As a landmark 1995 study by economists Larry Mishel and Jared Bernstein for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) revealed, a gap between the rise in productivity and the rise in median workers’ wages opened in the mid-1970s and has grown steadily wider since then; the difference between those two rates today is 55 percent. In the years between 1948 and 1979, when the egalitarian legacy of the New Deal was at its apogee, with high levels of unionization and progressive taxation and constraints on the financial sector, productivity grew by 108 percent and median worker’s compensation by 93 percent. In the years between 1979 and 2025, an EPI analysis found productivity grew by 87 percent but median worker’s compensation by a bare 33 percent.
American Prospect
December 8, 2025
The Economic Policy Institute offers a Family Budget Calculator. It says a family of four would need about $123,000 a year to attain “a modest yet adequate standard of living” in Essex County, New Jersey. In a prior blog post, Green examined living costs in Caldwell, a borough in that New Jersey county.
Green’s poverty-line exercise “basically is trying to replicate” the calculator, said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the left-leaning think tank. “But we’re clear in this measure that it’s not a measure of poverty or material deprivation – it’s a measure of a modest but adequate standard of living.”
USA Today
December 8, 2025
State and local governments were required to allocate funds they had received through the American Rescue Plan Act by Dec. 31, 2024, and must spend them by the end of 2026. Unused funds must be returned to the U.S. Treasury, according to a blog post by the Economic Policy Institute.
The News Tribune
December 8, 2025
Virginia has been hit especially hard by the cutting of federal jobs. Black Americans account for about 26% of the federal workforce in the state, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and make up around 18% of the total state population.
Capital B
December 8, 2025
Losses that result from this sleight of hand are steep. A January report from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that the country’s social safety net funds lose out on up to $3,070.10 annually for each misclassified worker; the Century Foundation report cited earlier estimated the overall cost of worker misclassification in the United States to be somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion.
The New Republic
December 8, 2025
The Trump administration is moving to reduce protections for entertainment workers under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Specifically, they aim to exclude entertainment employers from OSHA’s “general duty clause,” which is a catch all provision covering work that doesn’t have a specific standard yet, but for which dangers are recognized and preventable. OSHA estimates this will affect over 100,000 workers. The Economic Policy Institute says that if OSHA goes through with this, the deregulation “will result in a significant increase in preventable injuries among workers and a decrease in employer accountability.”
The Valley Labor Report
December 8, 2025
According to the Economic Policy Institute, exempting tips from taxation could actually cause some low-income workers to lose money overall, because their lower reported income might make them ineligible for valuable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) (4).
MoneyWise
December 8, 2025
Still, there’s something to be said regarding corporate excess. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the ratio of realized compensation for CEOs at the 350 largest U.S. firms compared to the average worker at these firms has risen dramatically since the 1960s, from about 20x to close to 300x today.2
Nasdaq
December 8, 2025
Childcare costs
Source: Economic Policy Institute
Investopedia
December 8, 2025
Research collected by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a leading nonpartisan think tank that studies the nation’s economy, found the explosion of the United States labor force between 1994 and 2024 was possible primarily because of immigration. The same study released in April 2025 found the number of workers in their prime years (ages 25 through 54) grew by 13.6 million people. EPI data shows that for the United States, immigrants’ share of total output was 18% in 2023, or $2.1 trillion in 2024 dollars. The breakdown highlights that the contribution of immigrants to economic output is greater than their share of the total population. Immigrants made up 14.3% of the total U.S. population in the same year.
Spectrum News 1
December 8, 2025