Media clips
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We have innovation, but also, people like their employer-sponsored health insurance. It’s, like, well, now we have twenty million people who don’t have that anymore. [By mid-April, twenty million Americans lost their jobs, and an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute suggests that roughly nine million Americans lost their employer-provided health insurance.] I think all those critiques were compelling to me. There was a certain portion of the Sanders folks who, I think, thought that, if they were able to win a narrow factional battle, they could essentially seize the palace, and that’s not how it works. They just didn’t convince enough people, and sometimes it felt like they were not trying.
The New Yorker May 11, 2020 -
“Money spent on continuing crucial unemployment insurance provisions will help avoid a prolonged period of high unemployment that will do far more serious and persistent damage to the economy,” wrote economic research director Josh Bivens and policy director Heidi Shierholz of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in a Monday post.
The Hill May 11, 2020 -
Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute wrote that the extra $600 “has been by far the most effective part our economic policy response to the coronavirus shock.” It would have been better to cap the benefit at 100% of pre-crisis wages “up to a quite generous maximum benefit,” but “decades of disinvestment in the administrative capacity” of state unemployment offices left them incapable of calculating a flexible amount with a 100% replacement rate.
SF Gate May 11, 2020 -
States are going bankrupt and beginning to implement brutal austerity measures. A report from the Economic Policy Institute earlier this month found that 50 percent more people are unemployed than have even been able to file for unemployment benefits—the result of overburdened application systems and onerous restrictions. Millions who have filed for benefits have not received anything.
World Socialist Web Site May 11, 2020 -
Now, if you plan of staying at home until July, then there is a chance the job (or jobs) that you are being offered now may not be available then. There are expectations of a tight labor market through the end of the summer. The Economic Policy Institute estimates an unemployment rate of 15.6% in July. In comparison, the highest unemployment rate at the time of the Great Recession was 10% in October 2009.
Value Walk May 11, 2020 -
“The way a recession can really hurt people just starting out can have lasting effects,” Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, previously told Business Insider. “There’s a lot of evidence that the first postgrad job you get sets the stage in some important way for later.”
Business Insider May 11, 2020 -
Plus, this pandemic may be far more prolonged than most lawmakers realized at the end of March when the president first authorized the program. In the end, eight weeks of help is likely not enough for many small businesses. And even though Congress has authorized $669 billion for the program thus far, Elise Gould, a senior economist with the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, said keeping all these people on payrolls into the summer would cost around $1 trillion.
Inc. May 11, 2020 -
Analysts have argued that thousands of American workers aren’t able to work from home and effectively “socially distance” themselves from their communities. Less than one in five black workers and roughly one in six Hispanic workers are able to work from home, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Independent May 11, 2020 -
Before the April jobs report release, Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) warned on Twitter that Friday would be “the most cataclysmic #JobsDay of all of our lives” and shared a chart showing how recent unemployment claims contrast with the past 80 years, before detailing current conditions in a 22-tweet thread.
Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at EPI, explained that “only about two-thirds of coronavirus-related job losses are showing up as unemployed—the rest are showing up as having dropped out of the labor force. If all coronavirus-related job losses had shown up as unemployed, the unemployment rate would now be around 19.0%, not 14.7%.”
“Further, about 7.5 million workers are likely being misclassified as ’employed, not at work’ instead of ‘temporarily unemployed,’” she continued. “If they were classified correctly AND all coronavirus-related job losses had shown up as unemployed, the unemployment rate would be around 23.6%.”
She also highlighted EPI’s estimate from April 30 that because of recent job losses, about 12.7 million Americans have lost their employer-based health insurance—which EPI researchers called a “terrifying” indictment of the country’s private, for-profit healthcare system, particularly in the midst of a pandemic.
EPI senior economist Elise Gould addressed the April jobs report in a Friday blog post entitled “A Waking Nightmare.” She wrote: “I struggle to even put into words how large this drop is. It’s as if all the gains in employment since 2000 were wiped out. Total job losses over the last two months would fill all 30 currently empty Major League Baseball stadiums 16 times over.”
Gould advised against celebrating the supposed “silver lining” that nominal wages grew 7.9% over the year, explaining that the wage growth “reflects the dropping of lower wage jobs from the total, which results in higher average wages for the remaining jobs, and what appears to be faster overall growth, but not driven by people getting meaningful raises.”
The 20.5 million job losses across the United States in April underscore the need for bold action from federal lawmakers, according to Gould.
“Congress needs to continue providing relief to workers and their families across the country,” she wrote. “They need to extend expanded unemployment insurance until the labor market has sufficiently recovered and provide a huge amount of aid to state and local governments.”
“The next relief package,” Gould concluded, “should also include worker protections, a paycheck guarantee, invest in our democracy, provide relief to the postal service, and make significant investments in testing and contact tracing.”
Common Dreams May 11, 2020 -
Money has been moving like lava through the economy for almost two months now amid the coronavirus shutdowns resulting in millions of layoffs, which some bank officials like J.P. Morgan’s Bob Michele, say will keep unemployment high for at least a decade. The bleak prediction comes as the April jobs report, published today, reported that 20.5 million people joined the ranks of the unemployed. If we consider a study done by the Economic Policy Institute, the real figure could be twice larger.
Mint Press News May 11, 2020