The need for Biden to push a more progressive policy agenda should now be apparent to former skeptics in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, suggested Sanders. The public health and economic crisis caused by the outbreak has so far pushed more than 16 million Americans off their employer-sponsored health insurance, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and has caused an explosion in demand at food banks across the U.S. as many unemployed people began struggling to afford basic necessities after missing just one or two paychecks.
Common Dreams
June 11, 2020
Valerie Wilson, the director of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity, and the economy, says the existence of racism erects systemic barriers within the economy that harm the financial wellbeing of Black people.Data from the Economic Policy Institute indicates Black households had $8,762 cash on hand on average — starkly lower than the $49,529 that white households had amassed on average.While Black workers make up one in nine workers (11.9%) in the labor force overall, they account for one of every six frontline industry workers, or 17%, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis.
Business Insider
June 11, 2020
Black college graduates ages 21 to 24 earn $3.34 less per hour than their white peers, reported Jillian Berman for MarketWatch, citing an analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That contributes to a $7,000 annual difference.
Business Insider
June 11, 2020
This impending fiscal horror story extends, to be sure, far beyond Suffolk County’s borders. Localities across the United States are facing massive budget shortfalls. In April, notes Economic Policy Institute analyst Elise Gould, the nation’s public schools lost more jobs than they lost over the course of the entire Great Recession a dozen years ago.
Counterpunch
June 11, 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, recently told Business Insider. “It’s not just physical violence.”
Markets Insider
June 11, 2020
“Many of the advocacy workers on these issues see the guest workers as being even worse off and more indentured,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. That’s because H-2A workers are completely dependent on the individual employers who sponsor them. If they lose their job—if they’re fired for complaining about working conditions or become too sick to work—they can be forced to leave the country immediately. Terrified of losing the chance to support their families, they’re unlikely to speak up about abuses.
“Sonny Perdue is really a lobbyist for the [agricultural] industry disguised as a Trump cabinet member,” said Costa, the Economic Policy Institute research director. His opinion is that many big growers want the H-2A program to be administered by the USDA instead of the Department of Labor, for this very reason: “It’s a strategy for not having real oversight or enforcement in the program.”
The Appeal
June 11, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that focuses on the needs of low- and middle-income workers, argues it’s a good idea to give workers who made below-average incomes before the crisis that $600 boost, and contends the subsidy should continue. In a blog post, economists from organization say putting extra money into the pockets of lower-income workers helped keep the economy going during the slowdown, and kept them from having to “run down their meager savings and go into debt just to survive during the lockdown period.”
Cleveland.com
June 11, 2020
[19] State Department, “Nonimmigrant Visa Statistics”. Daniel Costa and Jennifer Rosenbaum make more detailed efforts to estimate the L-1 population, arriving at 311,257 for 2013, compared to 339,273 under this method. Daniel Costa and Jennifer Rosenbaum, “Temporary foreign workers by the numbers,” Economic Policy Institute, March 7, 2017.
CATO Institute
June 11, 2020
“The human suffering and lost productive potential represented by these numbers is immeasurable,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Labor Department and now head of policy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Reuters
June 11, 2020