Black households have less in the bank in the case of, say, an economy-tanking global pandemic. In general, they have about fives times less in liquid assets — checking and savings accounts, cash and directly held stocks, bonds and mutual funds — than White households: About $8,800 compared to $49,500, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
August 14, 2020
As the Economic Policy Institute indicated through its own research, not only do Black women experience disparities in all these fields, but they experience them at every socioeconomic level. For instance, Black female doctors are paid 73 percent of the average hourly wage of non-Hispanic white male doctors—a $16.82 hourly shortfall. Meanwhile, Black women who work as waitstaff are paid 89 percent less, comprising a difference of $1.13 per hour. And the inequalities persist, even when Black women comprise the majority of the respective workforce in that field.
The Root
August 14, 2020
Economic Policy Institute Economist Monique Morrissey joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers to discuss the concerns over cost-cutting at USPS.
Yahoo Finance
August 14, 2020
Nina Banks, an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University, notes the pay gap is “particularly distressing” because, in comparison to women of other races, Black women have always had higher labor force participation rates.
“Black women’s labor market position is the result of employer practices and government policies that disadvantaged Black women relative to white women and men,” she wrote for the Economic Policy Institute in 2019. Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, founder and president of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race, agreed. She said it’s important to consider “occupation segregation.” She describes the practice as “the limiting of the occupations that Black women have access to, especially [jobs] that are higher paid and have more autonomy,” when discussing the pay gap Black women face.
NBC News
August 14, 2020
Julia Wolfe, state economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, shared similar concerns in a Thursday morning blog post.
“In an unserious move of political theater, the Trump administration has proposed starting up an entirely new system of restoring wages to laid-off workers through executive order,” Wolfe wrote.
Newsweek
August 14, 2020
Nor does it reflect that Black women typically work fewer hours and therefore make less than White men. That’s in part because they’re more likely to be
unemployed or work part-time, said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
EPI did account for those factors and found that, based on average hourly earnings, Black women still earned only 66 cents for every dollar White, non-Hispanic men made.
CNN
August 14, 2020
Society and its justice system, which Georgetown Law Center Professor Paul Butler discusses in his book, Chokehold, foment destructive patterns of youth development. Many urban schools are dysfunctional, and the prisons reflect a punishment system that does not take appropriate steps to correctly treat people and their problems. As the Economic Policy Institute reported in 2018, our society since 1968 has failed to address historic inequities related to health, housing, employment, income, and educational opportunity – all of which begin at child birth and persist throughout the lives of people of color.
The CT Mirror
August 14, 2020
And not even $17,300 is near the amount of money that a family needs to reach a “modest yet adequate” standard of living in most parts of the United States, estimates the Economic Policy Institute. According to the institute’s Family Budget Calculator, which takes into account the costs of housing, food, transportation, healthcare, taxes, and other necessities, it would cost a single person $51,323 dollars a year to live in the New York Metro area. That same person would have to dish out $42,825 a year to live in Los Angeles County, and it would take them 38,605 dollars a year to live in the Chicago Metro area.
The List
August 14, 2020
Calling the executive order “an unserious move of political theater,” Economic Policy Institute researcher Julia Wolfe said the drop in spending could cost the U.S. economy up to 2.6 million additional jobs over the next year.
Courthouse News Service
August 14, 2020
Some workers, including those laid off in 2019 and at the very beginning of the pandemic, could even exhaust their benefits before the end of this year. The number of people currently claiming extended benefits, which kick in after regular UI benefits and the CARES Act’s emergency UI are exhausted, is at its highest level so far this recession, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). That people qualify for extended benefits at all is a sign that “policymakers should extend [PEUC] even further,” writes EPI.
CNBC
August 14, 2020