“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
“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
There has been a constant debate between lawmakers and the IT industry about the salaries offered to H-1B visa holders. The Economic Policy Institute has published a report highlighting H-1B visa workers are paid below local wages.
Tech Gig
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
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
“It’s important that individual employers have a reckoning as it relates to pay and equality by race, ethnicity and gender, but it’s going to require broader and more systemic changes to really bring it down,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.
CNBC
June 12, 2020
“Racism generates exclusion, discrimination, oppression, exploitation in a number of ways,” Valerie Wilson, the director of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity, and the economy. “It’s not just physical violence.”
The Root
June 12, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute notes that corporate CEOs enjoyed record earning last year. Their average annual earnings were $17.2 million each, far exceeding any amount imaginable for a minimum wage worker. Professor Ellora Delenoncourt, an incoming economist at the University of California- Berkeley, also noted in the Wall Street Journal that blacks “headed into the crisis extremely vulnerable. Then jobs also left them more exposed to the coronavirus. Black and Latino workers have the lowest working-from-home rates and are more likely to work in industries considered essential. Inequality is a co-morbidity in the Covid-19 pandemic,” she concluded.
The Register-Herald
June 12, 2020