“I would be very surprised — I do not believe that that will be the sum total of what he is talking about on child care,” Elise Gould, an economist studying child care at the Economic Policy Institute, said of the package Biden revealed Wednesday. “But it’s pretty clear that if you’re going to invest in child care, yes, there are physical infrastructure needs — but it is an industry run by people who are providing that care, and we need to be investing in that workforce for the system to be high-quality and sustainable.”
Politico
April 9, 2021
Manchin, the moderate Democratic senator, voted against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though his state is one of the poorest in the nation and data from the Economic Policy Institute shows such an increase would boost the pay of some 250,000 residents by about $4,000 a year.
USA Today
April 9, 2021
Citing a study by the Economic Policy Institute, the Department of Energy further notes that the industry has one of “the highest indirect job employment multipliers, where one direct job leads to an additional 5.43 indirect jobs.” Put differently, for every job generated by the profitable production of oil and natural gas, there will be more than 5 jobs created in related industries. A 2015 study from the German government assessed that the similar economic multiplier from “green energy jobs” is around 2, or less than half the multiplier for the oil and gas industry.
Forbes
April 9, 2021
The top corporate tax rate has been falling since the early 1950s. In 2013, the Economic Policy Institute pointed out that this rate was 52 percent throughout the Eisenhower administration — 17 percentage points higher than the 2013 rate of 35 percent. The U.S. GDP grew by almost 4 percent annually in the 1950s, compared with a 1.8 percent growth rate in the 2000s. The Trump tax cuts that lowered the rate to 21 percent also make the case that economic growth is not linked to severe cuts in business taxes. After the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, only 4 percent of businesses increased hiring, according to a survey by the National Association for Business and the Economy. The Tax Policy Center found that the U.S. economy grew more slowly during the two years after the tax cuts than the two years before they took effect, and that business fixed investment was “slightly negative for the year, a sharp contrast to the nearly 5 percent real growth rate in 2017” before the tax cuts.
The Hill
April 9, 2021
The figures highlight the growing CEO pay gap, a problem among many public companies according to some investors and workers and even a few CEOs. In 2019, for example, the average pay ratio among 350 large American companies was 320-to-1, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. In 1989, the average was 61-to-1.
NBC News
April 9, 2021
The system is designed to make people feel bad about themselves. That’s how Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, described it to CNBC. And consider what that system is.
Almost 30% of Americans nearing retirement age have no access to a pension or employer retirement plan. 76% of all Americans fear they will not achieve a secure retirement. Everyone privately thinks that they’re screwing up, Morrissey added, and yet if everyone is screwing up, then it’s clearly a system flaw.
WBUR On Point
April 9, 2021
Indeed, Biden campaigned on a much more robust $775 billion caregiving plan that would subsidize child care programs, give child care workers raises, and provide free prekindergarten to 3- and 4-year-olds, among other things.
“I would be very surprised — I do not believe that that will be the sum total of what he is talking about on child care,” Elise Gould, an economist studying child care at the Economic Policy Institute, said of the package Biden revealed Wednesday. “But it’s pretty clear that if you’re going to invest in child care, yes, there are physical infrastructure needs — but it is an industry run by people who are providing that care, and we need to be investing in that workforce for the system to be high-quality and sustainable.”
Politico
April 9, 2021
National data from 2012 found that while 13% of teachers in affluent schools left that year — either to switch schools or exit teaching — 22% of teachers at high-poverty schools departed. Turnover is also substantially higher among special education teachers and teachers of color.
“There is a shortage that is much more acute in high-poverty schools,” said Emma García, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
Chalkbeat
April 9, 2021
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden fired Peter Robb, the Trump-appointed general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing federal labor law.
The Nation
April 9, 2021
“I think that number is pretty breathtaking, that nearly a quarter of unemployed workers have been unemployed for over a year,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor from 2014 to 2017.
“It really shows that even as the economy is recovering, you have a lot of the same people who have been unemployed throughout this whole damn thing,” she added.
CNBC
April 9, 2021