One proposed change would alter how the poverty threshold rises to reflect inflation; under the plan the threshold would move from using the consumer price index to using the “chained” consumer price index. While almost all indexes, including the CPI, measure inflation, in part, by assuming consumers will substitute one item for another when things get too costly, chained CPI does it more aggressively. Over time this change would lead to a decrease in the number of people living in poverty, not because they are earning more money, but because they will not meet the increasingly narrow definition of it. As a result, “fewer and fewer people would receive benefits over time,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post
May 8, 2019
The issue driving income inequality in the U.S. has not been a lack of productivity by American workers, a February report from the Economic Policy Institute finds. Instead it is that the lion’s share of gains from increased productivity have gone to a tiny segment of wage earners at the top.
Axios
May 8, 2019
Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute told DailyMail.com that part of the issue could be that inflation and the cost of living in America has outstripped wage growth.
Daily Mail
May 8, 2019
“There’s a whole history of attempts to cut benefits of various kinds by saying we could use a more accurate measure of inflation, but the only change suggested by these groups are changes that would kick more Americans off welfare benefits,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “This is being done to lower eligibility, and this administration cannot pretend they’re doing it for accuracy purposes, especially if the only thing they’re changing is to make a measure that is already too low even worse… There’s no rationalizing this as help.”
Newsweek
May 8, 2019
The reason is no secret: its simple math. The Economic Policy Institute found Maryland teachers earn 14% less, on average, than similarly skilled workers in other jobs in Maryland’s state economy.
MarylandReporter.com
May 8, 2019
Overall, teachers in the U.S. were paid 21.4% less than comparably educated professionals in 2018, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which described the gap as a “record high.”
Time
May 8, 2019
It’s by now a familiar story: anemic wage growth for most workers and rising inequality have plagued the US labor market since the 1970s, funneling an ever greater share of economic growth to the country’s most affluent people.
The Guardian
May 8, 2019
In August of 2011, President Obama signed the Budget Control Act. It was as part of a deal to end a crisis Republicans manufactured the month before when they threatened to shut down the government if Democrats did not agree to future spending cuts. The law mandated sequestration and imposed strict fiscal controls at a moment when the economy still needed economic stimulus. Sequestration, which capped the discretionary portions of the federal budgets, further slowed the recovery and constrained the Obama administration’s ability to influence the economy. “The recovery since 2009 has been historically slow, and the disappointing pace can be explained almost entirely by the fiscal austerity imposed by the Republicans in Congress,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens said in 2016. “To be blunt, if public spending since the Great Recession had followed the path it took during the recovery presided over by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, the U.S. economy would have been fully healed for years now.”
The New Republic
May 8, 2019
The faster growth at the bottom is probably being fueled in part by recent minimum-wage increases in cities and states across the country. Research from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, found that over the past five years, wages for low-wage workers rose 13 percent in states that raised their minimum wages, compared with 8.4 percent in states that did not.
The New York Times
May 6, 2019
Despite the possibility of last-minute spending, 40 percent of Americans are unable to afford a $400 emergency, while wages remain close to stagnant for most people, even as those at the top continue to see gains. Recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows that labor income for the bottom 90 percent has shrunk by more than 10 percent since 1979—translating to about $10,800 of lost pay per household. With little sign of bipartisan cooperation on pro-worker policies, a tight labor market is the primary force that most workers can expect to reverse this trend in the coming year.
Center for American Progress
May 6, 2019