“These real minimum wage increases since 2010 have not only raised low-wage workers’ wages generally,” analysts at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said in a Labor Day report last year. They “have also played an important role in reducing the gender pay gap at the bottom of the wage distribution.”
The Christian Science Monitor
January 9, 2020
“I think it’s unambiguously bad,” says Heidi Schierholz, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute and Department of Labor staffer in the Obama administration. “Every single time there’s a juncture where they could protect corporate interests or the interests of workers, they protect corporate interests.”
WIRED
January 9, 2020
Comparing the incomes of Bend’s top 1% to the bottom 99%, Bend ranked 108th out of 916 cities for inequality, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which used IRS Statistics of Income data through 2015. The top 1% percent of people in Bend then made 21.7 times more than average income of the bottom 99%. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau from 2014-2018 revealed that in Deschutes County, 25% of households made over $100,000 a year, while the bottom 25% made less than $35,000. The income poverty rate is currently 7.1%, according to Census data.
Source Weekly
January 9, 2020
A report recently released from the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research center based in Los Angeles, concluded that the wages Amazon pays its highly skilled workers versus warehouse workers perpetuates economic disparities that benefit those at the top but not necessarily those who do the heavy lifting. While Amazon’s starting salary of $15 an hour for manufacturing employees sits above Utah’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, full-time employees would still only make about $31,000 annually. That kind of salary is doable for a single person living in Salt Lake City, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator, but it falls far short of covering needs for a single parent with child or a family with one income.
The Salt Lake Tribune
January 9, 2020
At the same time, the U.S. economy has a steadfast relationship with greenhouse gas–producing sources not reflected in last year’s modest decline. Other wealthy countries have weaned their economies away from climate-harmful practices more significantly because of federal regulation, thus spending less on carbon-intensive goods and services over time, said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute.
“Part of what’s going on here is that we still consume lots of goods and services that are carbon-intensive in production, but we just import them. And so they’re not showing up in our GDP, but our lifestyle is still supporting the emissions,” Bivens said. “It’s not a win for the globe to just push our dirty industries offshore. We actually want to globally make industries less dirty.”
Newsweek
January 9, 2020
[EPI’S “Annual cost of child care in Washington, DC” chart]
WAMU 88.5
January 9, 2020
Donald Trump likes to talk tough on China. And he believes his new, preliminary agreement with Beijing will yield great benefits for U.S. farmers, producers and other exporters. But to paraphrase one analyst, his deal may not amount to more than a hill of soybeans.
The Hill
January 9, 2020
Robert E. Scott, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, said the numbers show the U.S. economy is slowing – especially in the manufacturing sector.
“Manufacturing is a big consumer of imports, it’s also affected heavily by imports,” Scott said in a phone interview. “The slowdown in the real economy is having a big effect on trade.”
Courthouse News Service
January 9, 2020
Robert Scott is a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “The ISM report is a reflection of the slowdown in both the domestic and foreign economies,” he told MultiBriefs in an email. “As the report indicates, GDP growth has slowed to a rate in the range of 1.3%. Manufacturing output and employment are contracting.”
MultiBriefs: Exclusive
January 9, 2020
According to Urban Institute economists Karen Smith and Eric Toder, the inequality of wage income and taxable wages escaping as health insurance premiums are the most salient and unexpected reasons for the shortfall. The Economic Policy Institute found that most labor earnings growth since 1979 has gone to the top earners; the top 1% wages grew 158% since 1979, while wages for the bottom 90% grew only 24%.
Forbes
January 8, 2020