According to the Economic Policy Institute, reinstating the unemployment insurance programs would add more than 5 million jobs and raise the United States’ GDP by 3.5%. Given the fact that we are still 10 million jobs below where we were a year ago, we cannot understand any hesitancy about making this move.
The State Journal
December 15, 2020
Biden’s plan to more than double the minimum wage is part of an ambitious effort to lift a wage that has remained at $7.25 since 2009, up from $5.15 as of 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence. However, 29 states and Washington, D.C., already have minimum wages that exceed the federal minimum, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
S&P Global
December 15, 2020
Wages for the bottom 90 percent of earners are being gobbled up by the top 10 percent of earners—with the top One Percent and top One-tenth of One Percent of earners reaping huge financial bonanzas, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed federal government data.
The Final Call
December 15, 2020
Here’s a look at the minimum wage and its scheduled increases in Nevada and surrounding coastal and intermountain states, as compiled by the Economic Policy Institute’s Minimum Wage Tracker.
Nevada Current
December 15, 2020
As everyone from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute to the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics has argued, these and other policies that put spending money into the pockets of poor and other working people would be a boon for the economy. It’s why even Forbes magazine — which spent the Great Recession making the case against unemployment insurance — championed extending the unusually generous unemployment program this time around.
Jacobin
December 15, 2020
Many left-leaning economists would prefer Congress renew the federal unemployment benefit at $600 a week. But Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, says $300 weekly payments are “infinitely better than nothing. … There’s no question it would lift a huge number of people out of poverty.”
Washington Post
December 15, 2020
To be clear, there’s little that the Biden administration can do administratively that would have the same impact on the economy as a stimulus package, says Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. But the administration can set in motion changes—on worker protections, student debt, the Federal Reserve’s lending to state and local governments, and more—that could “lead to a more equitable economy,” Shierholz says, boosting consumer spending and hopefully giving the overall economy “a shot in the arm.” Here are a few of the options in Biden’s toolbox, according to economists:
Mother Jones
December 15, 2020
Many economists, however, say workers need more pay to make it through the crisis, and delaying wage increases will only cause more economic damage.
Here & Now‘s Tonya Mosley speaks with Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Legal Center, and Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
WBUR Here and Now
December 15, 2020
Index of per enrollee costs for comparable health-care benefits*
Source: Economic Policy Institute
Bloomberg
December 14, 2020
The JOLTS report was “a clear and confirming sign that the recovery is not charging ahead,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, who noted in a commentary that the figures don’t even capture November’s slowdown in job growth. “With hiring and job openings at these levels, the economy is facing a long slow recovery, unless Congress acts,” she wrote.
The Balance
December 14, 2020
The U.S. could be headed for a “double-dip recession”—a second recession that begins before recovery from the first is complete—if Congress does not provide some sort of relief before the end of the year, said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
“The response to the virus has been so poor, and it’s becoming clear in the labor market,” Shierholz said.
The Balance
December 14, 2020
According to a University of California at Berkeley analysis, raising the minimum wage in the 1960s directly led to a 20% drop in income inequality for Black Americans. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour would increase wages for 38.1% of all Black workers. It is perhaps the most powerful single measure to lift wages and opportunity for the poorest workers and a major step toward shrinking America’s chiasmic racial and gender wage gap.
The Triangle Tribune
December 14, 2020
But as Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) wrote for The American Prospect last month, “there is plenty that President Biden can do to support working people that doesn’t require Congress.”
“One key area is the federal contracting system. While the president cannot—without Congress—increase the federal minimum wage, the president can, through executive power, increase the minimum wage of workers on federal contracts,” Shierholz noted. “The impact would be substantial.”
Common Dreams
December 14, 2020
In late October as the coronavirus pandemic raged, the Economic Policy Institute released a study showing that it isn’t just morally right but an economic necessity to deal with poverty in this country and fast. “If America does not address what’s happening with visionary social and economic policy,” as that study put it, “the health and well-being of the nation are at stake. What we need is long-term economic policy that establishes justice, promotes the general welfare, rejects decades of austerity, and builds strong social programs that lift society from below.”
Common Dreams
December 14, 2020
This is not simply an esoteric parliamentary debate that has no impact on people’s lives. PAYGO rules, and austerity politics in general, have caused real pain. In a paper entitled “The bad economics of PAYGO,” the Economic Policy Institute noted that, “The recovery from the Great Recession was the slowest in post-World War II history, and the degree of fiscal austerity can entirely explain its slowness.”
This “slowness” meant increased unemployment, increased hunger, decreases in access to health care, and an overall increase in mortality. Yes, austerity politics kill.
Jacobin
December 14, 2020
Georgia is ripe for this kind of economic message. According to an analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute, 34.7 percent of Georgian workers would get a raise if the federal minimum wage were increased to $15 an hour. That’s over 1.5 million people earning on average an extra $3,700 a year.
The Hill
December 14, 2020
CEOs in this country are also making fantastically big bucks. They’ve spent recent decades growing the gap ever wider between what they take home and what their workers earn. Major chief execs, the Economic Policy Institute calculates, now make 320 times worker pay, up from 21 times worker pay in 1969 and 61 times in 1989.
Common Dreams
December 14, 2020
The broadest and most effective way to increase wages is a tight labor market. According to an Economic Policy Institute analysis, wages for the bottom 90% of workers grew the most during the low unemployment years of 1995-2000 and 2013-2019.
Common Dreams
December 14, 2020
She worries that hard-won gains narrowing the pay gap between men and women will be eroded. Ohio women are paid 86 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to a 2019 Economic Policy Institute analysis.
Dayton Daily News
December 14, 2020
Now, he’s torpedoed a compromise bill amid a massive spike in coronavirus cases and a slowing recovery, with fewer jobs being created and more workers applying for unemployment benefits. A report from the Economic Policy Institute says that without more virus aid, “millions more jobs will be lost.“
The American Independent
December 14, 2020
Today, Black workers make up about 68% of the workforce in the poultry industry in Mississippi, according to data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute. However, Stuesse said, it’s hard to get an accurate count of the number of foreign-born workers. It is estimated at 8.4% by the same dataset but that likely “significantly undercounts” undocumented workers, she said.
The American South
December 14, 2020
The Brookings Institute and the New York Times published a list of 100 pieces of environmental legislation alone that this administration has trashed or is in the process of trashing. The Economic Policy Institute published another 50 dealing with labor protections.
Baltimore Sun
December 14, 2020
During Biden’s campaign, the incoming president talked about raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, up from the current $7.25 an hour. Without Congressional support, Biden will not be able to raise the federal minimum wage, but he could get part way there through an increase to the minimum wage of workers on federal contracts.
Biden could accomplish the increase through an executive order, according to Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. The hourly boost could affect the pay of 5 million workers, Shierholz estimated.
CNET
December 14, 2020
The impact of long-term unemployment on workers and families is dramatic, said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Since the additional $600 a week in federal jobless benefits expired at the end of July, unemployed workers have been getting by on regular state jobless benefits, which in Minnesota replace half of a worker’s prior earnings.
“In other words, we have lots of people who have gone a very long time with serious cutbacks in their income, so that means living standards drop, poverty increases, and all of the things that go along with you just had a massive cut in your income is happening to families left and right,” she said.
And with more unemployed workers than there are job openings, she said that some people will have no choice but to take jobs that weren’t as good the ones they had before.
“You lose not just the time you were unemployed, but also you have this setback in that many will get a job that’s for lower pay or perhaps lower rank,” she said. “That has some stickiness to it. It puts you on a different trajectory.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
December 14, 2020
And based on an analysis released by the Economic Policy Institute, people of color (Black, Latino, Asian American and other non-whites) account for 43% of all essential workers in the nation amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Good Morning America
December 14, 2020
Outdated unemployment insurance systems in some states collapsed from the influx of applicants who lost their job during the pandemic. As a result, only 71% of applicants received benefits by April 11, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Newsweek
December 14, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), extending and reinstating enhanced jobless benefits through 2021, in addition to getting the pandemic under control, could save or create 5.1 million jobs and increase total personal income by more than $440 billion.
Forbes
December 14, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute compared median household incomes in 2019 to those in 2007 (before onset of the Great Recession) and determined incomes are up 21.1% for Hispanics, 11.3% for Asians, 8.2% for Whites and 6.3% for Blacks.
Omaha World-Herald
December 14, 2020
Union membership in the United States has been on the decline since the mid-1980s. Lawrence Mishel is a distinguished fellow with the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C. He said unions in the private sector have been declining because of employer attacks that started in the 1970s and limited people’s ability to obtain collective bargaining.
That doesn’t mean unions are unpopular among Americans. A national study in 2017 found that 48% of nonunionized workers would vote to join a union if they could.
“So what we really have is a situation where there is a big gap between the representation that people want and what they’re able to obtain, and primarily because our laws governing collective bargaining have very limited penalties and they basically have tilted the landscape towards employers,” Mishel said.
Arizona Public Media
December 14, 2020
El seguro de desempleo es uno de los estímulos más eficientes para la economía. Los economistas de el Economic Policy Institute explican que reinstaurando y ampliando los beneficios se pueden crear más empleos en un momento en el que los trabajadores están abandonando la posibilidad de tener un puesto de trabajo.
Las cifras de desempleo correspondientes a noviembre muestran que había 26.1 millones de desempleados o personas sin empleo por el virus.
El Diario
December 14, 2020