“We just cannot get out of this—the hole that we’re in,” senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute Heidi Shierholz told The Inquirer, “in any reasonable way, without doing huge scarring, without a much stronger care infrastructure.” Happy days!
Jezebel
October 6, 2020
The national minimum wage was created in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the rate at 25 cents an hour. It has risen in fits and starts in the decades since, but it has not kept pace with the country’s cost of living. According to a 2019 analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, after adjusting for inflation, the minimum wage reached its peak value in 1968. Today, the minimum wage is worth 31 percent less than it was in 1968 and 17 percent less than it was even as recently as 2009, the last time the national rate was increased, to $7.25 an hour.
Sarasota Magazine
October 6, 2020
Among the largest 350 companies in the country, the average CEO compensation was about $14 million in 2018. That’s an over 29% increase from executive pay in 2009. That’s according to the Economic Policy Institute. That’s not bad at all. But CEO compensation is a confusing mix of all of this stuff, so let’s unpack the many different ways that the big wigs in this country get paid.
Yahoo Finance
October 6, 2020
Though redlining is no longer government policy, its consequences are still with us. According to the Economic Policy Institute, just 13 percent of white students attend a school that has a majority of Black students, while nearly 70 percent of Black students do. Black wealth trails badly behind white wealth; the former is more likely to live in an area with lower home values and, because of disparities in income, many Black Americans have not been able to build up enough wealth to buy a home in the first place.
VOX
October 6, 2020
Between the last quarter of 2007, also the last quarter before the Great Recession, and the first quarter of 2020, the unemployment rate for White Kentuckians declined 1.1 percentage points, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Nationally, people of color have lost their jobs at a higher rate than White people, but Kentucky’s populations of color are too small for sample sizes that create accurate estimates.
Stateline
October 6, 2020
Continuing to increase wages makes sense because service workers face the same or worse financial challenges they faced pre-pandemic plus the health risks of working in public-facing jobs during a pandemic, said Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, which supports higher minimum wages.
He also noted generally broad public support for wage increases, demonstrated by successful ballot measures such as those in Arkansas and Missouri in 2018.
“We’ve heard a lot of noise about” states being urged to postpone wage increases, “but not much definitive action,” he said. “One of the reasons why critics of the minimum wage haven’t been very successful at winning delays is that minimum wages are actually a pretty popular political issue.”
Bloomberg Law
October 6, 2020
As the free-trade consensus began to erode, studies from the Economic Policy Institute and other organizations confirmed the gut feeling of average Americans: Millions of jobs were being lost to China.
Asia Times
October 6, 2020
In the United States, the average K-12 public school teacher makes around $60,000 per year according to 2018-2019 National Education Association reports. In my opinion, teachers should be some of the highest paid professionals in the United States or in any country. There are no doctors, lawyers, meteorologists and Presidents without science, math, language arts, and history teachers. Yet, a 2019 report by the Economic Policy Institute found that not only is the teacher shortage real, it is growing. Some of the key findings in the report include:
- 13.8 percent of public school teachers in the U.S. are either leaving their school or the profession.
- Schools are struggling to fill vacancies because of dwindling applicant pools.
- Over the period 2008–2009 to 2015–2016 school years, there was a 15.4 percent decline in education degrees awarded (also a 27.4 percent decline in completion of teacher preparation programs).
Forbes
October 6, 2020
“At the current slowing rate of job growth and expected continued drag from austerity as federal policymakers fail to act, weakness in the labor market is expected to drag on for years and those workers will be left out in the cold well before they are able to get back on their feet,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, in a blog post.
CBS Moneywatch
October 6, 2020
Repealing the ACA would strip nearly 30 million people of their health insurance, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute. Particularly in New Hampshire, the number of uninsured households would skyrocket by 190 %, or by 118,000.
The New Hampshire
October 6, 2020