The dark side of public–private partnerships entails bailouts and bad deals. Infrastructure is in part defined by natural monopolistic tendencies, and without an effective public regulatory monitoring mechanism, private actors who take on public services might raise prices to an inefficient level or degrade service quality to an inefficient degree, says Hunter Blair, budget analyst for the Economic Policy Institute. Governments run the risk of mistaking the financing that public–private partnerships can leverage for the funding of projects themselves—of missing the forest for the trees. “A lot of people in the government, when they talk about [public–private partnerships], they see it as this free lunch,” Blair says. “We’re going to bring in private money, so that means, somehow, it’s going to cost us less to pay for the infrastructure. Funding at the end of the day still has to come from taxes or user fees. There is no free lunch here.”
CityLab
November 13, 2017
In fact, most corporations have access to pretty much all the money they need right now, says Josh Bivens, director of research at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. But they’re not investing all that much or increasing wages. “So we have exactly what the corporate tax cut is trying to engineer—really high post-tax profit rates. And yet it has not resulted in more investment. So the idea that we just want to do more of the same thing that has not spurred investment strikes me as not correct,” Bivens says.
Marketplace
November 13, 2017
According to the Economic Policy Institute, one in five veterans — or 1.8 million veterans — are currently paid less than $15 an hour. Who are these low-paid veterans? Two-thirds (66 percent) are 40 years old or older, 61 percent have college experience and 69 percent work full time.
Marketplace
November 13, 2017
October brought more improvement, with 369,000 more Americans exiting unwanted part-time status, shrinking the percentage of involuntary part-timers to 3.4 percent. Still, the country has not returned to pre-crisis levels on this measure, which worries some economists. “We are continuing to see this steady improvement, but there is still this slack in the labor market,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
The Washington Post
November 8, 2017
Nearly 2 million US veterans would benefit from raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Approximately 1.8 million of the 9 million veterans in payroll jobs across the US would get a raise if Congress raised the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2024, the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute determined in an analysis on the Raise the Wage Act of 2017 in honor of Veterans Day. Nearly two-thirds of the veterans who would get the raise are age 40 or older, over 60% have some college experience, and nearly 70% work full time, the EPI found. (whole story)
Business Insider
November 8, 2017
In a statement, Celine McNicholas, labor counsel for the Economic Policy Institute, claimed it “robs workers of their rights, making it impossible for them to effectively collectively bargain or litigate workplace disputes.” She also said it “leaves small businesses holding the bag when the large corporations that control their business practices and set their employees’ schedules violate labor law and refuse to come to the bargaining table.”
The Hill
November 8, 2017
When education economist Emma García started researching the academic gaps that show up in kindergarten between low-income students and their high-income peers, she had reason to suspect the gaps had widened in recent years. Income inequality in the U.S., for example, has been on the rise: Since 1980, incomes have stagnated for the bottom 50 percent of American adults. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent, who in 1980 earned 27 times more than the bottom 50, now earn 81 times more. But despite that growing economic inequality, reading and math performance gaps between low-income students and their more well-off peers haven’t grown, according to a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute. (whole story)
The Seattle Times
November 7, 2017
An analysis in September of Census Bureau data by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank, found that between 2000 and 2016 — years when many millennials first entered the job market — there was “little to no gain” in median annual earnings. This isn’t some limited fallout from the 2008 financial crisis; it’s a different type of phenomenon and part of a longer trend of wage stagnation that reaches back to the 1970s.
The New York Times
November 7, 2017
In the agreement’s first year, 1994, one million Mexicans lost their jobs, by the government’s own count. According to Jeff Faux, founding director of the Economic Policy Institute, “the peso crash of December, 1994, was directly connected to NAFTA.” And as the border maquiladora factories were tied to the U.S. market, Mexican workers lost jobs when the U.S. market shrank during recessions. In 2000-2001, at the time of the dot-com crash, 400,000 jobs were lost on the U.S./Mexico border, and in the Great Recession of 2008 thousands more were eliminated. With the border so close, many crossed it to survive. (EPI cited throughout)
The American Prospect
November 7, 2017
“This is asking a lot of Janet Yellen,” wrote Josh Bivens of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in a commentary. “She is likely to lose a job she has done extraordinarily well for no good reason at all.…But her continued presence as a key decision maker at the Fed would be a huge win for smart economic policy-making.”
The Wall Street Journal
November 6, 2017