Lawmakers lacked foresight when they set winter deadlines for many programs, when COVID-19 caseloads were predicted to rise, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
“The trigger on and the trigger off should have nothing to do with a particular calendar date, it should have to do with the health and economic conditions of the country,” she said.
The Balance
December 21, 2020
One study by the Economic Policy Institute found that if state and local spending after the Great Recession had grown at a pace similar to previous recovery periods, unemployment rates would have reached their pre-recession levels by early 2013 instead of 2017.
Dollars and Sense
December 21, 2020
“As we got beyond March and April, we started to see more typical patterns such as Black unemployment not improving as quickly,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute. “What we’re seeing as more time passes is that it’s also more of a reflection of different kinds of jobs that people hold. A lot of the big impacts have been in the service sector, which disproportionally employ women and people of color.”
The Advocate
December 21, 2020
Manufacturing holds a key role in American history but for the past couple of decades, a massive number of manufacturing jobs have gone off-shore. Since 1997, more than 91,000 manufacturing plants have closed and almost 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Rome News-Tribune
December 21, 2020
“Credit scoring, the way in which it’s done, has a disparate impact on African American and Hispanic families,” says Richard Rothstein, distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute.
Axios
December 21, 2020
“The slowdown is hugely problematic for those people who are not able to get work, but also just for the recovery itself,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told Insider.
Gould said that there needs to be more money not only to help Americans be able to pay for food and bills, but to stimulate the economy.
“When [people] don’t spend money in the economy, there’s much slower job growth because they’re not buying goods or services, and therefore more people don’t have to be hired to produce those goods or provide those services,” Gould said.
Business Insider
December 21, 2020
Early in the pandemic, more than 1 in 6 Black workers lost their jobs between February and April, and as of April, less than half of the adult Black population was employed, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The institute concluded that Black workers were less able to weather the storm because they have fewer earners in their families, lower incomes and lower liquid wealth than white workers.
Chicago Tribune
December 21, 2020
Biden could try to tackle parts of his economic agenda on his own. He could modify Trump’s trade tariffs, for example, or change regulations around the Affordable Care Act. These ideas might be helpful in the long run, says Heidi Shierholz with the Economic Policy Institute, but they don’t tackle the financial problems people are facing right now. The economy needs a stimulus and…
HEIDI SHIERHOLZ: The president just doesn’t have those tools.
KHALID: The tools, for example, to offer more money to state and local governments so they can keep firefighters on the job. And so the biggest economic test for Biden isn’t how much he can do on his own, but how good he is at cutting deals.
SHIERHOLZ: The thing he’ll have to resort to is trying to lean on his nearly 50 years of experience in Washington. That is what it will come down to. Can President Biden convince Mitch McConnell to move on some of this stuff? Because that is what it will take to get the stimulus that is needed.
NPR
December 21, 2020