Moreover, black people are less able than their white counterparts to engage in the social distancing that makes it possible to avoid contracting COVID-19 in the first place. Low-income people, who are disproportionately people of color, are the “essential workers” who are keeping our cities functioning and our country running. On this point, the Economic Policy Institute issued a report in March that stated that “only 9.2% of workers in the lowest quartile of the wage distribution can telework, compared with 61.5% of workers in the highest quartile.” It also noted that “less than 1 in 5 black workers and roughly 1 in 6 Hispanic workers are able to work from home.” Low-income people are the janitors. They are the farm laborers. They are stocking the shelves at the grocery stores. They are cooking food in restaurants. (This, of course, is if they were able to keep their jobs, as Hispanic and black Americans were more likely to be laid off or furloughed during the pandemic than white Americans.) Low-income people also cannot social distance because they are less likely to have a car. To go somewhere, they have to take buses. They have to take trains. This also heightens their risk of exposure.
Time
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
“Research has shown that historically higher unemployment rates, lower wages, higher poverty rates, and lower liquid savings make job losses even more devastating for African-American workers and their families,” Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an analysis on June 5.
Courthouse News Service
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
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