Bernstein’s experience includes a role as senior economist and director of the Living Standards Program at the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute; deputy chief economist at the Department of Labor under President Clinton and executive director of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class. He is currently a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and is a former social worker. Bernstein completed his PhD in social welfare at Columbia University.
Quartz
December 1, 2020
Jared Bernstein was Joe Biden’s chief economist when he served as vice president early in the Obama administration. He was responsible for sort of sizing up the damage done by the Great Recession, the financial crisis, and helped to shape the response to that, the recovery plan. He’s now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He was previously with the Economic Policy Institute. He’s a left-leaning economist. He’ll serve on the Council of Economic Advisors.
NPR Morning Edition
December 1, 2020
The most sweeping attempt at regulating the J visa program was 2013’s comprehensive immigration reform act, which passed with bipartisan support and is best remembered for expanding the DREAM Act. The bill sought to rein in human trafficking endemic to other guest worker programs by implementing registration requirements for recruiters and making recruitment fees illegal. But the final bill exempted J-1 sponsor organizations from those requirements.
“It really just shows the power of the J-1 lobby,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law at the Economic Policy Institute. “This lobby inserted itself into those legislation efforts to make the argument that their entire business model was going to go away if that recruitment registration was implemented.”
The Nation
December 1, 2020
Those choices “signal the desire of the Biden administration to take the CEA in a direction that really centers on working people and raising wages,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and former Labor Department chief economist during the Obama administration.
Associated Press
December 1, 2020
Bernstein served as a senior economist and director of the Living Standards Program at the Economic Policy Institute and as the deputy chief economist at the Labor Department during the Clinton administration.
Boushey was chief economist for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She served as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
December 1, 2020
Despite the passing of legislation like the Fair Housing Act in 1968 that aimed to end racial discrimination in the housing market, disparities in housing continue to persist. Richard Rothstein, distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America joins Hill TV to discuss the history of housing discrimination in the United States and some possible solutions.
Hill TV
December 1, 2020
The data reporting issues are a symptom of the larger dysfunction that has coursed through badly swamped state unemployment agencies this year. Those issues have manifested in high levels of fraudulent claims, delays and denials for hundreds of thousands of legitimate claimants, and other problems that slowed the delivery of financial aid for many people in need, particularly during the early months of the crisis.
And they are not without consequences, as unemployment claims have served as a weekly indicator for analysts and policymakers about the health of the labor market and broader economy as a whole.
“We need to know what happened so we can shore up these systems and this doesn’t ever happen again,” said the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist for the Labor Department. “We have chosen to disinvest in these programs for decades and this is what you get from that.”
Washington Post
December 1, 2020
“Usually these smaller companies are even worse — because they are almost completely non-union,” Debbie Berkowitz, the worker health and safety director at the National Employment Law Project and a former senior official at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), said in an email. The poultry industry has historically relied on the labor of Black people, poor white women, and, more recently, immigrants, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Arkansas Times
December 1, 2020