“There was a time when really high oil price inflation could’ve tipped us into a recession by clamping down on household spending,” said Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute. “But our oil extraction sector is pretty huge now… and they generate a ton of domestic profit now.”
Quartz
March 18, 2022
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said it wasn’t just closures but uncertainties around school and daycare reopenings. This uncertainty, Gould said, especially impacted moms and parents with young kids. Moms were also more likely than fathers to be in jobs hard hit by pandemic-related closures early on in the pandemic, according to a Census post.
Business Insider
March 18, 2022
Then there are wages. After organizing efforts shifted into high gear, Starbucks announced that it was making “historic investments in its partners,” including raising the wage floor to $15 an hour by this coming summer. However, $15 is what activists called a “living wage” in 2012, and it’s what Amazon started paying fulfillment-center workers back in 2018. The MIT Living Wage Calculator says that a single adult needs to earn at least $20 an hour to meet today’s minimum standard of living in New York City, $23 in the Bay Area, and $19 in Seattle. To sustain themselves in America’s most affordable county (Orangeburg, South Carolina), workers need to earn at least $14.50 an hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s latest Family Budget Calculator.
Fast Company
March 18, 2022
Heidi Sheirholz, who leads the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said the legislation is “a core reason we’re in such an incredibly strong recovery right now.”
Associated Press
March 18, 2022
However, others define a livable wage differently. The Economic Policy Institute’s “Family Budget Calculator” says the income needed for a “modest yet adequate standard of living” is $45,517 a year, or nearly $22 per hour. With Boulder defining a living wage as “an amount intended to help people meet basic living needs and maintain or achieve self-sufficiency,” its 2020 budget increases the minimum living wage for its employees to $17.42 per hour.
Daily Camera
March 18, 2022
“It is about making sure that you have kind of a captive workforce,” said Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute. “Your workforce can’t go anywhere else, and then you actually have to pay them less to keep them because they don’t have outside options.”
The Denver Channel
March 18, 2022
At the same time, the gap has remained relatively unchanged over the past three decades. From 1979 to 1994, it fell from 37.7% to about 23%, the Economic Policy Institute found. But it has not improved much since, even as women have made great gains in educational attainment – going from less likely having a college or advanced degree compared to men – to surpassing men in education. Women with advanced degrees are paid less on average than men with bachelor’s degrees, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
CBS News
March 18, 2022
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s updated Family Budget Calculator, a full-time worker with no children would need to make roughly $14.50 an hour to sustain themselves in the US county with the lowest cost of living: Orangeburg County, South Carolina.
Business Insider
March 18, 2022
Elsewhere, Mike Konczal and Emily DiVito at the Roosevelt Institute, Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, and staff at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have all highlighted the important ways in which the American Rescue Plan significantly improved the lives of working families and achieved an historic economic recovery. And yet, each of these analyses also remind us that we cannot stop here.
Washington Center for Equitable Growth
March 18, 2022
Studies show that every unit of reduction in equality leads to a similar reduction in GDP. Economic Policy Institute research found income inequality slows U.S. economic growth by reducing demand by 2 percent to 4 percent. The Calvert Institute determined that a 1 percent increase in inequality leads to a 1.1 percent per capita GDP loss. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco researchers calculated that gender and racial gaps created $2.9 trillion in losses to U.S. GDP in 2019. And, Citi research concluded that eliminating racial disparity would add $5 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next five years.
Proxy Preview
March 18, 2022
The failure to adjust the minimum wage for inflation has eroded its value over time. Indeed, the Economic Policy Institute reports that as of 2021, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, was 21 percent lower than in 2009 and 34 precent lower than it was at its peak value in 1968. The minimum wage section of the American Rescue Plan Act was dropped before passage, but the proposal renewed the economic and policy debate about the situation of low-wage workers and the projected effects of increasing the minimum wage.
Nonprofit Quarterly
March 18, 2022
Given our current economic trajectory, you may find yourself wondering if your household is even in the middle class. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonprofit think tank that focuses on middle-income earners, has two tools that can help answer the question for you.
Fast Company
March 18, 2022
The updated document from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that teachers and school staff, bus drivers, firefighters, police and other local government workers – many of whom are women and/or people of color – benefit from having strong unions that represent them and their interests on the job. In other states that curtail public sector collective bargaining, however, larger wage gaps persist.
Teamsters
March 18, 2022
To compile the list, the researchers employed the “50-30-20” budget formula made popular by Senator Elizabeth Warren, in which 50 percent of income is allocated for unavoidable “needs,” like rent, groceries and utilities; 30 percent goes to “wants,” like eating out, alcohol and entertainment; and 20 percent goes to savings. The median costs of “needs” were culled from census surveys and the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator; “wants” came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey; and starter-home prices were derived from Zillow.
The New York Times
March 18, 2022
Still, Summers’s prediction that we’re headed for stagflation does seem pretty nuts. “He’s doing some damage to the history,” Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, told me. Stagflation was, practically speaking, a one-time event. There was a momentary recurrence during the first half of 2008, when oil prices spiked at the start of the Great Recession, but that “was so short that no one remembers,” Bivens said. (A consumption boom in China coincided briefly with falling Saudi production.) What people remember about the Great Recession isn’t inflation, but years and years of high unemployment and low wages.
The New Republic
March 18, 2022
Governors have certainly made trade-offs during the pandemic between the health of their populations and economic growth, said David Cooper, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Cooper noted that seven of the 10 states with the highest per capita deaths from Covid-19, including Oklahoma, had Republican governors.
The New York Times
March 18, 2022
Union-busting tactics are disturbingly common. The Economic Policy Institute found in 2019 that employers are charged with breaking labor law in 41.5 percent of all union election campaigns — meaning that they illegally intimidate employees through terminations, disciplines, or threats.
Jacobin
March 18, 2022
But the reduction in supply was met with increased demand as Americans started purchasing durable goods to replace the services they used prior to the pandemic, said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute.
CNET
March 18, 2022
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the cost of a modest but adequate standard of living in the Columbus metropolitan area for a family of one adult and two children is $70,190 a year.[11]
Policy Matters Ohio
March 18, 2022
Features interview with Heidi Shierholz.
Bloomberg TV
March 11, 2022
In a tweet, the president of the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist to the Labor Secretary under President Obama called it “mindbogglingly fast and sustained growth.”
Reuters
March 11, 2022
“It’s not like everything is totally rosy,” noted Heidi Shierholz, president of the D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, who also gives the federal relief effort high marks. “We still have a long way to go. So I don’t want to make it seem like I’m trying to convince people who are living in what is a difficult time that everything is great. But our recovery is much faster than what it would be if Congress hadn’t acted.”
Capital and Main
March 11, 2022
Features quote from Asha Banerjee.
USA Today
March 11, 2022
The Economic Policy Institute shares that union workers get an average 11.2% more and gain greater access to health insurance and paid sick leave. Even with many states raising the minimum wage in 2022, and a tight labor market that continues to drive employee wages higher in an effort to find quality workers, employees with unions behind them are likely to garner even higher pay, historically speaking.
GoBankingRates
March 11, 2022
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal nonpartisan think-tank, has reported that North Carolina teachers earned 25% per week less than “similarly educated peers” before the pandemic. How teacher pay aligns, or doesn’t, with professionals in government and business is a stronger measure than the conventional debate over state salary rankings.
EdNC
March 11, 2022
Pity the CEO. Well, maybe not. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the top executives at the largest 350 firms in the U.S. were paid an average of $24.1 million per year in 2020. That’s about 350 times more than the compensation of the typical worker.
The Week
March 11, 2022
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, believed wages would get ahead of inflation in 2022. “I thought inflation was going to relent quite a bit through the year,” he said. “That’s probably been delayed pretty considerably.”
Marketplace
March 11, 2022
Heidi Sheirholz, who leads the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said the legislation is “a core reason we’re in such an incredibly strong recovery right now.”
Associated Press
March 11, 2022