The flood of Chinese imports purchased by Walmart shoppers has cost the U.S. economy about 400,000 jobs since 2001, according to a liberal think tank. The Economic Policy Institute, which has long been a critic of U.S. trade policies with China, saysWalmart (WMT) has been a major factor in the growing trade gap with China. It estimates that Walmart sold at least $49 billion worth of Chinese-made goods between 2001 and 2013, and said that its estimate of 400,000 jobs lost is conservative.
CNN Money
December 10, 2015
Incomes for teachers vary sharply depending on where they work, and Pew’s data suggest that the profession still has more members of the upper and middle tier than the employed population as a whole. Still, belt-tightening among many in the US has left a shortage of 375,000 public school teachers, according to estimates by The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank.
Financial Times
December 10, 2015
One of the economic themes of the last few decades has been the hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector. But how has that happened, and how is the world’s largest retailer playing a part? A new study from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute takes a look at what it calls “the Walmart effect,” by which it means the giant retailer’s growing trade deficit with China. With Walmart importing more cheap goods from China than it exports to that country, the retailer’s actions may be implicated in an estimated loss of at least 400,000 U.S. jobs from 2001 to 2013, the study finds.
CBS Moneywatch
December 10, 2015
Imports from China by Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and biggest importer, eliminated or displaced over 400,000 jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research group that has long targeted Walmart’s policies. The jobs, mostly in manufacturing, represent about 13 percent of the 3.2 million jobs displaced over those same years that the study attributes to the United States’ goods trade deficit with China. Walmart’s Chinese imports amounted to at least $49 billion in 2013, according to the study, which was based on trade and labor data. Over all, the United States’ trade deficit with China hit $324 billion that year. “Walmart is one of the major forces pulling imports into the United States,” said Robert E. Scott, an economist at the institute and the study’s author. “And the jobs we’re losing are good-paying manufacturing jobs, which pay higher wages and provide better benefits.”
Walmart has long been the subject of criticism from groups like the Economic Policy Institute over its role in flooding the United States with cheap imports. Under pressure, Walmart in 2013 announced that it would increase its sourcing of American-made products by $50 billion over the next 10 years.
The New York Times
December 9, 2015
The world’s largest retailer likely accounted for 15.3 percent of the growth in the U.S. goods trade deficit with China in the same period, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) said in a report on Wednesday. United States goods trade deficit with China increased almost fourfold to $324.2 billion in the 12 years till 2013, with Wal-Mart accounting for $48.1 billion of the total, the EPI said. “Wal-Mart has aided China’s abuse of labor rights and its violations of internationally recognized norms of fair trade by providing a vast and ever-expanding conduit for the distribution of artificially cheap and subsidized Chinese exports to the United States,” the EPI said.
Reuters
December 9, 2015
Government benefits, specifically medical benefits, do more than just help people pay their bills, according to Josh Bivens, the research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The government, by providing a benefit like Medicare, serves as a “countervailing power in the provider market,” Bivens says, which can help keep costs down (at least a little bit) across the health care market. There’s also a concern about how to identify those who need the most help in the absence of government benefits, also known as transfers. “There are a lot of problems with transfers, but they are pretty well-targeted,” Bivens said. That is, the majority of them go to the poor. With a very flat UBI scheme, there is very little targeting, which means people with good jobs may get more than they need, while the unemployed, elderly, disabled and single parents could end up with too little.
The Huffington Post
December 9, 2015
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s import of goods from China displaced over 400,000 jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a U.S.-based nonprofit think tank. According to the study, cited by the New York Times, Wal-Mart’s Chinese imports amounted to at least $49 billion in 2013.
International Business Times
December 9, 2015
The tax is a new idea that could add even more disincentive to companies contemplating an inversion, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute. “The Obama administration proposals are good on tamping down on inversions. I think the exit tax is an extra little benefit that will reduce the incentive even further,” he said. “I tend to be pretty skeptical of tax-based solutions to lots of problems, but these are actually useful tax-based solutions.”
Think Progress
December 9, 2015
Saying affirmative action is constitutional because diversity is good, wrote the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein in a piece about the Fisher case on SCOTUS blog, “dodges the nation’s racial legacy and avoids our constitutional and moral obligation to remedy the effects of centuries of slavery and legally sanctioned segregation. Without acknowledging we were doing so, we have engaged in a legal sleight of hand, substituting enriching the educational experience for remedying past injustice in designing affirmative action policy.”
MSNBC
December 9, 2015
Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., told 24/7 Wall Street that it’s “hard to find a state where outcomes for African-Americans are very good.” Not one state has better socioeconomic outcomes for blacks than for whites, according to the report.
International Business Times
December 9, 2015