“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
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank, argued that it was Republicans who caused the problems that hampered the economy. Former President Barack Obama oversaw an unusually slow economic recovery throughout his time in office. “Congressional Republicans spent a decade strangling economic recovery for political gain,” an EPI report stated. “Millions of American families suffered unnecessarily because of this. They don’t deserve credit for releasing the chokehold now that it’s politically expedient. And the tax cut they constructed with President Trump has been staggeringly tilted toward the rich and as inefficient and wasteful as fiscal stimulus could possibly be.”
Lifezette
October 29, 2018
With the Trump administration’s trade war with China showing no signs of letting up, new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute says Minnesota workers have lost 88,000 jobs since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. The report says the U.S. as a whole lost 3.4 million jobs in that time. Lead author and EPI senior economist Robert Scott says the single biggest cause of growing trade deficits and job losses has been China’s currency manipulation, which he explains has inflated the value of the U.S. dollar by 30 percent or more. (whole story)
Public News Service
October 26, 2018
An analysis released this week by the Economic Policy Institute suggests the growth in the U.S. trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2017 was responsible for the loss of 3.4 million U.S. jobs, including 1.3 million since 2008. The U.S. had a $375 billion trade deficit with China in 2017, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In Wisconsin, the trade deficit led to the displacement of 78,700 jobs since 2001, the ninth largest share of any state at 2.67 percent.
Milwaukee Business Times
October 26, 2018
Democrat Gavin Newsom has an 11 point lead over his Republican opponent, businessman John Cox, according to the recent Public Policy Institute of California poll. The PPIC poll also found voters closely split between Democrats and Republicans in the 11 Congressional districts that Democrats are trying to flip.(Rob is a guest)
KQED
October 26, 2018
Nervous. They have no idea. Since 2001, when the United States agreed to allow China into the World Trade Organization, U.S. workers have been nervous every day. Twenty-four hours a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. They fear losing their jobs to China. And rightly so. A study by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute(EPI) released this week shows the growth in the U.S. trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2017 cost 3.4 million American workers their jobs. (EPI cited throughout)
AlterNet
October 26, 2018
The trade imbalance between the U.S. and China has resulted in job losses in every state and in each of the 435 Congressional districts, the EPI study says. The trade deficit with China has increased by more than $100 billion since the beginning of the Great Recession, and “almost entirely explains why manufacturing employment has not fully recovered along with the rest of the economy,” says the report. California’s unemployment rate decreased to 4.1 percent in September – a record low level dating back to 1976 — but still stubbornly resists dropping below the national average, which was at 3.7 percent in September.
California Political Review
October 26, 2018