Robert Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says the stock market at the moment is being held up by “Frankly, just financial engineering.” He estimates that by the time the government’s rescue packages are all tallied up, they could add up to $5 trillion of zero-interest loans to big business. Hardly the fabled laissez-faire version of capitalism, but of course the companies will take it. (It is, after all, what their political contributions have paid for.) Scott believes that the gravity of America’s crushed economy will eventually pull down the stock market again, but the current measures will have served their purpose: “Insiders are going to sell off their stock and make a killing,” he says, “and long term investors will take the loss.”
In These Times
May 6, 2020
An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that 88.3% of farmworkers could be eligible for paid leave under the FFCRA (including H-2A workers). However, the vast majority of farms in the U.S. could qualify for the act’s small business exemptions. That means if every farm that could be exempt applied and got approved, about two-thirds of farmworkers would no longer be guaranteed paid leave.
KUNC
May 6, 2020
More than 50 percent of Americans receive their health insurance through their employer; a recent analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute forecast that 3.5 million workers had lost their insurance in the last two weeks of March alone.
Fox Business
May 6, 2020
By the numbers: States have processed unemployment claims for roughly one in five working Americans — some 30.3 million people — in just 6 weeks.
- And yet the Economic Policy Institute estimates as many as 13.9 million more Americans out of work since mid-March have been unable to get unemployment benefits because “long-neglected state [unemployment] systems are unable to handle the volume of applications.”
Axios
May 6, 2020
But he tossed all that aside. Trump’s massive corporate tax cuts were a boon to the rich and did little for workers. He badly undermined worker protections and tried to roll back the Affordable Care Act’s protections for millions. Trump and Republicans are still trying to destroy those protections amid a pandemic.
The Washington Post
May 6, 2020
Life in the U.S. today can feel dark. Sure, we can’t predict the future, but the country has found itself in a similar position before. And, while history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, there are things we could learn from the trials of the nation, just under a century ago, when tens of millions were out of work.
To unpack these questions and more, we spoke with Elise Gould, senior economist from the Economic Policy Institute, and Rebecca Dixon, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.
NPR
May 6, 2020
In this video, we explain how and why the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands chose a different path. With the help of economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, we explore whether the US can still avoid millions more job losses.
VOX
May 6, 2020
With stay-in-place laws and mandatory closing of most businesses, unemployment has skyrocketed. Before the pandemic it was at 3.5 percent in December 20, as of April 2020, the Economic Policy Institute has estimated that unemployment rate to be at 18.3 percent. Many economists using April’s Labor Department data predict that the unemployment rate could reach 25 percent this summer if the existing practices remain in force. That level would match the peak of the Great Depression in 1933. However, then it took three years not six months to reach that level.
Daily Kos
May 6, 2020