Leslie is joined by Scott Paul and Robert E. Scott to discuss a new EPI report entitled, “The China toll deepens: Growth in the bilateral trade deficit between 2001 and 2017 cost 3.4 million U.S. jobs, with losses in every state and congressional district.”
The Leslie Marshall Show
November 1, 2018
China has taken advantage of these privileges to more than quadruple its share of world trade, creating great wealth in the Chinese economy and for a segment of Chinese society while causing economic damage in the United States and other nations. A recent report by the union-backed Economic Policy Institute estimated that China’s entry into the WTO cost 3.4 million American jobs, 74 percent of them in manufacturing.
November 1, 2018
“The tariffs are tactics in search of a strategy,” said Robert Scott, trade policy analyst for the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “They’re as likely to lead to what economists refer ‘trade diversion’ — diverting trade to some other country — as they are to lead to reduction in the amount of trade. Much more likely, in fact,” Scott said. “China maintains the advantage. They’re just shipping their products to the U.S. through some other port.”
The Washington Examiner
November 1, 2018
“It’s true [black unemployment] has been declining, but it’s still much higher than other groups,” Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, told ABC News. “It’s the persistence of the racial gap. To me, that’s the bigger challenge.” In other words, black unemployment remains the highest — nearly double that of whites. “There’s nowhere you’d go in the country and see the black and white unemployment rate as the same — it’s race, any way you slice it,” Wilson added. (Valerie quoted throughout)
ABC News
October 29, 2018
A new report by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank, suggests that U.S. customers are indeed paying too much. Looking at how often Americans use specific medical services such as knee replacements and C-sections, he finds that they generally tend to use fewer of these procedures than people in a number of other developed countries. This strongly cuts against the narrative that Americans are simply choosing to consume more health care. They’re using less, but getting charged a lot more. Bivens also demonstrates just how much higher U.S. health prices are than prices in any other rich country. (EPI cited throughout)
Bloomberg
October 29, 2018
This year’s third-quarter figure was fueled by strong consumer spending, but newly enacted trade tariffs between the U.S. and China acted as a drag on the figures. Declining U.S. exports and a drop in business investment are partly responsible for growth cooling between the second and third quarters, the Commerce Department noted. “[T]he trade deficit expanded rapidly and subtracted 1.8 percentage points from growth this quarter. If the Trump administration is trying to boost American competitiveness with its policy actions, it is clearly failing,” wrote Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
CBS Moneywatch
October 29, 2018
“This looks to me like a fiscal stimulus boost, but the thing about stimulus is, it has to keep growing in order to keep growth high,” said Josh Bivens, director of research for the Economic Policy Institute. The White House remains optimistic that President Trump’s economic policies will continue driving growth even as they aim to cut government spending.
Sinclair Broadcast Group
October 29, 2018
Where is the tax cut investment bump? Consumer spending probably got a boost from the individual tax cuts, but business investment – the most important factor associated with the Republican tax plan and the one that was supposed to drive a big increase in capital investment and, eventually, wages – is showing no signs of a boom. “The third-quarter rate of business investment was the weakest since the fourth quarter of 2016,” The Wall Street Journal said. Non-residential fixed investment grew at just a 0.8 percent, and the Economic Policy Institute said that such investment is growing more slowly in the first three quarters of 2018 than it did in the same period in 2017 – before the tax cuts went into effect.
The Fiscal Times
October 29, 2018
Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, said the lesson of growth was that government spending can boost the economy. He said the $300 billion, two-year spending increase Congress agreed to earlier this year is the biggest infusion since the Obama stimulus — and it’s reverberating. Still, in a piece Friday morning, he blamed the GOP for a bad mix of policies, saying their tax cuts weren’t helpful, but said some good came out of the spending. “What this past year’s growth acceleration has made clear is that Congress and the president really can use fiscal policy to provide a very quick and sharp boost to the economy — even when they’re being mostly incompetent about it,” he said. “We should insist in the future that this power be used when it’s good for typical families, not just when it’s useful for beating your political opponents.”
Washington Times
October 29, 2018
The U.S. trade deficit grew rapidly and removed 1.8 percentage points from GDP growth in the quarter. If Trump is trying to boost American competitiveness with its policy actions, it is clearly failing, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Business Times
October 29, 2018