Childcare costs
Source: Economic Policy Institute
Investopedia
December 2, 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 2, 2025
The European Central Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund all published studies on profits driving inflation, while the Groundwork Collaborative and the Economic Policy Institute found that over 53 percent of price increases from 2020 to 2022 were driven by profit gains.
Jacobin
December 1, 2025
According to the National Education Association, the average teacher salary in Mississippi is $53,704. That’s $15,000 less than what the Economic Policy Institute says is needed to comfortably support a single parent, one child household in the Jackson metro area, which is $68,772. In DeSoto County, where Reid lives, that cost is even higher — $76,612 a year.
Mississippi Today
December 1, 2025
Investopedia
December 1, 2025
Research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that communities with stronger union density enjoy higher median household incomes, lower poverty rates …[paywall].
Sacramento Business Journal
December 1, 2025
Wimer pointed out that others have tried to make budgets like Green’s before. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s state-by-state Living Wage Calculator says that in Maryland, for instance, two working adults with two children need an income of $129,572 to afford food, child care, housing, transportation and other expenses. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute says that for a “modest but adequate standard of living,” a family needs $139,524 to pay for housing, child care, health care, food and transportation in the D.C. metro area, or a little over $100,000 in Birmingham, Alabama, or Cleveland, or $84,019 in El Paso.
The Washington Post
December 1, 2025
To be sure, Green acknowledged his calculations are based on costs in suburban New Jersey. His threshold is also above the median household income for a family of four in 37 states, according to the Washington Post.
But Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator and the Economic Policy Institute have also put family expenses in some states at more than $100,000 a year.
Fortune
December 1, 2025
Affordability – or the lack of it – is dominating the public discourse. “Affordability, affordability, affordability: Democrats’ new winning formula,” proclaims Politico. “Trump tries to seize ‘affordability’ message,” reports The New York Times. Election results in New Jersey, Virginia, New York and elsewhere showed that voters are responding to candidates who speak directly to the cost of living.
Today’s affordability debate, however, focuses almost entirely on prices, as if the only way to make life affordable is to make things cheaper. But that approach misses the bigger picture. Affordability depends on both prices and wages. The roots of today’s affordability crisis actually lie not in recent price spikes, but in the long-term suppression of workers’ pay.
MSNBC.com
December 1, 2025
Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute notes that between 1973 and 2013, the average hourly wage increased just 9%. For students who either work a minimum-wage job in high school, hoping to put themselves through college, or work while pursuing their studies, a wage increase of less than 10% does little to offset a nearly 315% rise in costs.
Straight Arrow News
December 1, 2025