According to a 2018 report by the Economic Policy Institute, the top 1 percent of families in the U.S. earned an average of 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent; that ratio increases to 44.4 times in New York and 39.5 times in Florida. As of late 2017, the three richest people in the U.S.—Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway—own the equal amount of wealth as the bottom 160 million people in the country. Bezos’s company, Amazon, earned $11.2 billion in profits in 2018 but didn’t pay a single dollar in federal income tax, and instead received $129 million in tax breaks and credits.19 In January 2017, Oxfam reported that two men in Canada—David Thomson of Thomson Reuters and Galen Weston Sr. of George Weston Limited—had the same amount of wealth as the bottom 30 percent of the country.
Canadian Dimenson
April 24, 2020
Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said the administration’s priorities are also evidence of regulations they’re not pursuing.
“The failure to act at this moment says every bit as much as what they’re doing,” she said.
Los Angeles Times
April 24, 2020
“The workers – that’s us – are the consumers,” said Julie Wolfe, state economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute. “The best thing we can do to jump start the economy on the other side of this is to provide workers with income right now.”
Dayton Daily News
April 24, 2020
Yet this number probably won’t be reflected in the official unemployment rate, according to a blog post by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
“This is due to the fact that jobless workers are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work,” Heidi Shierholz, Senior Economist and Director of Policy at EPI wrote. “That means many workers who lose their job as a result of the virus will be counted as dropping out of the labor force instead of as unemployed, because they are unable to search for work due to the lockdown.”
Salon
April 24, 2020
“It’s a problem of our own making,” said Heidi Shierholz, Senior Economic and Director of Policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank focused on improving conditions for low and middle income workers. Shierholz is also a former Chief Economist for the U.S. Department of Labor.
“These systems have been underinvested in for decades,” she said. “It just means that the systems aren’t agile enough to be able to quickly respond to a crisis that’s as dramatic as the one we’re going through right now.”
News 5 Cleveland
April 24, 2020
Those numbers are all seasonally adjusted, which “attempts to measure and remove the influences of predictable seasonal patterns” to show how employment levels change over time. The unadjusted numbers show that more than 24.3 million workers have filed claims the past five weeks. That dwarfs previous five week stretches, according to Heidi Shierholz, who served as chief economist at the Labor Department from 2014-2017 during the Obama administration and is now with the Economic Policy Institute.
“In the period before the coronavirus hit, just over a million workers would apply for UI in a typical five-week span, and in the worst five-week stretch of the Great Recession, it was less than four million,” Shierholz wrote in a blog post. She says more than 1 in 7 workers have lost jobs based on the unadjusted jobless numbers. Shierholz also estimates that about 71% of people who have filed for unemployment between March 14 and April 11 are receiving their benefits.
CBS News
April 24, 2020
There are other avenues to protect small businesses and their employees in this time of crisis, and these mechanisms would reach more people and help more communities. For example, as the Economic Policy Institute notes: A paycheck guarantee program would be far simpler to administer and would more effectively stabilize employment and business in this moment.
NC Policy Watch
April 24, 2020
Last week, an average of one million Americans lost their jobs every day. While nations around the globe have been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, and have issued shutdown orders to contain the spread, none have seen comparable rates of unemployment.
Time
April 24, 2020
“Latinos are more likely to work in ‘essential’ jobs and according to the Economic Policy Institute only 1 in 6 Latinos has the ability to telecommute,” he wrote. “What does this mean? Latinos are expected to leave home, expose themselves and then return home to air pollution.”
Denverite
April 24, 2020
For context, that would put U.S. unemployment approximately in line with levels not seen since the Great Depression. The non-partisan Economic Policy Institute is estimating that the current unemployment rate is approximately 18.3 percent.
Urban Milwaukee
April 24, 2020