Media clips
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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 -
Teachers have long been underpaid. Their average salary is a little over $58,000 a year. While that’s just below the national median income, teachers have the kinds of qualifications that should mean they bring home more than the average employee. About half of public-school teachers have a master’s degree, and nearly two-thirds have more than 10 years of job experience. And yet they make 17 percent less than other similarly educated workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Compensation for all college graduates rose over the last two decades, adjusted for inflation, but for teachers it actually declined.
The Nation March 29, 2018 -
The idea was conceived by John Hansen, a retired World Bank adviser. The Coalition for a Prosperous America, an organization that represents import-threatened companies and unions, endorsed the market access charge last year. Hansen says the coalition’s representatives talked it up in 130 meetings with congressional staffers in mid-March and got strong interest. The charge could succeed in shrinking trade deficits, says Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the centrist Peterson Institute for International Economics. One advantage, he says, is that “it’s completely legal under international law.” Robert Scottof the labor-supported Economic Policy Institute has also come out in favor. Big banks, however, would likely oppose it, and the public might dislike it for making imports more costly and raising interest rates.
Bloomberg March 29, 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.
Quartz March 29, 2018 -
A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute says that 50 years after the Kerner Commission, a group that assessed poverty and racism in the United States, black youths have made significant gains in K-through-12 education, but challenges still exist. “Over the last five decades, African Americans have seen substantial gains in high school completion rates. In 1968, just over half (54.4 percent) of 25- to 29-year-old African Americans had a high school diploma. Today, more than 9 out of 10 African Americans (92.3 percent) in the same age range had a high school diploma. However, college completion expanded for whites at a similar pace, rising from 16.2 percent in 1968 to 42.1 percent today, leaving the relative situation of African Americans basically unchanged: In 1968 blacks were just over half (56.0 percent) as likely as whites to have a college degree, a situation that is essentially the same today (54.2 percent).” (Richard Rothstein also cited)
The Washington Post March 28, 2018 -
Fifty years later, the picture is bleak. The initial reception of the report would have made it difficult for Fred Harris to imagine just how little difference half a century would make for black Americans. To be sure, some gains have been made. Black Americans are more educated than ever before. As the Economic Policy Institute reports, in 1968 fewer than 55 percent of young black Americans had a high-school diploma while only 9 percent had graduated from college. Today, those numbers hover at 92 percent and almost 23 percent respectively.
New York Magazine March 28, 2018 -
However, manufacturing – advanced manufacturing in particular – remains a key to the country’s economic success in the long run. In addition to its significant contribution to GDP ($2.1 trillion in 2013, amounting to 12.5 percent of total U.S. gross domestic product, according to Economic Policy Institute) and its vital role in providing goods and services for other sectors of our economy, manufacturing also plays a critical part in maintaining the nation’s innovative competitiveness. As a report by McKinsey Global Institute points out, manufacturing makes “outsized contributions to research and development, exports, and productivity growth.”
U.S. News & World Report March 28, 2018 -
A few weeks ago, I posted an interview with Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Department of Labor. The topic of our interview was a potentially terrible new rule sought by the Trump administration that would allow employers to pocket workers’ tips. The rule, long sought by the National Restaurant Association, was sold as a tip-sharing arrangement with “back-of-the-house” workers, but the most important and unprecedented change in the law was rescinding the ban on employers taking workers’ tips. The first I learned about this was from an article by Ben Penn, a journalist with Bloomberg Law, which revealed a key fact about the administration’s implementation process: It was suppressing internal analysis of the impact of the rule, findings that allegedly showed billions of dollars at risk of being transferred from the pockets of tipped workers to those of their employers. Shierholz and the EPI team, who have done extensive work in this regulatory space, quickly crunched the numbers and came up with their own estimate of how much of the workforce’s tips employers might pocket for themselves: just under $6 billion, or 16 percent of the estimated annual $36 billion in tips earned by tipped workers, or “roughly $1,000 per tipped worker on average each year.” (To be clear, most employers don’t do this; Shierholz cites research that found about 12 percent of tipped workers had tips stolen by their employers or supervisors.)
The Washington Post March 28, 2018 -
Labor advocates cried foul, arguing that the change would have resulted in a massive wealth transfer from workers to employers. An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute estimated that the rule would have cost workers at least $5.8 billion per year in lost income.
The Conversation March 28, 2018 -
The thing is, the Trade Partnership assumed a job loss multiplier of 3.7. That’s nearly four people losing their jobs for every one person directly thrown out of work by the tariffs. Robert Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told The Week that’s really, really high. It’s the upper bound for estimates of the multiplier in the depths of the 2008 crisis. Certainly, the U.S. economy is still below full employment. But unemployment in the officially-counted labor force has fallen from 10 percent to 4.1 percent. We’ve gained back an enormous amount of ground since the Great Recession. Under today’s conditions, standard multiplier estimates from the Congressional Budget Office are in the 0.2-to-1.8 range. That would reduce the Trade Partnership estimate to a range of 37,000-to-87,000 job losses Here’s another weird aspect of the debate. In mainstream economics, it’s actually standard procedure to assume full employment when estimating the effects of trade policy. In fact, by applying the bog standard economic approach to Trump’s steel tariffs, the job losses fall to 15,000, or even just 5,000. That doesn’t make the standard approach right, of course. But as Scott wrote, jettisoning established practice “should be done carefully and with well-reported results on how this new assumption affects all aspects of economic outcomes of tariff changes.” Instead, the Trade Partnership analysis, like the Moody’s analysis before it, is extremely brief, and doesn’t give a detailed look into the modeling.
The Week March 27, 2018