“With health insurance in particular, we have a social support system that really isn’t very functional when you have job loss,” said Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. That’s a problem at the best of times, he said, “but it’s a real disaster when you have tens of millions of workers suddenly lose their job.”
The Covid-19 shock had likely pushed more than 16 million workers off employer-provided health insurance as of early May, the left-leaning EPI estimates. Unemployment data for June, due Thursday, will shed more light on the picture
Bloomberg
June 30, 2020
Among the states where unemployment benefits will end earlier than July 31 are California and New York, with their labor departments ending their payment cycles on July 25 and July 26, respectively. They also have more workers claiming unemployment than any other states, with more than 3 million in California and 1.8 million in New York, according to an analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
CBS Moneywatch
June 30, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning, pro-immigration, Washington, DC, think tank, wrote that hundreds of thousands of workers arrive in the U. S. annually on J-1 visas without adequate protections and thereby put at a disadvantage the countless U.S. workers struggling to find jobs in the same industries. The jobs are often in leisure categories that young Americans would eagerly do on resorts like Martha’s Vineyard Bar Harbor.
The Patriot Post
June 30, 2020
The share of Americans’ total wage and salary income made up of unemployment benefits has reached historically high levels, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Since the 1940s, unemployment assistance has never made up more than 2.5 percent of American income, but that benefit constituted 15 percent of wages and salaries last month.
NBC News
June 30, 2020
Nearly 11 percent of the workforce is unemployed without a possibility of being called back off furlough. (Economic Policy Institute)
The American Prospect
June 30, 2020
The ongoing economic crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic will leave over 17 million workers without a job to return to once the outbreak is over, according to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz, who also predicts without sustained and continued federal action 10 million or more jobs could be lost in the next year.
“Of the 32.5 million workers who are either officially unemployed or otherwise out of work because of the virus, only 14.8 million workers (or 45.6%) can reasonably expect to be called back to a prior job, which means 17.6 million (or 54.4%) cannot,” Shierholz writes.
Common Dreams
June 30, 2020
According to economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, if state and local government spending “had instead followed the trajectory it established following the recovery from the similarly steep recession of the early 1980s, pre-recession unemployment rates could have been achieved by early 2013 rather than 2017. In short, this austerity delayed recovery by over four years.”
Nonprofit Quarterly
June 30, 2020
That surprised some observers, who thought the Democrat’s support was assured. “I would have expected him to sign the bill with pleasure,” says Dave Cooper with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that supports a higher minimum wage. “I was disappointed.”
WAMU
June 30, 2020
Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, told CNN Business that “cutting off a policy support that helps households maintain spending is a terrible idea, both for these households’ welfare and for macroeconomic stabilization.” Bivens also added that he believes extending the additional $600 under the HEROES Act through the middle of next year “would provide an average quarterly boost to gross domestic product of 3.7% and employment of 5.1 million workers.”
iHeartRadio
June 29, 2020
Although some, like National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow, say the economy has “hit a turning point,” Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute correctly says the claims data “highlight the deep recession we are now in.” Shierholz notes this is “the 14th week in a row where initial unemployment claims are more than twice the worst week of the Great Recession.”
Forbes
June 29, 2020