Wage stagnation is an old story, of course, having been around for about 35 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank. It reported last year that hourly wages of the vast majority of Americans have either stagnated or declined since 1979 — the late 1990s being a brief exception — even as the economy surged.
Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2015
The repositioning of candidate Clinton has already begun. One of the fascinating indicators is a report of a commission on inclusive prosperity organized and released in January by the Center for American Progress. The report, co-authored by Larry Summers (!), sounds more like something Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute or Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz might have written.
Huffington Post
March 30, 2015
“A do-it-yourself retirement system isn’t any more feasible than a do-it-yourself health-care system,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute specializing in retirement security. “People need to be guided.”
CNBC
March 30, 2015
Tom Hungerford interview.
The Real News Network
March 30, 2015
Missouri and Illinois had among the highest rates of black unemployment in 2014, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. Missouri’s rise of 3.2 percentage points in black unemployment from 2013 to 2014 year was the second highest among the states, according to the study by EPI economist Valerie Wilson, which was released Thursday. Black unemployment fell in most states in 2014, according to the study, but spiked up in Wisconsin and Missouri.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
March 27, 2015
A new report on unemployment trends by the Economic Policy Institute has some sobering findings on the varying unemployment trajectories that different racial groups experienced between 2013 and 2014, and what we can expect to see this year. According to the report, in 2014 the white unemployment rate across the United States was 4.9%. But the black unemployment rate was more than double that, at 11.4%. The GIF below breaks down the disparities between white and black unemployment by state in 2014. (The sample size for unemployment broken down by race wasn’t big enough for every state; this chart includes 32 states and the District of Columbia.) You can see that black unemployment dwarfs white unemployment across the country:
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Mic
March 27, 2015
The unemployment rate for black people was 11 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and was 10.4 percent in February. Both rates are still higher than the peak the national unemployment rate reached at the worst point of the recession — 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Think Progress
March 27, 2015
In Wisconsin, the state with the highest annual African-American unemployment rate, nearly 1 in 5 black people are unemployed. The states with the next highest rates of black unemployment were Nevada (16.1 percent) and Michigan (15.8 percent), according to a new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data released by the Economic Policy Institute on Thursday. The issue brief is a sobering reminder that black Americans continue to face troublingly high unemployment rates.
Huffington Post
March 26, 2015
Unemployment among African-Americans in Wisconsin last year was the highest of any of the 50 states, according to a study released Thursday by the center-left Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. At 19.9% — or 1 in 5 working-age people — the black unemployment rate in Wisconsin is nearly three times higher than the highest state white unemployment rate (7% in Nevada) and significantly higher than the national black unemployment rate of 11%, the think tank found.
Milwaukee is merely the extreme of a national trend, according to Valerie Wilson, the author of the report. “Five years into recovery from the Great Recession, unemployment rates are finally nearing their 2007 levels, but the pace of recovery varies by state for different racial and ethnic groups,” wrote Wilson, who directs the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
March 26, 2015