Lily Garcia, former head of the National Education Association whose mother is from Panama. She serves on the president’s advisory commission on educational excellence for Hispanics and is a board member of the Economic Policy Institute. If appointed, she would be the first Latina named Secretary of Education.
USA Today
November 16, 2020
“Things have improved more quickly than I expected, but we still have an enormous gap,” said Heidi Shierholz, a Labor Department economist in the Obama administration who is the policy director for the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington. She said the economy still needed trillions of dollars of support over the next two years.
The New York Times
November 16, 2020
The ever more radical social views that dominate the “woke” left and increasingly corporate America also may not play well with many immigrants who, according to one recent survey, are twice as conservative in their social views as the general public. Hispanics may not be the reliable social conservatives imagined by some Republicans, but they certainly seem unlikely to widely share the world-view of woke faculty lounges. Adding Latinos, African Americans and, in some states, Asians to the GOP’s working and middle-class base will prove critical to building a populist majority. Today barely 58% of all working-class Americans are white; according to a 2016 Economic Policy Institute study, people of color will constitute the majority of the working class by 2032.
The Daily Caller
November 16, 2020
The education level of people entering the workforce has a significant impact on the rate at which the economy grows in the long run, Hanushek told NBC News. A more educated person is more likely to have a job, work longer hours and be paid more. Higher education levels also correspond to improved health and lower rates of mortality and crime, according to a 2013 report from the Economic Policy Institute. All of these dynamics contribute to a faster growing economy, Hanushek said.
NBC News
November 16, 2020
“Inequality in our economy causes a lot of problems,” said Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “There’s a growing awareness that we can actually do something about it.”
Bloomberg
November 16, 2020
“The Trump administration never did lay out a coherent, comprehensive, engaged trade strategy,” said Thea M. Lee, an economist and the president of the Economic Policy Institute. “It was much more scattershot: Throw up a tariff here, do a deal with China, disparate elements that didn’t seem to talk to each other.”
“But there are a lot of tools in that toolbox, and I would like to see the Biden administration be thoughtful and strategic about how to use them,” Ms. Lee said.
The New York Times
November 16, 2020
The bottom line: Most progressive economists agree that “the president and the White House don’t have many levers to pull on stimulus without Congress,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s super limited.”
But most of the potential regulatory changes to juice the economy, like waiving permitting requirements, tend to conflict with other progressive priorities, such as environmental protection.
Axios
November 16, 2020
Josh Bivens, the director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, argued that the path to recovery would take years and far more funding than is being discussed for the next round of relief.
Salon
November 16, 2020
The pattern is particularly pronounced for executives. Since 1978, C-suite compensation has risen 940%, in comparison with 12% for the typical employee, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That provides the US the highest ratio of executive to worker compensation (354:1) on the earth, almost twice the subsequent closest nation, Switzerland (148:1). The final time the US witnessed this level of inequality, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller have been constructing their monopolies in steamships, railroads, and oil through the robber-baron period within the late 1800s.
Quartz
November 16, 2020
Despite the positive jobs report cited by McConnell, about 1 million people applied for unemployment insurance last week, more than any time during the Great Recession, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Many workers are exhausting their state unemployment benefits as the pandemic drags on – the number of state claims dropped by 436,000 last week – and federal emergency unemployment benefits will expire on December 26 without congressional action.
Truthout
November 16, 2020