Media clips
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All that money doesn’t really buy a community anything. The Economic Policy Institute looked at areas that had won bids to host Amazon warehouses and found that, while warehousing jobs did increase by 30%, total employment was flat in the community.
MarketWatch April 4, 2018 -
Morning Shift: Trump takes DACA off the table — More teacher protests — Democrats want Ross on census
Politico Pro/Ted Hesson
DEMOCRATS WANT ROSS ON CENSUS: Senate Democrats on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee demanded that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross testify on changes to the 2020 Census. “The success of the 2020 Census is already in danger due to historic levels of distrust in government, making this decision to add a citizenship question even more disturbing,” Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Tom Carper (D-Del.), and Gary Peters (D-Mich.) wrote in a letter Friday. The lawmakers accused the Trump administration of tainting the census with “improper political considerations” and complained that no census hearings have been scheduled by committee chair Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
The citizenship question isn’t the only contentious census issue, with 51 economists signing a letter released today urging Congress for greater funding of the 2020 census. The letter was signed by four Nobel Prize winners and officials from the past three presidential administrations. Although the Census Bureau was funded above the White House’s budget request, the economists “remain concerned about the cumulative effects on census readiness of underfunding… in all previous years in this census cycle, which started in fiscal year 2012.”
The letter was written “for future generations to make sure this important tool is not politicized and not done on the cheap,” said Thea Lee, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, and one of the signatories. Despite firmly opposing the citizenship question, “the solution to that is not underfunding the census so you have inaccuracy and incompleteness,” she told Morning Shift. Lee warned that an underfunded census could lead to undercounted immigrant and impoverished populations. Read it here.
Politico Pro April 2, 2018 -
This year, the Labor Department proposed a regulation that could have resulted in restaurant employers dipping into the tips customers leave for employees, depriving those employees of as much as $5.8 billion a year in income, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute. The story began under the Obama administration, when it barred employers from pooling servers’ tips and using them to boost pay for untipped “back of the house” staff such as dishwashers, even if they paid servers the full statutory minimum wage. The Trump administration rule said employers who paid servers the full statutory minimum could indeed divert tips to the back of the house; as written, though, it seemed to allow restaurants to keep the tips for themselves, not just share them with dishwashers. The restaurant lobby swore that restaurants had no intention of doing so, but with wage theft already a chronic problem in the industry, employee advocates were understandably skeptical.
The Washington Post April 2, 2018 -
“The reason that an aggressive program like [George Romney’s] hasn’t been done since is that there’s no political support for it,” said Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and author of The Color of Law. “And part of the reason there’s no political support for it is because we’ve adopted this myth that the government wasn’t responsible for segregation, and so there’s no governmental responsibility for undoing it.” (Rothstein quoted throughout)
The Atlantic April 2, 2018 -
The homeownership gap between blacks and whites is now wider than it was during the Jim Crow era. Another independent research report by the Economic Policy Institute found that the difference in black homeownership between 1968 and 2018 is virtually the same — 41.1 percent (1968) compared to 41.2 percent (2018).
Orlando Sentinel April 2, 2018 -
Research from the Economic Policy Institute earlier this year thatlooked specifically at the employment impact of Amazon Fulfillment Centers on their host communities came to a similarly sobering conclusion. “While warehousing jobs increased in the two years after,” wrote CityLab’s Tanvi Misra, “overall employment at the county level remained roughly the same.”
City Lab March 30, 2018 -
A 2018 study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that the overall employment rates don’t change when Amazon opens a new warehouse in a city. The researchers say warehouse wages also do not change when Amazon comes. Cities and states providing tax incentives to Amazon for warehouse construction may be getting a “bad bargain,” one of the study’s authors, Ben Zipperer, told Business Insider. Amazon, which has opened fulfillment centers in 25 states, disputes the group’s findings.
Business Insider March 30, 2018 -
Still, the minimum starting salary for an entry-level lecturer in Ann Arbor is $34,500 for the eight-month academic year, the university confirmed, which annualizes to much less than the $89,186 the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute says a family of four needs to live there, and which Cardinal and others said they’re not shy about sharing with their students.
The Hechinger Report March 30, 2018 -
“He has consistently underestimated how much lower the unemployment rate could sustainably go,” wrote Josh Biven in a note from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that has worked with the Fed Up Campaign.
The Wall Street Journal March 29, 2018 -
The department devised the rule out of concern that the increased popularity of individual retirement accounts attracts clients who can be duped into dubious transactions by advisers with conflicts of interest. One example is that an adviser sells a client a fund charging a 2 percent sales fee, and doesn’t offer similar products with lower fees. Heidi Shierholz, senior economist with the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, says investors acting on advice from nefarious advisers will lose an estimated $23 billion a year.
St. Louis Post Dispatch March 29, 2018