The evidence that automation has been displacing human labor is fairly thin. A 2017 NBER paper by Acemoglu and Restrepo found that industries and areas that added more robots saw lower employment and lower wages. But a careful analysis by economists Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute found that the story wasn’t so clear. Acemoglu and Restrepo focused only on one very narrow form of automation — industrial robots. Mishel and Bivens, looking at the same data, found that overall investment in information technology was positively correlated with employment.
Bloomberg
September 2, 2020
TCJA’s supporters argue that corporate tax cuts ultimately trickle down to American workers in the form of higher wages. But in the short run, TCJA’s steep, immediate corporate tax cut was merely a windfall for shareholders. And the trickle-down theory that posits workers benefit in the long run is not functioning in practice. The theory was that corporate tax cuts would spark such a boom in corporate investment that it would make workers more productive and that workers would benefit from that increased productivity in the form of higher wages. But TCJA did not produce an investment boom. In fact, business investment was declining even before the economic crisis wrought by COVID-19. Instead, corporations used their tax cuts to distribute more cash to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. Corporations have also increased their CEOs’ pay packages since the enactment of TCJA, as the Economic Policy Institute has found.
Center for American Progress
September 2, 2020
“What we’re seeing now is really just a magnification of what’s been there already,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Gould and economist Valerie Wilson published a report in June on the economic inequality that the pandemic has exposed.
St. Louis Public Radio
September 2, 2020
A separate study by the Economic Policy Institute found that expanding jobless aid boosted personal income by $842 billion in May; extending the heightened benefits through mid-2021, the nonprofit said, would provide an average quarterly boon to GDP of 3.7 percent.
Fox News
September 2, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, just 67% of nonunion private-sector workers had access to health care benefits in 2019, compared to 94% of union members.
Tennessean
September 2, 2020
Since George Floyd’s death, renewed and vigorous attention has been placed on police violence and discrimination against African Americans. These depredations are often referred to as “structural racism.” But structural racism is not restricted to criminal justice, and not restricted to adults.
Farmers Advance
September 2, 2020
A 2019 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute showed that across the country, educators spend an average of $459 of their own money buying supplies.
Yes Weekly
September 2, 2020
Numerous studies have shown that the Midwest has some of the most egregious disparities between Black and white people. A 2019 report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) noted that “racial disparities in economic opportunity and economic outcomes are wider [in the Midwest] than they are in other regions, and policy interventions designed to close those gaps are meager.” Indeed, when 24/7 Wall St. identified the ten worst cities for Black Americans, all ten were in the Midwest.
Sojourners
September 2, 2020
Some—but far from all—parents benefited directly from the CARES Act set-aside of $3.5 billion, says child care expert Elliot Haspel, because many states temporarily waived copays for lower-income families already receiving child care subsidies. (By contrast, Delta Airlines alone received more from CARES than the entire child care industry.) But the Center for Law and Social Policy and the National Women’s Law Center estimate that a true stabilization package for the duration of the pandemic would cost $9.6 billion a month. Even that is a pittance compared with what is needed longer-term. A genuine universal child care system with high-quality care and solid salaries across the board would be more like a $70 billion annual proposition, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others (Haspel and his ilk estimate it will cost much more: One Economic Policy Institute paper puts the cost between $337 billion and $495 billion).
Slate
September 2, 2020