executive order issued this week. It offers a major pay bump for the workers whose minimum wage currently sits at $10.95 — the Economic Policy Institute estimates it will impact 390,000 federal workers.
Jacobin
April 30, 2021