She says her salary, about $60,000, is more than enough for their life in Dallas, where they own a three-bedroom home. A family of four in Dallas County would need $72,000 to attain a modest yet adequate standard of living, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator. Their mortgage payment, including property tax and homeowner’s insurance, is $575. Before they purchased the house for $70,000, they lived with Benjamin’s parents and paid $275 each month to rent a room.
New estimates from the Economic Policy Institute put the number of people who have lost the health insurance they or a family member previously got through their employer at about 12 million. There has been a significant churn in coverage since the spring.
“Because most U.S. workers rely on their employer or a family member’s employer for health insurance, the shock of the coronavirus has cost millions of Americans their jobs and their access to healthcare in the midst of a public health catastrophe,” Josh Bivens, co-author of the study and director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said in a statement announcing the findings.
“Tying health insurance to the labor market is always terribly inefficient and problematic, but becomes particularly so during times of great labor market churn,” said Bivens.
Teacher shortages have always been a crisis due partly to a lack of qualified applicants, low wages and lack of career support, according to a 2019 report by the Economic Policy Institute. “You would think states would panic upon hearing this,” teacher Kelly Treleaven wrote in a New York Times op-ed that cited the report. Instead, “they slash the education budget, which forces districts to cut jobs (increasing class size), put off teacher raises and roll back the quality of teachers’ health care. They ignore teachers’ pleas for buildings without black mold creeping out of ceiling tiles, for sensible gun legislation, and for salaries we can live on without having to pick up two to three additional part-time jobs. So, a lot of good and talented teachers leave.”
Vermont senator: “Joe supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. This will give 40 million workers a pay raise and push the wage scale up for everyone else.” — Democratic convention Monday.
THE FACTS: Not likely. He’s taking an optimistic projection as a certainty.
He’s referring to a 2019 study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that estimated $15 an hour by 2025 would directly raise wages for 28 million and indirectly for 11 million. Even that study doesn’t say wage scales would go up for “everyone.”
Monique Morrissey is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She previously worked at the AFL-CIO Office of Investment and the Financial Markets Center.
St. Louis/Southern Illinois Labor Tribune
August 26, 2020
A new report by the Economic Policy Institute discusses the importance of unions and workers’ collective action in establishing an equitable economy, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and shock to the economy, job losses have been consistent with roughly 6.2 million workers losing access to health insurance that they previously got through their own employer. This is the finding in a new paper by EPI Director of Research Josh Bivens and economist Ben Zipperer that surveys the limited data available to infer changes in health insurance coverage since the COVID-19 shock began. For each person who is covered under their own employer’s plan, roughly two people on average are covered through employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) once spouses and dependents are included. This means that closer to 12 million people have been cut off from ESI coverage due to job losses in recent months.
Overall, the Economic Policy Institute calculates, the annual cost of care for an infant in California is a whopping $16,945 — consuming about a quarter of the median yearly income.
In the second quarter of 2020, the Gross Domestic Product dropped faster than in any other quarter of U.S. history, contracting at a 32.9 percent annualized rate. It will take years to recover from this historic collapse in GDP. (Economic Policy Institute, July 30, 2020).