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
When it comes to retirement, many Americans remain financially unprepared. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the median retirement savings balance for the typical working-age family is $5,000. The median savings for 32-to-37-year-olds is just $480.
Investopedia
November 30, 2020
The pandemic has exacerbated well-documented opportunity gaps that put low-income students at a disadvantage relative to their better-off peers,” said researchers from the Economic Policy Institute. “As a consequence, many of the children who struggle the hardest to learn effectively and thrive in school under normal circumstances are now finding it difficult, even impossible in some cases, to receive effective instruction.”
Kansas City Star
November 30, 2020
“De facto segregation, it turns out, is a myth. The reason we have segregation in every metropolitan area in this country is government policy. Federal, state, and local policy that was racially explicit that ensured African-Americans and whites could not live near one another.”
Historian, writer, and social chronicler Richard Rothstein is here to talk about histories and patterns of what he calls “purposeful race-based housing segregation.” He doesn’t paint a pretty picture, and he describes a concerted effort not just in major cities but in localities and towns all over this country. Why is this not taught in our schools? What is left out of the picture when we think about housing patterns and take a social overview of our cities?
Talking Beats
November 30, 2020
And those who need Covid economic relief the most — gig and other low-income workers who’ve lost jobs or hours to the pandemic — don’t have retirement accounts to withdraw from. Overall, the Economic Policy Institute reported last year, “nearly half of working-age families have nothing saved in retirement accounts.”
Inequality.org
November 30, 2020