In the coming weeks some 12 million Americans will stop receiving unemployment benefits, the CDC’s nationwide eviction moratorium will expire, student loan borrowers will resume payments on their debts, and other financial relief programs will expire.
“It’s kind of devastating,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“We were already in this terrible situation now the caseloads are rising and the relief is going to end. What that means for the economy moving forward is, I hate to say it, but we could be seeing a double-dip to the recession.”
Friday’s jobs report made it clear to Gould that it is “absolutely necessary to reinstate and extend all the unemployment programs.” That would include Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which through the CARES Act, enabled gig workers, self-employed workers and independent contractors to qualify for unemployment benefits.
MarketWatch
December 7, 2020
Biden rolled out his “Made in America” plan during a speech in Warren in September, committing his administration to spending $400 billion on domestically produced products, creating a 10 percent tax to penalize U.S. companies that offshore jobs and a 10 percent credit to companies to invest in U.S. jobs and close loopholes in Trump’s 2017 tax cut plan, including an exemption on the first 10 percent of profit for a company that locates production or call centers overseas.
Will it make a difference?
Maybe not, said Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive nonprofit think tank in Washington.
He said the effects of the plan are “marginal at best,” but he said the tax penalty could “create incentives for companies to bring jobs home.”
Biden also plans to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent after Trump had lowered it from 39 percent.
Scott predicted the increase would generate more taxes while having little to no impact on job creation.
Bridge Michigan
December 7, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimated December 2 that 5.1 million more jobs would be created if the government kept open the suite of pandemic unemployment insurance programs in 2021, including the extra $600-per-week benefit.
Yahoo Finance
December 7, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, previously told Business Insider that recessions typically hit younger workers harder in the short term, potentially reaping long-term consequences.
“The way a recession can really hurt people just starting out can have lasting effects,” she said. “There’s a lot of evidence that the first postgrad job you get sets the stage in some important way for later.”
Business Insider
December 7, 2020
In 2010, 10.4% of Millennial college graduates in the US were officially unemployed. That’s already a large number, but for those without higher education credentials, the situation was over three times worse. High school graduates were unemployed at a rate of 32.7% in 2010, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington based think tank.
Quartz
December 7, 2020
“Good data is essential for policymaking in a crisis and we did not have that this time around, which is unacceptable,” Shierholz, now director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, tells Axios in an email. “[K]nowing exactly what happened so that we can make the investments to ensure this will never happen again is crucial.”
Axios
December 7, 2020
Investment in sustainable school construction, like updated lighting, plumbing and electrical systems, as well as renewable energy projects, would not only be a great climate solution, but would generate significant numbers of new jobs. A $100 billion investment would create more than 1.9 million jobs, based on an Economic Policy Institute analysis.
The 74 Million
December 7, 2020
Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, said holiday hiring in November didn’t make up for other factors slowing the recovery. She also noted expanded unemployment insurance benefits will expire the day after Christmas.
“This spells trouble not only for workers and their families who are desperately trying to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table—especially with the eviction moratorium also set to expire on December 31—but also for the recovery itself,” she wrote. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
Gould said over 5 million jobs could be created next year if lawmakers extended pandemic unemployment programs through 2021. She said relief efforts should focus on helping state and local governments.
Courthouse News Service
December 7, 2020
Former worker Grace Erpenbach told City Pages last month she was called into a meeting and presented with a choice: Stop organizing or lose your job. If true, such a threat would violate federal labor law even if it’s a common tactic. A recent study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found employers are charged with illegally firing employees in 20% of unionization efforts. Through a spokesperson, Spyhouse says Erpenbach was a manager and should not have participated in organizing efforts.
Payday Reports
December 7, 2020
Even more concerning: The number of people who have been unemployed for 27 months or longer continues to grow. It grew by 385,000 in November to nearly 4 million people, more than a third of the total number of people without a job.
That figure is expected to hit 40 percent soon, mimicking the Great Recession, during which time the share of long-term unemployed remained at around 40 percent for three years, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
“The days of imagining a V-shaped recovery are over,” Gould said. “The easy gains we saw this summer of people on temporary layoffs getting rehired—that’s over. We are going to have to work hard to claw back all those jobs.”
The 19th
December 7, 2020
Given the various ways in which the crisis has widened existing socioeconomic disparities and how these disparities impacted educational outcomes, educational inequities are growing. According to studies by the Economic Policy Institute, the pandemic has exacerbated well-documented opportunity gaps putting low-income students at a disadvantage. Despite COVID-19’s negative impact on our children, there is a solution to mitigate some of the impact to a degree: social-emotional learning programming.
Worcester Business Journal
December 7, 2020
In June, Josh Bivens and David Cooper at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute wrote that without more federal aid, we’re facing a result like this:
If policymakers do nothing at the federal level to address these shortfalls, the United States could end 2021 with 5.3 million fewer jobs, with losses in every state.
Daily Kos
December 7, 2020
As winter sets in and covid-19 cases surge throughout the US, millions of Americans find themselves unemployed. Extending the unemployment benefits of the kind put in place at the beginning of the pandemic could save over 5 million jobs according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute.
AS English
December 7, 2020
The real number of Americans out of work would total roughly 19 million, accounting for the number of officially unemployed, plus workers on temporary layoff, those who dropped out of the work force, and people who didn’t respond to the survey the jobs report is based on, according to Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.
“If all these workers were taken into account, the unemployment rate would have been 11.2% in November,” Shierholz
wrote on Twitter.
CNN Business
December 7, 2020
Post-college, it’s difficult for workers of color to financially catch up. As the Economic Policy Institute wrote in its latest wages report, “average wages grew faster among white and Hispanic workers than among [Black] workers for all education groups from 2000 to 2019.”
Business Insider
December 7, 2020
Most financial fragility is caused by low pay, not the frequency with which low wages are paid. According to the Economic Policy Institute, wages have stagnating over the last 40 years (disclosure: I sit on the board of EPI). “From the end of World War II through the late 1970s, the U.S. economy generated rapid wage growth that was widely shared,” the institute reports. Since 1979 average wage growth has slowed sharply, with the biggest declines in wage growth at the bottom and the middle.
Forbes
December 7, 2020
Even before the pandemic, access to affordable, high-quality child care was shifting from an issue regarded as a personal and family responsibility to a matter of public concern, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That’s partly because middle-class families were feeling the pinch as average annual costs for child care soared to roughly double the cost of in-state tuition at a public university.
The pandemic has exposed many fault lines in American society, and one of the most prominent has been the role of child care in keeping the economy moving. With schools and child-care centers closed and demands on working parents — mostly mothers — mounting, millions of women have left the workforce. Women’s labor-force participation rate in April fell to 54.7%, a level not seen since the late 1980s.
MarketWatch
December 7, 2020
The chief concern — echoed by city officials across North America, Europe and Asia — is the supposed impact on the affordability of local housing. “A reasonable reading of the available evidence suggests that the costs imposed on renters’ budgets by Airbnb expansion substantially exceed the benefits to travellers,” concluded a 2019 report from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington based think-tank. It drew on studies conducted in cities such as Boston and New York that found parallels between growing Airbnb activity and increased rent for locals.
Financial Times
December 7, 2020
How trickle-down economics works…for the one-percent. In the last 40 years, wages for the bottom 90% grew by an incremental 26%, while income for the top 0.1 percent shot up 345%…
Counterpunch
December 7, 2020
Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, disagreed. Teachers not only ensure that children don’t fall further behind in their education, she said, but are also critical to the work force at large.
“When you talk about disproportionate impact and you’re concerned about people getting back into the labor force, many are mothers, and they will have a harder time if their children don’t have a reliable place to go,” she said. “And if you think generally about people who have jobs where they can’t telework, they are disproportionately Black and brown. They’ll have more of a challenge when child care is an issue.”
New York Times
December 7, 2020
The housing disparities are especially pronounced along racial lines. Minority populations have always dealt with racism in the financial markets and redlining practices that keep communities segregated and unequal. But the pandemic is also exposing other racial inequities that make it even harder for minorities to become homeowners. For instance, while 30% of white workers can do their jobs remotely—and are thus more able to move to a city with a lower cost of living—only 20% of Black workers can do the same, according to a March study from the Economic Policy Institute.
Time Magazine
December 7, 2020
“Whatever lame-duck agreement may happen, we already know that it won’t be nearly enough, so it’s still essential for the Democrats to sweep in Georgia for the kind of stimulus package that economists have a large consensus as being needed, can also be potentially passed,” Heidi Schierholz, the director of the Economic Policy Institute, told AlterNet.
AlterNet
December 7, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimated December 2 that 5.1 million more jobs would be created if the government kept open the suite of pandemic unemployment insurance programs in 2021, including the extra $600-per-week benefit.
Yahoo Finance
December 7, 2020
In the coming weeks some 12 million Americans will stop receiving unemployment benefits, the CDC’s nationwide eviction moratorium will expire, student loan borrowers will resume payments on their debts, and other financial relief programs will expire.
“It’s kind of devastating,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“We were already in this terrible situation now the caseloads are rising and the relief is going to end. What that means for the economy moving forward is, I hate to say it, but we could be seeing a double-dip to the recession.”
Friday’s jobs report made it clear to Gould that it is “absolutely necessary to reinstate and extend all the unemployment programs.” That would include Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which through the CARES Act, enabled gig workers, self-employed workers and independent contractors to qualify for unemployment benefits.
MarketWatch
December 7, 2020
“Good data is essential for policymaking in a crisis and we did not have that this time around, which is unacceptable,” Shierholz, now director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, tells Axios in an email. “[K]nowing exactly what happened so that we can make the investments to ensure this will never happen again is crucial.”
Axios
December 7, 2020
Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, said holiday hiring in November didn’t make up for other factors slowing the recovery. She also noted expanded unemployment insurance benefits will expire the day after Christmas.
“This spells trouble not only for workers and their families who are desperately trying to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table—especially with the eviction moratorium also set to expire on December 31—but also for the recovery itself,” she wrote. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
Gould said over 5 million jobs could be created next year if lawmakers extended pandemic unemployment programs through 2021. She said relief efforts should focus on helping state and local governments.
Courthouse News Service
December 7, 2020
Even more concerning: The number of people who have been unemployed for 27 months or longer continues to grow. It grew by 385,000 in November to nearly 4 million people, more than a third of the total number of people without a job.
That figure is expected to hit 40 percent soon, mimicking the Great Recession, during which time the share of long-term unemployed remained at around 40 percent for three years, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
“The days of imagining a V-shaped recovery are over,” Gould said. “The easy gains we saw this summer of people on temporary layoffs getting rehired—that’s over. We are going to have to work hard to claw back all those jobs.”
The 19th
December 7, 2020
In June, Josh Bivens and David Cooper at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute wrote that without more federal aid, we’re facing a result like this:
If policymakers do nothing at the federal level to address these shortfalls, the United States could end 2021 with 5.3 million fewer jobs, with losses in every state.
Daily Kos
December 7, 2020
The real number of Americans out of work would total roughly 19 million, accounting for the number of officially unemployed, plus workers on temporary layoff, those who dropped out of the work force, and people who didn’t respond to the survey the jobs report is based on, according to Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.
“If all these workers were taken into account, the unemployment rate would have been 11.2% in November,” Shierholz
wrote on Twitter.
CNN Business
December 7, 2020