Even before Covid-19, teachers were leaving the profession in droves. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, the national teacher shortage is looking dire. Every year, fewer and fewer people want to become teachers.
New York Times
August 17, 2020
Yet another form of racial injustice has largely been left out of the conversation: segregation, says Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow at the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute and author of “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”
“It’s not being talked about enough,” Rothstein says. “The attention to racial inequality that the Black Lives Matter movement has generated provides the opportunity to begin to consider the underlying residential segregation that perpetuates so much of the inequality, including police abuse, in this country.”
U.S. News & World Report
August 17, 2020
Eighteen organizations have issued a joint public comment on the Employee Benefits Security Administration’s proposed rule entitled “Improving Investment Advice for Workers and Retirees”. The comment was written on Aug. 5, 2020, and posted on Aug. 10, 2020:
The comment was co-signed by the Alliance for Retired Americans, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, Center for Economic Integrity, Center for Economic Justice, the Committee for the Fiduciary Standard, Consumer Action, Delaware Community Reinvestment Action Council, Inc., Economic Policy Institute, Georgia Watch, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers, Lynn Turner, Montrose Cones, National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, Pension Rights Center, Public Citizen, Take on Wall Street.
Insurance News Net
August 17, 2020
In a webinar Friday by the union-based Economic Policy Institute, economists ranging from George W. Bush economic advisor Glenn Hubbard to Barack Obama economic advisor Jason Furman said money from Washington was crucial to avoiding worsening the economic meltdown.
“We just went off the fiscal cliff” for states and cities, said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “And there is going to be real damage to the economy.”
The City
August 17, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average Uber driver only works three months out of the year and 17 hours per week. For most drivers, Uber only supplements their income. Uber never claimed to provide a living wage, it’s pretty openly marketed as a side hustle.
Uber drivers may only make between $8.55 and $10 an hour, but people continue to hop in the driver’s seat, proving they would rather work for those numbers than take the extra leisure time.
Orange County Register
August 17, 2020
Indeed, according to the Economic Policy Institute, 60 percent of all H-1B positions certified by the Department of Labor are paid well below the local median wage for the occupation. In other words, TVA was willing to cut costs by replacing federal employees with lower-paid contractors.
InsideSources
August 17, 2020
If we continue to allow Trump and McConnell to do nothing, the result will be the type of economic implosion we haven’t experienced in our lifetimes. The failure to extend the expanded unemployment benefits will cost an additional five million jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
August 17, 2020
Inequality in Rhode Island has soared in recent decades. From 1975 to 2015, the inflation-adjusted pre-tax incomes of the richest 10 percent of Rhode Islanders rose 86 percent, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. Over the same period, incomes of the other 90 percent of Rhode Islanders rose just 36 percent. As a result, the top 10 percent now receive nearly half of all pre-tax income earned in Rhode Island each year, the largest slice in nearly a century’s worth of data. Meanwhile, policymakers have lowered taxes on the wealthy across the country — including in Rhode Island, where the top state income tax rate has dropped from 17 percent in 1975 to 5.99 percent in the present day.
Uprise Rhode Island
August 17, 2020
Larry Mishel, the former longtime president of the Economic Policy Institute and one of the most prominent pro-labor economists in Washington, told the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg that Biden’s plan was “as robust and fleshed out a policy suite on labor standards and unions” as he’d seen from a Democrat in his lifetime.
VOX
August 17, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that extending the $600 UI benefits, which expired in July, through to the middle of 2021 would provide an average quarterly GDP boost of 3.7 percent, as well as sustain the employment of 5.1 million workers.
Newsweek
August 17, 2020