If you and your spouse have children, it may be expected that you’ll pay child support or that child support may not cover all your expenses. But have you thought about this in real-world terms and prepared for it? When the average cost of infant care in the US is $11,420.02 ($9,166.53 for a four-year-old), according to numbers provided by the Economic Policy Institute, not preparing can be a costly mistake.
Finance Buzz
January 24, 2020
There are many factors at work there, from globalization to changing social norms (the workforce-participation rate of men 25 to 54 has declined just a smidgen since 1998, but the workforce-participation rate of men 20 to 24 has declined by a tenth) to catastrophically stupid experiments with subsidizing subprime mortgages and then basing a whole bunch of economic assumptions on the resulting asset bubble. During that time, CEO compensation at the big firms went up and down, too — it fell by half from 2000 to 2002, to a measly $10.3 million! — but what executive pay at publicly traded companies tends to track most closely is, no great surprise, the performance of the S&P 500, as data from the Economic Policy Institute and others confirm.
National Review
January 24, 2020
The basic facts about inequality in the United States — that for most of the last 40 years, pay has stagnated for all but the highest-paid workers and inequality has risen dramatically — are widely understood. What is less well-known is the role the decline of unionization has played in those trends. The share of workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement dropped from 27 percent to 11.6 percent between 1979 and 2019, meaning the union coverage rate is now less than half where it was 40 years ago.
Morning Consult
January 24, 2020
Defenders of the status quo will counter that teachers are more highly educated, but that their pay doesn’t reflect it. For evidence, they often trot out an annual study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute purporting to show the “teacher pay gap.” The institute asserted that the pay gap was 21.4 percent in 2018.
Las Vegas Review-Journal
January 23, 2020
A well-known factoid in American economic debates is that wages used to grow with productivity, but they don’t anymore. There’s a particularly famous chart, courtesy of the Economic Policy Institute, that shows hourly pay for the typical U.S. household increasing closely in line with the economy’s overall productivity from 1950 to 1970. Then wage growth suddenly slows down around 1972, and flatlines thereafter.
The Week
January 23, 2020
Read a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute on the flaws of the NLRB proposal here.
Bernie Sanders
January 23, 2020
Nearly 7 million workers will start the new year with higher wages: As economic research continues to show that higher minimum wages work precisely as they’re intended—lifting pay for low-wage workers with little, if any, impact on their job prospects—there is no excuse for lawmakers in some states to continue to deny higher pay to millions of the country’s lowest-paid workers. [Economic Policy Institute]
Oklahoma Policy Institute
January 23, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute analyzes key data from monthly Employment Situation reports generated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among its recent findings is that the average number of jobs created each month throughout 2019 was slightly lower when compared to 2018. Likewise, some of the gains involving wage growth in 2018 were erased in 2019.
“Last year was a little softer than 2018,” says Elise Gould, senior economist at EPI. She explains that an average of 176,000 jobs was created each month in 2019, compared to 223,000 jobs in 2018. “But that still far exceeds how many jobs you need to create just to keep up with population growth.”
Human Resource Executive
January 23, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute believes another factor behind the jump in African American employment is a growing number of them who graduated from college.
The BL
January 23, 2020
Advanced manufacturing and especially aerospace remain a pillar of Connecticut economic development. By one measure from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank and advocacy group in Washington, D.C., precision manufacturing jobs create 7.4 positions in a regional economy for every new job.
Middletown Press
January 23, 2020