Media clips
-
Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, also attributed the gains for poorer households to a rapid decline in unemployment, from 5.7 percent at the beginning of last year to 4.9 percent at the beginning of this year. “Their hourly wages also get a boost from having less competition among workers for jobs,” Mishel said. “We may finally start seeing employers having to compete for workers.”
Washington Post September 14, 2016 -
“Wages and incomes took a big battering that we’re just now recouping, and you could say there’s no Super Bowl parade, but this is really superb growth,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. At the current rate of growth, Mr. Mishel said annual household incomes could soon surpass their prerecession high. “We’re climbing out of a deep hole. We definitely can see the top, and we’ll get there next year even with normal growth,” he said.
Wall Street Journal September 14, 2016 -
Even for an economist, Larry Mishel is famously grumpy. “I’m a glass-half-empty guy,” he told me. He is the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank devoted to analyzing and improving the economic lives of poor, working, and middle-class Americans. Which is to say, in his hundreds of academic papers, blog posts, and interviews, “I haven’t written anything about the U.S. economy this positive in many years. Probably since the late nineties. That was the last time there was really good, across-the-board income and wage growth.” Until today.
The New Yorker September 14, 2016 -
Other economists heralded the income growth and poverty reduction, with the Economic Policy Institute’s Lawrence Mishel describing the report as “superb in almost every dimension.” “If we get decent strong income growth in 2016, we’ll see the broad middle class have dug themselves out of the great recession,” Mishel said on a conference call to discuss the report. “We have to have economic policies that get wages growing and drop unemployment. That is really the key driver in my view of what we are observing.” The reason for the improvement in household income is tied to higher employment, Census officials said. Wages also improved, with EPI economist Elise Gould noting that women’s inflation-adjusted wages rose 2.7 percent, while men’s rose 1.5 percent. Households were helped by the current low-inflation environment, Mishel noted. A decline in energy prices is offsetting higher prices elsewhere, a trend that’s not likely to continue indefinitely. If inflation were closer to normal levels, household income would have likely increased only about 3 percent, EPI said.
CBS Moneywatch September 14, 2016 -
With improving incomes, 3.5 million people climbed out of poverty in 2015, pushing down the official poverty rate to 13.5 percent. The 1.2 percentage decrease in the poverty rate is the biggest drop since 1999. “[The Great Recession put us] in a deep hole, and this one year almost single handedly got us out of the hole,” said economist Lawrence Mishel of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. But, if we look back to where we were before the recession and as far back as the 1990s, we still have a ways to go.
PBS News Hour September 14, 2016 -
The Census data was “superb in almost every dimension,” said Larry Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, on Tuesday. After such a deep recession caused by a financial crisis, incomes were “submerged” for many years, he noted. “This one year almost single-handedly got us out of the hole. That’s worth celebrating.” EPI charted the difference between incomes for all households and for the non-elderly, or working age, Americans. Working-age households did better, Mishel said, highlighting the role the labor market played. A stronger job market doesn’t just mean more people employed, Mishel added. It means more hours worked for more people, and better wages for most workers. To be sure, incomes were helped along by stagnant inflation. If inflation had run at a more normal rate, Mishel said, incomes would have risen about 3%. And they have not yet regained the peak they set in 1999.
MarketWatch September 14, 2016 -
“This one year almost single-handedly got us out of the hole … and that’s worth celebrating,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute think tank, said on a call with reporters Tuesday…“We’re digging ourselves out of a pretty deep hole,” said Dr. Mishel. But if 2016 brings the similar levels of growth as last year did, he predicts, “most households will recoup their income losses from the Great Recession.” The wealthiest Americans, on the other hand, have fully recovered from the recession and are now even a few percentage points ahead. According to an analysis by EPI, there are a few forces that shaped the strong household income growth of 2015 – the likes of which the country hasn’t seen in half a century. First, the unemployment rate declined from 6.2 to 5.3 percent last year. “We may finally start seeing employers having to compete for workers, which is something we should have every year,” Mishel said…They key to getting back to a pre-recession America is to keep growing wages and lowering unemployment, according to EPI.
The Christian Science Monitor September 14, 2016 -
Many Americans are not prepared for retirement. In fact, “nearly half of families have no retirement account savings at all,” the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported. Just how much has the average American family saved up? According to the EPI, the mean retirement savings of all families is $95,776. But that number doesn’t tell the whole story. Since so many families have zero savings and since super-savers can pull up the average, the median savings, or those at the 50th percentile, may be a better gauge. The median for all families in the U.S. is just $5,000, and the median for families with some savings is $60,000.
CNBC September 13, 2016 -
These changes would have a major impact on the enduring strength of Obama’s overtime rule, according to a report released last month by the Economic Policy Institute, the labor think tank that helped craft the rule’s language. “Rep. Schrader wants to reproduce the very disaster for working people the Department of Labor is seeking to prevent: an inevitable and significant loss of guaranteed overtime coverage due to inflation and wage growth,” the report declares…”The guts of DOL’s rule is the indexation of the salary test for exemption. If it isn’t indexed it immediately loses its value and protects fewer workers, quickly becoming meaningless, as the current $23,660 level is today,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute and the brainchild of the overtime rule
American Prospect September 13, 2016 -
“We have a myth – I call it ‘de facto segregation,’ ” says Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., and author of the report “The Making of Ferguson.” “As if all the patterns of racial segregation across the country just sort of happened by accident. And that’s a myth.” While personal choices may have contributed to segregation, with families choosing to live in places where their neighbors looked like them, Mr. Rothstein says that government policies have been the biggest driver for the incredible levels of separateness that are seen today. Early on, the federal government built separate public housing projects for African-Americans and whites in urban areas…The difficulty in reducing segregation is rooted in part in society’s reluctance to admit that it’s a self-made problem. “There are many things we can do [to reduce segregation], but we’re not going to do them so long as we have the myth that segregation developed without intent and that it happened by accident, and therefore that it can only un-happen by accident,” says Rothstein. “It’s going to require policy as conscious to desegregate as it was to segregate.”
Christian Science Monitor September 10, 2016