The researchers acknowledge that CEOs are highly compensated — both in their job, and when they leave. CEOs make 320 times the typical worker, according to separate data from the Economic Policy Institute.
MarketWatch
March 15, 2021
A study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that having $15 per hour minimum wage by 2025 would impact poverty in terms of tax credits and federal assistance programs. The study estimated a drop in public assistance programs between $13.4 and $31 billion.
“These large wage increases would disproportionately raise the incomes of families at the bottom of the income distribution and would meaningfully reduce the number of families in poverty,” the EPI study stated.
Money spent on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would drop by $5.2 billion and $10.3 per year, according to the EPI study.
Ohio Capital Journal
March 15, 2021
“Even though revenue shortfalls maybe aren’t as dire as we thought they were going to be, I don’t think we fully understand what the needs are going to be over the next few years,” says David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “We know that there are lots of people who are without jobs, who are struggling to pay their bills, to buy food, to afford rent or their mortgage. The public service needs that are going to exist over the next few years are going to be much more demanding than I think we might have anticipated at the beginning of a pandemic.”
Cooper also says places that seem OK now — like D.C. — could face challenges in the coming years, especially if office workers don’t return to the city in full force.
DCist
March 15, 2021
“State and local austerity in the aftermath of the Great Recession was just devastating to the economy; it delayed the recovery by more than four years,” says Heidi Schierholz, an economist with the labor-aligned Economic Policy Institute. “[Avoiding] that will just be super important for setting up the recovery.”
The Atlantic
March 15, 2021
“If we think about in the last year, there probably would have been reasonable job growth as there had been in the months leading up to the pandemic recession,” Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said.
Business Insider
March 15, 2021
HCA CEO Sam Hazen was paid $27 million in 2019, making him the highest paid CEO in the hospital sector for that year (2020 figures will be released in mid-March). Hazen’s 2019 compensation was higher than the CEO of Humana, $16.7 million. His pay is 478 times the median HCA employee, up from 383 times in 2018. His pay is over 1,038 times the lowest paid worker at HCA, which is $12.50 at its El Paso facility. Hazen is paid roughly $13,000 an hour. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average ratio of U.S. CEO pay to median worker was 320 to 1 in 2019.
Truthout
March 15, 2021
JESSICA SMITH: But the president and progressives did not get everything they wanted. The Senate stripped the minimum wage hike from the package, tightened the eligibility for stimulus checks, and reduced the weekly boost to unemployment benefits.
HEIDI SHIERHOLZ: It’s not perfect. There’s still work to be done, but it will make a huge difference. It’s one of the reasons I’m quite optimistic about the chances for a relatively quick bounce back.
Yahoo Finance
March 15, 2021
Features interview with Valerie Wilson.
CNBC
March 15, 2021
“There are a million ways it feels like a game-changer,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “It is such a departure in how we deal with relief. We have not done things this way before, and we have suffered because of it.”
According to Shierholz, whereas the relief bills that addressed the Great Recession more than a decade ago included cost-cutting and austerity, with some of the budget cuts falling on states and local governments, the new relief bill avoids some of those mistakes.
“So then state and local governments became these little anti-stimulus machines because they are making cuts all over the place, and those cuts in the aftermath of the Great Recession delayed the recovery by four years,” she said. “We are going to get relief now while the labor market is still weak, and we are setting the economy up for as fast as a bounce-back as possible when the virus is under control.”
Washington Post
March 15, 2021