“The unemployment data are just incredibly problematic,” Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist to the U.S. Secretary of Labor who now serves as senior economist and director of policy at EPI, tells Axios.
Axios
September 8, 2020
“Economists use seasonal adjustments to smooth out seasonal patterns to get a better read of the underlying trends in the labor market,” said Heidi Shierholz, who was chief economist at the Labor Department during the Obama administration.
“Every year in January, 100,000 extra people apply for unemployment insurance claims, because they lost temporary holiday jobs,” Shierholz said. “You wouldn’t want economists to say, ‘Ah, things in the economy are really deteriorating’ when they’re not, it was just a normal seasonal pattern.”
Marketplace
September 8, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, who was chief economist at the Labor Department in the Obama administration, says the new seasonal adjustment formula should fix that distortion, though she would have preferred that government statisticians also went back and recalculated past reports.
“It is great they’re making improvements in the seasonal adjustment,” Shierholz said. “But the big thing they didn’t do that I wished they had done is fix the earlier numbers.”
NPR
September 8, 2020
In the future, Shierholz said she hopes the federal government takes more responsibility for administering unemployment benefits in times of crisis. The patchwork of statewide rules and standards creates an inequality problem: not including the $600 bonus from the stimulus package, unemployed workers in Massachusetts can get access to as much as $1,220 per week for 26 weeks, while Georgians can get just $365 per week for 12 weeks.
Business Insider
September 8, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, Economic Policy Institute senior economist and former chief economist at the Department of Labor, joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers to break down a new EPI report on the outlook for unions amid COVID-19.
Yahoo Finance
September 8, 2020
“Looking at one month of job gains doesn’t provide the appropriate context, you really need to look and see how far we still are in the hole,” Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute think tank, told ABC News ahead of the report’s release. “In April, we lost more than 20 million jobs in one month. It’s going to take months, if not years, to get back to that level.”
ABC News
September 8, 2020
Several studies have thrown cold water on the idea that the $600 payments discouraged people from returning to work. Their expiration probably didn’t play a major role in August’s jobs gain, according to Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and a Labor Department chief economist under President Barack Obama.
“A job is so precious,” she said. “The idea that you would turn down a job for temporary benefits, it just doesn’t make sense in the vast majority of people’s lives.”
“It is good that we are seeing job growth, we are improving, this labor market is getting stronger,” Shierholz said. “The really bad news is it’s still in absolute crisis.”
Bloomberg
September 8, 2020
The change in central bank policy can offset the blow to consumer demand from the GOP-run Senate letting the across-the-board $600 hike in weekly unemployment insurance benefits end at the close of July. Meanwhile, an estimated 12 million workers and family members have lost their employer-paid health insurance from the COVID-19 pandemic since February, according to Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
MultiBriefs
September 8, 2020
“It is clear that the pain is nowhere near over for millions of workers and their families across the country,” Economic Policy Institute senior economist Elise Gould said in a statement on the report.
“This Labor Day, we will hear a lot of rhetoric from policymakers about helping workers, but it is important that they take real action that will help working people in this recovery.”
Newsweek
September 8, 2020
But if the goal is for the federal government to provide additional support to state and local governments, far better to do so directly, rather than by the roundabout route of offering a tax break to the rich. As Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute writes:
“The SALT deduction is one tool for redistributing tax revenue, but most working people don’t have access to it, because they don’t itemize their tax deductions to be able to qualify for it. We should transfer federal aid directly to states to allow them to use the money on targeted healthcare, infrastructure, and education spending, which would more progressively distribute the money and allow states to be more responsive to recessions.”
Brookings Institution
September 8, 2020