On top of the somewhat opaque nature of their consortiums, public-private partnerships can be misleadingly pitched as a means of relegating what would otherwise be taxpayer-funded expenditures to the private sector, said Hunter Blair, a budget analyst at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. Raising taxes, he noted, can be politically unpopular while embracing industry is much less so. “Public-private partnerships — they never really act as a funding mechanism. At the end of the day, the actual funding has to come from roads, from tolls, that kind of thing … in return for providing that upfront financing, usually during construction,” he said, adding that how beneficial those partnerships can be varies on a case-by-case basis, with some bringing wonderful results and others taking a turn for the disastrous. “You give the private provider a lot of market power to drive up rates or reduce quality.” (Hunter quoted throughout)
International Business Times
May 31, 2017
The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental
Smithsonian Magazine/Katie Nodjimbadem
Interview with Richard Rothstein about The Color of Law
Smithsonian Magazine
May 31, 2017
Start renegotiation of Nafta with a focus on workers’ rights
The Financial Times/Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.)
As a result, there is extreme downward pressure on US wages and US jobs. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the US lost nearly 700,000 jobs between 1993 and 2010 because of Nafta. And, with the share of auto production in Mexico projected to double by 2021 there is no way we can rely on the faulty conclusion that we have maintained “advanced, higher-skilled work”.
The Fiscal Times
May 28, 2017
Ramping up deportations puts city’s economy at risk
Crain’s Business New York/Greg David
Not all the numbers are comforting. Some employers benefit too much from hiring undocumented workers because they cheat them. Many restaurants pay less than the minimum wage—sometimes a lot less, like $7 an hour. New research from the Economic Policy Institute shows a similar impact in nonunion construction, where undocumented workers are concentrated and the average yearly pay is a pretty miserly $35,000. Research by the Building Congress shows few of them have health insurance.
Crain's New York
May 28, 2017
Full Employment: Are We There Yet?
The Atlantic/Gillian White
Josh Bivens, the director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, says that the number of prime-age Americans who are actually working remains low, even by historical standards. And the wage and productivity growth that’s happened hasn’t been significant enough or speedy enough. For those reasons, Biven says the economy isn’t at full employment. But he says that he gets why people think it might be time to call it: The labor market has tightened up and now some economists are starting to fear that continuing expansionary policies—essentially, keeping interest rates artificially low—in hopes of drumming up jobs and growth could instead result in inflation. But Bivens would be inclined to wait to see if any evidence of that inflation shows in the data. And that hasn’t happened yet. (Josh quoted throughout)
The Atlantic
May 27, 2017
Wage theft costs low-paid California workers $2 billion per year
San Francisco Chronicle/Dominic Fracassa
Each year, minimum-wage violations by California employers sap the state’s workforce of nearly $2 billion in earnings, increasing the financial vulnerability of already at-risk populations and creating a drag on the state’s overall economic health, according to a report released this month by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington. Employees who are supposed to be getting paid the minimum wage in California are, on average, losing $64 per week and about $3,300 annually — 22 percent of their earnings — from employers shortchanging their hourly workers. Though the current state minimum wage of $10.50 an hour translates to an annual salary of $21,840, minimum-wage workers don’t always have full-time work, so they collect only $11,700 a year in wages on average. That forces them “to rely on public assistance programs to survive and provide for their families,” the report’s authors wrote. (whole story)
San Francisco Chronicle
May 26, 2017
The New Deal as raw deal for blacks in segregated communities
The Washington Post/Charles Lane
Book review for The Color of Law.
Washington Post
May 26, 2017
Mark Zuckerberg supports universal basic income. What is it?
CNN Money/Patrick Gillespie
Critics say the idea has good intentions, but it doesn’t solve bigger problems related to abysmal wage growth in recent decades. They also say it challenges the notion that you need to work to earn money. “It’s a misguided mission,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research center. “It’s a tech CEO view of the world that I think is distorted.”
CNN Money
May 26, 2017
“If you hang around with executives, you adopt a certain view of the world, and it’s a view of the world that seems to be informing his policies,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning advocacy group in Washington. “It takes a lot to think cutting corporate taxes is central to tax policy when corporate profits are near historic highs.”
The New York Times
May 26, 2017
Don’t panic about a robot takeover just yet
Marketplace Tech/Ben Johnson
You’ve heard it before: the robots are coming and they’re going to steal our jobs. But, wait a second — the Economic Policy Institute has crunched the data and is now arguing that the effects of automation are a little overstated. One of the authors of the report, Lawrence Mishel, joined us to break down why and what he thinks workers should actually be worrying about. Then to cap off the week, we’ll play Silicon Tally with Rachel Metz, an editor at the MIT Technology Review.
Marketplace
May 26, 2017