“Affordability has been a big buzzword that we’ve been hearing in the news, from our president, from workers, and there’s really no policies enacted in the last year that have made life more affordable for workers,” said Economic Policy Institute senior policy analyst Margaret Poydock, who examined the strike data in a blog last week. “Prices and pay make things more affordable, and unions are a great tool to help secure wage gains and strikes are an even more effective tool.”
The American Prospect
March 2, 2026
One million fewer people enrolled in an ACA plan this year. Up to 16 million people are projected to lose health care coverage by 2034.
“The combined effect of these policies is expected to disproportionately impact lower-income, working-class, and minority communities,” the Economic Policy Institute reported.
Memphis Flyer
March 2, 2026
President Donald Trump’s economic agenda “will make ordinary families reliably poorer in the future,” according to the author of a report published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute.
Josh Bivens, EPI’s chief economist, said Trump’s slashing of federal spending and jobs, mass deportations, chaotic tariffs, and anti-labor policies were suppressing hiring and wages, draining household and business spending, and slowing economic growth.
Common Dreams
March 2, 2026
“The hires rate today looks a lot like the hires rate did coming out of the Great Recession,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “And you pretty clearly see that the labor market softened over the years. We saw that payroll employment growth slowed pretty substantially.”
Capital and Main
March 2, 2026
The Economic Policy Institute (a left-leaning think tank) estimates that from 1979 to 2024, net productivity grew roughly 80% while median hourly compensation grew only about 30%.
John Dickerson Substack
March 2, 2026
01:13:10 – Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz previews Trump’s SOTU
Bloomberg TV
March 2, 2026
“Trump policies will hamstring the economy’s ability to supply goods and services, and these policies aim to increase inequality by transferring income from the bottom and middle toward the top,” according to a new report by Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. This shift will happen through funding cuts for public services, including Affordable Care Act subsidies, and tax cuts favoring the rich, he wrote.
“Sometimes this affordability crunch will manifest as higher prices or faster inflation, but it is more likely to appear as slower wage growth and the rollback of public supports for households,” Bivens wrote.
MarketWatch
March 2, 2026
But Trump didn’t talk about the root cause of these affordability problems: the long-running rise in inequality. And he didn’t call for the single most-effective way to reverse this inequality: raising taxes significantly on the ultra-rich families and corporations. In a new Economic Policy Institute report, I highlight how we got here and offer meaningful solutions to tackle growing inequality through wealth taxation.
The link between inequality and affordability is clear: Affordability improves when incomes (mostly wages and public benefits for typical families) grow faster than prices. Rising inequality means that the economy’s average growth rate is buoyed by stratospheric growth at the top and hence no longer maps onto what is available to typical families to help them afford a secure and decent life.
In These Times
March 2, 2026
Overall, real wages rose slightly faster in the 12 months ended in January than in the prior 12 months. That resilience, combined with the low unemployment rate, helps explain why consumer spending has held up, boosting the economy. But the picture isn’t all positive. Americans with the lowest incomes saw their real wages fall in 2025, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that analyzed census data.
Wall Street Journal
March 2, 2026
Sources:
- Economic Policy Institute. “CEO pay declined in 2023.”
Investopedia
March 2, 2026