So while the Trump administration is more than happy to praise their own tax cuts as stimulative, they also opened up the taps on spending, reaching a budget deal with congressional Democrats in early 2018 that lifted caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act by some $300 billion.
“The big difference in 2017 and 2018 relative to the five or six years that came before was that fiscal policy was a lot more expansionary,” Josh Bivens, an economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, told Business Insider.
“It wasn’t the fiscal policy I would have chosen, but it proved that there was slack in the labor market, we got continued reductions in unemployment without a huge uptick in wage or price inflation,” Bivens said.
Business Insider
October 19, 2020
The debates in Washington over numbers high enough to be meaningless did nothing for the young Americans trying to get their lives going. And in the crucial half-decade after the recession began, a string of tools to boost the economy — including federal funds to help states employ teachers and first responders despite their budget cuts — were blocked in the name of keeping costs down. The Economic Policy Institute in 2012 projected that passage of the American Jobs Act alone would have added 1.6 million jobs to the economy.
MSNBC
October 19, 2020
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimated that 1.5 million public sector workers — mostly in education — already lost their jobs by July on the state and local level and that a total of 5.3 million would lose their jobs through the end of 2021 without additional aid.
The Hill
October 19, 2020
Daniel Costa, director de investigación legal de inmigración en el Instituto de Políticas Económicas, con sede en Washington, dijo que Estados Unidos se beneficia de los trabajadores calificados extranjeros, pero que igual hace falta hacer ciertas reformas.
“Tu puedes traer legalmente a un trabajador por menos de lo que cuesta un trabajador en esta área”, dijo Costa. “Las compañías harán lo que sea mejor para sus resultados y sus ganancias”.
Costa fue coautor de un reciente reporte que muestra que el 60 por ciento de los puestos H-1B certificados por el Departamento del Trabajo tienen “asignados niveles de salarios muy por debajo del promedio local por esa ocupación”, agregando que pasar nuevas leyes es la “más sencilla y simple solución” para reformar el programa de trabajadores extranjeros temporales.
Voice of America
October 19, 2020
The nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute recently produced a report detailing “the Trump administration’s 50 most egregious attacks on working people.” The head of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups and labor unions, deemed Trump “the most anti-worker and anti-environment president of our lifetime.”
National Catholic Reporter
October 19, 2020
Fully funding the country’s water-system needs could create 800,000 jobs and expand GDP by $4.5 trillion over 20 years, according to a report from the ASCE. A 2014 report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) concluded that spending at any level would create short-term increases in employment and economic activity, with more benefits tied to bigger investments.
Capital and Main
October 19, 2020
San Francisco Chronicle
October 19, 2020
Teresa Ghilarducci is the Schwartz Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. She’s the co-author of “Rescuing Retirement” and a member of the board of directors of the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg
October 19, 2020
First, unemployment figures themselves are notorious for lowballing real rates of joblessness, and these problems have been exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis. Heidi Shierholz from the Economic Policy Institute argues that the official unemployment number, 13.6 million, is a severe undercount. A very conservative estimate should count at least 21.5 million jobless workers, millions of whom are not considered officially “unemployed” because they are classified as “discouraged” and have dropped out of the labor force. That figure would translate to a more accurate (but still conservative) unemployment rate of 12.5 percent. This does not include another 11.5 million who have had their hours and pay cut as a result of the pandemic.
Jacobin
October 19, 2020