Connecticut has a serious income disparity problem: Last year, the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington D.C., ranked Connecticut third in income inequality based on 2015 data. But Needleman believes that economic disparities can’t be fixed in the state by increasing taxes on the wealthiest.
Zip06.com
August 6, 2019
A study last year by the Economic Policy Institute says membership in New York’s top 1 percent requires you to make more than $550,000 per year. But to really be considered part of the club, you’d have to be making closer to the average of $2.2 million.
The Riverdale Press
August 6, 2019
Another report from the Economic Policy Institute — Lower Relative Pay and High Incidence of Moonlighting Play a Role in the Teacher Shortage, Particularly in High-poverty Schools (May 9, 2019) — states:
New Age
August 6, 2019
The unrest stems in part from state cuts that have squeezed school budgets and teacher pay. An analysis last year from the Economic Policy Institute found that until the mid-1990s, teachers were paid nearly as much as other educated workers, but in 2017, they made 18.7 percent less.
The Washington Post
August 6, 2019
“We absolutely need to take note of this. Teachers have legitimate grievances. This indicates we’re going to see continued agitation,” said Lawrence Mishel, a labor market economist who studies teacher compensation at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank supported partially by teachers’ unions.
Ed Week
August 6, 2019
This statistic is among multiple jaw-droppers contained in a new Colorado-centric report from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit that stresses its bipartisan nature. And Elise Gould, a senior economist for EPI, notes that the strain such expenses place on Coloradans crosses demographic lines.
Westword
August 6, 2019
Wage theft has serious financial consequences for workers and businesses who are trying to play by the rules. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that American workers are shorted as much as $15 billion in wages each year due to minimum wage law violations. Michigan has the 5th highest total of unpaid wages in the country due to minimum wage violations. According to EPI, from 2013 to 2015, roughly $430 million in wages were improperly withheld from Michigan workers. Misclassifying workers as ‘independent contractors’ also negatively impacts law-abiding taxpayers. According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, millions of employers nationwide have failed to pay more than $45 billion in employment taxes. These practices deprive the federal government of billions of dollars in unpaid employment taxes that are used to fund Social Security, Medicare and other benefits. In Michigan alone, a study released in 2008 found that Michigan loses tens of millions of dollars annually from misclassification practices – depriving the state of dollars for projects like highway and infrastructure upgrades, educational programs, or public hospitals.
Public
August 5, 2019
Whatever the academic history of Neoliberalism may have been, the context within which it blazed the world’s path into the 21st century contained hardly any mechanism to limit income gaps from growing. And so they grew to the shocking size they are today. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s report from November 2018, the situation worldwide was this:
The bottom 90% earned 69.8% of all earnings in 1979 but just 60.9% in 2017. In contrast, the top 1.0% increased its share of earnings from 7.3% in 1979 to 13.4% in 2017, a near doubling. The growth of wages for the top 0.1% is the major dynamic driving the top 1.0% earnings as the top 0.1% more than tripled its earnings share from 1.6% in 1979 to 5.2% in 2017.
The Edge Markets
August 5, 2019
Looking at hourly wage growth, it’s easier to see the state of the labor market is a bit more mixed. According to the Economic Policy Institute, wage growth has been below the target set by the Federal Reserve for more than a decade. Weak wage growth is bad for all workers, but can signal deeper challenges for workers of color. While the Black unemployment rate is routinely twice the white unemployment rate, wage growth for typical white workers is four times the rate for typical Black workers.
Forbes
August 5, 2019
Robert E. Scott, senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, said that the tariffs are a bad idea.
“I’m not a fan of these tariffs… there’s no strategy behind it and it’s unlikely to lead to an improvement in our trade relations, or that it’s going to help workers or American production,” said Scott.
ThinkProgress
August 5, 2019