Christian Science Monitor
December 20, 2016
For parents who pay full tuition, the District is one of the most expensive places for child care in the country, with an average monthly cost of $1,868 for infant care at a center, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post
December 18, 2016
But the anxiety over economic competition is easier to answer. Working-class whites aren’t losing out because other groups are taking limited resources. They, along with the minority workers who the Economic Policy Institute says constitute about 40 percent of the working class, are facing uncertainty because of structural economic change. That ranges from the decline of unions and manufacturing to the rise of an urban service economy. Collectively, this translates to lower wages for working people, while the fruits of economic growth accrue at the top.
The New York Times
December 18, 2016
Berman’s potential appointment appears to undercut Trump’s promise to put worker’s interests front and center, says Robert E. Scott, the director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Research, at the Economic Policy Institute. “Trump said he was going to drain the swamp,” Scott told International Business Times. “But now he’s considering the kind of guy who lobbies for multinational corporations, then comes to Washington and works for those same companies on the inside.”
International Business Times
December 16, 2016
Some 6.4 million Americans work part time because they cannot find full-time work, according to an Economic Policy Institute study released this month. In a recent blog post arguing against a rate hike, Elise Gould, a labor economist at Economic Policy Institute, noted that pre-inflation wage growth remains significantly lower than it was before the recession.
The Huffington Post
December 15, 2016
It could be argued that the lack of strong early signs of increasing inflation mean that the Fed could afford to wait to raise interest rates. In a recent blog post, The Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould noted that the rate of increase of nominal wages (the dollar amount workers are paid) rose only 2.5 percent in November, below the previous months’ 2.7 percent. She suggests that raising interest rates now would only decrease future wage growth.
The Hill
December 15, 2016
According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, around 6 million workers nationwide are forced into part-time work, despite wanting and needing full-time hours. Moreover, those statistics are stratified racially: The share of white employees involuntarily working part-time is around 3.7 percent; for black and Hispanic workers, those shares are 6.3 and 6.8 percent, respectively.
CityLab
December 15, 2016
Some economists question how tight the labor market is. “In the early 1950s, the unemployment rate fell below 3 percent,” Deutsche Bank Chief U.S. Economist Joseph LaVorgna pointed out in a note to clients on Dec. 13. Foreign competition is continuing to depress wages in many sectors, he says. Average hourly earnings grew only 2.4 percent over the past year, below the sum of inflation and productivity growth, says Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg Businesweek
December 15, 2016
Now, a bill has been introduced in the New York City Council calling for a formal study of the causes — and remedies — of racial segregation in public schools. In this post, Richard Rothstein explains why such an effort, as spelled out in the bill, is misguided. Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit organization created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. He is also a a senior fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and author of the forthcoming “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.” A former national education writer for the New York Times, Rothstein also wrote books including “Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right,” and “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap.” In 2013, Rothstein wrote a report titled “For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since: Education and the Unfinished March.” which says in part: Today, African American students are more isolated than they were 40 years ago, while most education policymakers and reformers have abandoned integration as a cause.
The Washington Post
December 14, 2016
Robert Scott, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute concurs that the “threat of broad-based tariffs” was essential to success in the Plaza Accords, and also points out that the most successful exchange-rate negotiation prior to the Plaza Accords was the Smithsonian Agreement when, in 1971, President Nixon forced American trade partners to allow dollar depreciation, instituting a 10% import surcharge to force them to the negotiating table…The EPI’s Scott says that needed reforms in countries with large trade surpluses (like China, Germany, and Japan) include allowing for currency appreciation, the removal of state subsidies for business that enable firms to sell goods at below cost, and the institution of policies that would raise wages and lower savings rates in surplus countries.
Fortune
December 14, 2016