A potentially bigger threat to public-sector unions is Mr. Trump’s plan to appoint a conservative justice to the Supreme Court. Last year, the court split 4-4 on a decision involving California teachers that could have overturned precedent allowing public-employee unions to collect mandatory dues from represented workers, if authorized by state law. Such a ruling would “make the entire public sector right-to-work,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. In right-to-work states, workers don’t have to pay dues or a fee if they decline to join a union. The change could reduce union membership among government workers by 10% to 25%, he said.
Wall Street Journal
January 27, 2017
“The U.S. automobile supply chain is heavily integrated with Mexico and Canada. If you start monkeying around with tariffs along that supply chain, you’re pushing costs up,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank often skeptical of free-trade agreements
Huffington Post
January 27, 2017
A similar tax on U.S. imports imposed by the Mexican government would make American goods more expensive in Mexico and their market shares would drop. American exports to Mexico supported more jobs — about 792,000 as of 2010 — than exports to China, said Robert Scott, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “It’ll cost jobs here and Mexico,” he said…Trump’s proposal would also throw the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, into “a turmoil,” Scott said. The U.S.-Canadian-Mexican trade pact, ratified in 1994, waived tariffs on goods traded among its partner nations and has been a boon to the Mexican economy.
USA Today
January 27, 2017
This is not an Arizona problem. In New Jersey, charter school administrative expenses are nearly $1,000 per pupil higher than those of district schools, with twice as many budgeted dollars going to management. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute determined that the dual system of district and charter schools in Newark alone added $10.5 million in unnecessary overhead, a pattern repeated in other cities. A study of costs in Pennsylvania found that charters spend double on administrative costs when compared with public schools.
Washington Post
January 27, 2017
Robert E. Scott, the director of trade and manufacturing policy at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, sees more to be gained by rethinking the trade relationship between the United States and China, Japan, South Korea and even Germany. “Those are accountable for 80 percent of trade-related job losses over the last 20 years,” he said. “To me, Nafta is not a top priority.” “There are much bigger fish to fry,” he added.
The New York Times
January 26, 2017
Some economists argue that schools, airports, bridges and roads need constant upkeep and that investing in such repairs as needed can lead to regular hiring. “It’s a constant need to do the maintenance required to keep the infrastructure we have in good shape,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president for the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. “If we were doing that all the time instead of putting it off, people would be put to work,” he said, adding that he supports Trump’s plans to invest in infrastructure.
The Washington Post
January 26, 2017
And as for dreams, decades of government-enforced segregation and discrimination have left those same communities at an even further disadvantage. “It was not a vague white society that created ghettos but government,” explains Richard Rothstein of the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, a government “that employed explicitly racial laws, policies, and regulations to ensure that black Americans would live impoverished, and separately from whites.”
Dayton Daily News
January 26, 2017
“I know a lot of the narrative was about working class white men in particular who feel like they’ve been left behind — it’s true, their wages have been stagnant. But to the extent that their wages have been flat, if we were to look at African-American men at the same earnings point, or earnings level, their wages have actually been negative,’’ says Valerie Wilson, who directs the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute’s (IPI) Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.
NPR Illinois
January 26, 2017
Robert E. Scott, the senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, who argued against the deal, said the notion that it would have strengthened exports is “simply not coherent,” based on the degree to which it would have empowered corporations. Scott, who voiced skepticism about how effective the TPP would have been in strengthening U.S. influence in Asia, said that the framework of the deal was designed to help “really big companies” and implied that what would have happened to workers as a result of the deal was an afterthought. “It would have redistributed wealth from the poor to the ultrarich,” he said. “This is a win for workers, in my view.”
ABC News
January 25, 2017
But the issue is far from simple. A March 2016 study from the labor-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that in 2015, the U.S. trade deficit with TPP countries translated into 2 million U.S. jobs “lost,” with 1.1 million of those in the manufacturing sector…In the study, the EPI said the treaty “lacks an absolutely key component to keep it from doing potential damage to the U.S. economy. The missing piece of this trade and investment deal is a set of restrictions and/or enforceable penalties against member countries that engage in currency manipulation. “Currency manipulation is one of the key driving forces behind the high and rapidly rising U.S. trade deficit with the 11 other members of the TPP,” the study said.
Dayton Daily News
January 25, 2017