Economic Policy Institute Senior Economic Analyst David Cooper joins Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman to discuss its recent analysis that finds 5.3 million workers could lose their jobs by the end of 2021, if Congress withholds federal aid to state and local governments.
Yahoo Finance
June 12, 2020
He then claims that students with and without degrees are making “identical” wages. But according to the Economic Policy Institute, college graduates earned 56 percent more than high school graduates in 2015. Moreover, college graduates earn about one million dollars more over their lifetimes than high school graduates. Even accounting for student loan debt, that is a significant difference.
The Laconia Daily Sun
June 12, 2020
“Too many students in low-income and rural communities don’t have internet access: 35% of low-income households with school-aged children don’t have high-speed internet; for moderate-income families it is 17%, and only 6% for middle-class and affluent families,” according to an April 14 Economic Policy Institute report. “When measured by race and ethnicity, the gap is greater for African American and Hispanic families.”
Click Orlando
June 12, 2020
The protesters march in a state where African Americans make up nearly 5% of the population, but 18% of the state inmate population. They march in a state where the most recent five-year census survey shows the poverty level of African Americans is more than twice that of whites, where the median household income of African Americans is two-thirds that of whites — a gap that has barely budged in the last 50 years. They march in a state where white homeownership is nearly double that of blacks. The un- and underemployment rates fell across the board last year and gaps among blacks and whites narrowed significantly, but still persist, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis provided by the Colorado Center on Law and Policy.
Colorado Sun
June 12, 2020
The police and courts benefit the rich. For example, a 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that in the ten most populous states, an estimated 2.4 million people lose a combined $8 billion in income every year to different forms of wage theft by their employers. That’s nearly half as much as all other property theft combined, according to FBI stats from 2018.
Socialist Alternative Minnesota
June 12, 2020
The best evidence for how strapped state and local governments can become drags on growth comes from the 2008-2009 recession, when they became relentlessly austere “anti-stimulus machines,” observes Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute.
If state and local spending had matched the trajectory it followed during the recovery from the recession of the early 1980s, “pre-recession unemployment rates could have been achieved by early 2013 rather than 2017,” Bivens calculates. “In short, this austerity delayed recovery by over four years.”
Closing the revenue gap with federal aid will save as many as 6 million jobs by the end of 2021, Bivens adds, placing the U.S. back on the path to full employment it enjoyed before the coronavirus pandemic.
Los Angeles Times
June 12, 2020
“If all the 32.5 million workers who are out of work as a result of the virus had shown up as unemployed, the unemployment rate would have been 19.7% in May instead of 13.3%,” said Economic Policy Institute Policy Director Heidi Shierholz.
Canton Daily Ledger
June 12, 2020
If Connecticut does not receive more stimulus money from the federal government, nearly 60,000 jobs in the state could be lost, hampering an economic recovery, an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute says.
Hartford Courant
June 12, 2020
“States actually can’t solve this on their own — the federal government can. And so, it should be stepping in and providing state governments with a ton of aid.” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and former chief economist at the Department of Labor, told Yahoo Money. “They could do it very, very easily. And it’s being debated. It should be happening already. It’s pretty shameful that it’s not.”
Yahoo Money
June 12, 2020
At the Economic Policy Institute, Josh Bivens and David Cooper write:
- If policymakers do nothing at the federal level to address these shortfalls, the United States could end 2021 with 5.3 million fewer jobs, with losses in every state.
- Further, if Congress passes some level of aid that is insufficient—less than $1 trillion—they will needlessly guarantee a significant job gap by the end of 2021.
- If they pass $500 billion of aid over that time, the jobs gap will likely be roughly 2.6 million. If they pass $300 billion of aid, the jobs gap will likely be roughly 3.7 million.
- While empirical estimates of the shortfall should guide policymakers’ thinking, they can (and actually should) avoid putting a firm sticker price on state and local aid by tying this aid to economic conditions. If the economy recovers faster than the forecasts driving the $1 trillion estimated shortfall indicate will happen, then less aid would be needed. If instead recovery lagged, more would be needed.
- Finally, filling in the estimated shortfalls would merely return state and local governments to their pre-crisis fiscal status quo. But the unique features of the current economic shock will put greater demands on public services than existed before the crisis. To go beyond macroeconomic stabilization and promote the general welfare, even more federal aid to these governments is likely needed.
Daily Kos
June 12, 2020