“The millions who will remain jobless after the extra $600 is cut off will have no choice but to drastically cut their spending, causing a sharp decline in their living standards,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the progressive-leaning Economic Policy Institute think-tank wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
Al Jazeera
July 20, 2020
Minority workers make up more than half of the “essential workers” who supply their fellow Americans with goods and services essential to their well-being. They are 53% of the people working in industrial, commercial, residential facilities and services, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and 50% of workers in food and agriculture.
Arizona Republic
July 20, 2020
The J-1 program, supposedly a cultural exchange experience for students, is similarly exploitative, according to a report last year from the Economic Policy Institute. The skilled workers of the H-1B program are paid more than H-2A, H-2B and J-1 workers, but they still get less than the local median wage for their occupations.
Truthout
July 20, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute agrees. “Occupational segregation is particularly devastating for black women, who face a history of deep-seated racial and gender discrimination,” senior economist Elise Gould wrote in a February 2019 blog on the nonprofit think tank’s website titled, “Stark black–white divide in wages is widening further.”
Gould notes the wage disparity between Black and white people is the narrowest at the bottom of the scale where the minimum wage “keeps the lowest-wage black workers from even lower wages.” Even if Black people pursue education to close the wage gap, Gould says that racial wealth gaps “have been almost entirely unmoved.
Colorado Springs Independent
July 20, 2020
Richard Rothstein: author, “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”
NPR
July 20, 2020
The push for stimulus checks amid a $1 trillion cap is a “real problem,” Josh Bivens, research director of the Economic Policy Institute, told Newsweek, “because they’re quite expensive.” Given the money checks eat up, he said it’s possible “higher priority” items, such as extending the unemployment expansion, could get “crowded out.”
Newsweek
July 20, 2020
“It’s one of the most effective things we’ve seen from the CARES Act, but it’s not perfect,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, and former chief economist at the Department of Labor in the Obama administration.
“That extra $600 is getting a ton of money into the economy,” said Shierholz. For example, people who claim in Mississippi get an average of $813, up from $213. That substantial extra payment stops at the end of July.
Marketplace
July 17, 2020
“You have people who get thrown into these terrible situations because of the timing, because of the lapse that is absolutely unnecessary,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Hill
July 17, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think-tank, analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and determined there are approximately three unemployed workers for every one job opening in the country right now.
Urban Milwaukee
July 17, 2020
African Americans are also more likely to work front-line jobs deemed “essential,” during the pandemic, have higher rates of preexisting conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma and diabetes, and live in more densely populated housing, according to the Economic Policy Institute. African Americans make up 12.5% of the U.S. population but account for 22.4% of COVID-19 deaths, EPI said in a June report.
Breitbart
July 17, 2020
