The president is oblivious, but otherwise almost nobody likes the job Acosta’s been doing. People who care about workers are naturally outraged that he’s been trying to water down everything from mine safety regulations to the rules that prohibit restaurant managers from grabbing a piece of the waiters’ tips.
The New York Times
July 12, 2019
Last week, more than 30 groups including the Economic Policy Institute and US PIRG also asked asked Congress and regulators to impose a moratorium on Libra until “profound questions” are answered
CNET
July 9, 2019
On June 25, 2019, the Institute for Policy Studies co-produced a conference with our allies at the Economic Policy Institute that was truly ground-breaking, thanks in part to its title: “Taxing the (Very) Rich: Finding A Cure for Excessive Wealth Disorder.” Over 21 organizations joined us in co-hosting the sold-out conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. Note this conference was aligned and inspired by the April 2019 conference “Taxing the Rich,” hosted by the Patriotic Millionaires. You can watch their entire April gathering here.
Resilience
July 9, 2019
The post below looks at past busing experiments and the long-term effects, written by a renowned researcher on segregation in the United States. He is Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow emeritus at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California at Berkeley.
The Washington Post
July 9, 2019
In fact, teachers make an estimated 19% less than workers with a similar level of education, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Even when those figures are adjusted to account for benefits, which teachers typically get, educators still earn 11% less than their comparably qualified counterparts.
The Motley Fool
July 9, 2019
Supporters of the legislation answered that the benefits would outweigh the job losses. Heidi Shierholz of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said in an online post that CBO overstated the latter and that anyway, “an employment decline as a result of a minimum wage increase doesn’t necessarily mean any worker is actually worse off. For a wide variety of reasons, a sizeable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in an out of employment; each quarter, more than 20 percent of the lowest-wage workers leave or start a job.” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was more blunt: “Every time momentum builds for lifting wages, conservative ideologues say it will cost jobs. Every time they’ve been dead wrong.” (Studies of minimum-wage hikes over the past two decades have tended to find little or no job loss, but the increases studied were usually of much smaller magnitude.)
Politico
July 9, 2019
The Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan, liberal think tank, took issue with the way the report characterized some of the negative effects of wage increases.
“The crucial fact is that an employment decline as a result of a minimum wage increase doesn’t necessarily mean any worker is actually worse off,” Heidi Shierholz, the institute’s senior economist and director of policy, said in a statement. “For a wide variety of reasons, a sizeable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in an out of employment… This means that even if employment does decline as CBO predicts, workers who work less can still come out ahead because they earn much more when they are working.”
Newsweek
July 9, 2019
Heidi Shierholz, chief economist of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, says the CBO overstated the number job losses. Its findings were partly based on its review of other studies on minimum wage hikes, and Shierholz says the agency should have given more weight to more reliable studies.
She also says that low-wage workers cycle in and out of the labor force so often that many who lose jobs because of a minimum wage increase could wind up earning more and working fewer hours in another position.
USA Today
July 9, 2019
But Heidi Shierholz of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said in an online post that “an employment decline … doesn’t necessarily mean any worker is actually worse off.” That’s because, he wrote, “a sizeable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in an out of employment.” Every three months, according to Shierholz, “more than 20 percent of the lowest-wage workers leave or start [a] job.”
Shierholz also said the CBO study “substantially overstates” how many jobs a $15 minimum wage would cost by failing to weight properly “the highest quality studies” on the matter, which show “small-to-no employment effects.”
Politico
July 9, 2019
But even the CBO included scenarios in which no jobs would be lost. Economic Policy Institute economist Ben Zipperer says it’s an acknowledgement that raising the minimum wage hasn’t proven to be as dangerous as researchers once feared. He added that the CBO’s median estimate nonetheless appears overly pessimistic.
The Washington Post
July 9, 2019