The 2020 new year marks an historic landmark for dramatically improving many people’s living standards by increasing the minimum hourly wage. According to David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 7 million workers will start the new year with higher wages. This is not due to Trump’s tax cut which reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to as low as 20 percent. That change resulted in doubling the number of companies paying zero in taxes, according to research from the Center for Public Integrity.
Counterpunch
January 9, 2020
“No matter how you cut it, the low-wage workers are getting a larger wage boost in states that have raised their minimum wage,” says senior economist Elise Gould of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
NPR
January 9, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, projects that in four years, almost 83% of private-sector workers will be subject to mandatory arbitration. It estimated 56% of workers had mandatory arbitration clauses in their contracts. The EPI says mandatory arbitration does not give workers a fair hearing, or the resources of the American legal system — like a jury by one’s peers.
MarketWatch
January 9, 2020
“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