Companies have the cash to grow, but with wealth and income skewed to the top, “there’s not enough customers to buy the new output,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg
April 1, 2021
According to one analysis of work schedules between 2017 and 2018 by the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute, only around 20% of Black workers are able to work remotely, as compared to 30% of white employees and 37% of Asian employees.
Yahoo Finance
April 1, 2021
One is Heidi Shierholz, who served as chief economist to Obama’s secretary of Labor. “If my 2010 self could see just how different we’re handling this recovery than we handled that one — when we were just pulling our hair out, because Congress was turning towards austerity when the unemployment rate was literally over 9% — it was just an outrageous approach to the recovery at that time.”
Shierholz, who is now director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, noted that decade saw an “incredibly weak and slow” economic recovery, which she attributed to Congress not providing the kind of fiscal relief that would have boosted aggregate demand to get the economy going, “and we are not making that mistake this time.”
Business Insider
April 1, 2021
Spending on investment outside of housing rose an average of 3.4% a year from 2000 through 2019, down from 5.2% the prior two decades and a heady 7.2% in the 1960s — when tax rates were substantially higher.
Companies have the cash to grow, but with wealth and income skewed to the top, “there’s not enough customers to buy the new output,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg
March 30, 2021
A recent report by the liberal Economic Policy Institute found Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders saw the biggest increase of any group in state unemployment rates compared to white, Black and Hispanic workers from the first quarter of 2020 through the fourth quarter.
Asian American unemployment rose by 4.6 percentage points in the states where EPI was able to estimate it, compared with 3.9 percentage points for Hispanic and Black workers and 2.3 percentage points for white workers.
The EPI estimates are based on a survey conducted monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics but use numbers modeled at the state level by state labor departments.
New York, Virginia, and Hawaii — which saw its crucial tourism industry hit hard by the pandemic — all saw Asian American joblessness jump the most in the EPI report. In California, the jump was the second largest of any group.
MarketWatch
March 30, 2021
Features interview with Elise Gould.
In November 2020, the Economic Policy Institute estimated 25 million American workers are either unemployed, underemployed or have pulled out of the workforce entirely, many of whom are low-wage earners.
Could a heated economic recovery pull these workers back into the labor force? Or will America’s most vulnerable workers be left behind?
1A
March 30, 2021
“If my 2010 self could see just how different we’re handling this recovery than we handled that one — when we were just pulling our hair out, because Congress was turning towards austerity when the unemployment rate was literally over 9% — it was just an outrageous approach to the recovery at that time,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist to Obama’s secretary of Labor, told Insider. “And so this is just incredibly different.”
Business Insider
March 29, 2021
“It is a bipartisan failure of public policy dating back at least two or three decades,” said Robert E. Scott, a senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., a think tank that seeks to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions.
Amid the various policies, the United States has seen a net loss of manufacturing plants every year from 1998 through 2018, according to U.S. Census Bureau data included in an August report that Scott authored. Overall, the report notes, the United States has had a net loss of more than 91,000 manufacturing plants and nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs since 1997.
Manufacturing is still a major U.S. sector, employing 12 million people, but Scott argues it could be stronger and add a significant number of jobs if the country reforms its trade policy, curbs dollar overvaluation and invests in infrastructure and clean energy.
Allentown Morning Call
March 29, 2021
Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization, said lower- and middle-income families alike were vulnerable to major economic instability after losses of income.
“It’s incredibly destabilizing in the short run,” she said. “People just simply don’t have the savings to be able to weather job losses or to cut back on hours or furloughs to be able to continue paying their bills,” she said.
Losing a home, facing declines in its credit score or the continued inability to get a job could also affect a family long after the pandemic is over, she said.
NBC News
March 29, 2021