Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington points to the proliferation of viral videos on social media highlighting racial inequities — a factor brought to the foreground amid a wave of social unrest sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
“Even though those aren’t explicitly economic issues, I think there’s something about seeing the blatant racism and inequality that continues to persist in this country that serves to elevate people’s consciousness about race, and racial inequality in a number of different aspects,” Wilson said.
Bloomberg
June 12, 2020
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
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on Wednesday published the conclusions of a bipartisan panel of economists, warning that some 5.3 million more jobs would be lost by the end of 2021 if the federal government does not provide a significant amount of federal aid to state and local governments facing major budget shortfalls because of the coronavirus pandemic. The analysis said that the level of aid should total more than $1 trillion to avoid significant job losses.
“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,” EPI analysts Josh Bivens and David Cooper wrote. “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.”
Newsweek
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
Some have argued those generous benefits will keep people from seeking new jobs. But extending the $600 unemployment benefit would mean that Americans would have more money to spend in stores, and that could ultimately lead to lower unemployment, Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank based in Washington, D.C., said.
“It’s not true that there’s a pool of jobs out there that people would fill if they weren’t receiving unemployment benefits,” she said.
MarketWatch
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
A panel assembled last week by the Economic Policy Institute urged Congress to pass at least $1 trillion more in economic stimulus or risk 5.3 million jobs. The panel urged lawmakers to provide aid to state and local governments, which are facing massive budget deficits as a result of lost revenue resulting from the pandemic.
International Business Times
June 12, 2020
Economic Policy Institute: More than five million workers could lose their jobs by end of next year without further aid to state and local governments.
Politico
June 12, 2020