All that said, Robert E. Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, has argued that the United States could penalize countries that manipulate their currencies more severely than it does, which would improve U.S. manufacturers’ competitive advantage on the global stage and is more important that restructuring trade deals. (The liberal think tank, incidentally, was cited by Mr. Trump in a recent speech; its leader later called Mr. Trump’s approach to trade policy a “scam.”)
The New York Times
July 22, 2016
Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, has heard that claim a lot since she published research showing that women earn $4 an hour less than men right out of college. Gould and EPI researcher Jessica Schieder published a paper on Wednesday explaining why the pay gap has little to do with real choice. “People were not understanding the full picture,” Gould told The Huffington Post.
The Huffington Post
July 21, 2016
Nearly half of American families have no retirement savings at all, the Economic Policy Institute reported in March.
Fiscal Times
July 21, 2016
Manufacturing has crossed the Rio Grande, as CNN Money writer Patrick Gillespie put it on March 31. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the U.S. lost over 682,000 jobs to Mexico between 1997 and 2013 because of NAFTA.
Forbes
July 20, 2016
Hunger remains persistent because millions of Americans are still struggling financially as a result of the crash. Post-recession wage growth, though real, has been wildly unequal. A recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that “between 2000 and 2015, wages for the bottom 60 percent of male workers were flat or declined” and that wage gains have been largely concentrated among high earners.
The Atlantic
July 20, 2016
Critics may point to the jobs women choose. But a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute complicates that idea, tracing all the different forces pushing women toward lower-paying jobs from a young age through their entire careers. In fact, only about a third of the pay gap can be attributed to chosen profession, the EPI writes. If men and women were paid equally within the jobs they already hold — even if women still held a disproportionate amount of lower-paying jobs — more than two-thirds of the gender gap would be closed. That’s controlling for education and other factors. Women are more highly educated in general, the paper’s authors write, but they “cannot educate themselves out of the gender wage gap.”
Marketplace
July 20, 2016
“Opaque global monetary policies combined with unfocused, poorly negotiated international trade agreements are undermining the entire project of globalization as proponents of these policies face a growing backlash among voters,” he writes. As Trump did in his speech in Pennsylvania, Barrack name-checks the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that’s been critical of trade agreements.
Bloomberg
July 19, 2016
Research released in June by the Economic Policy Institute outlines disparities of wealth in 26 Utah counties, revealing that the state has less income inequality than most of the U.S. — but the gaps are getting worse over time. Few regions of the state are exceptionally wealthy, and Utah’s poverty rate is a low 10.2 percent — only Wyoming and Minnesota are lower. The average U.S. poverty rate is about 15 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The Economic Policy Institute’s research is based on 2013 data for single adults and couples. Nationwide, 1 percenters held 20.1 percent of the wealth, compared with 15.7 percent in Utah, giving the state a ranking of 27 out of 50 states.
Salt Lake Tribune
July 19, 2016
Childcare is already prohibitively expensive for many Americans. Not even counting rent and food, a minimum wage worker in Hawaii, for instance, would have to devote all wages from working full-time from January through September to just cover the costs of care, according to the Economic Policy Institute.That same study also found that childcare costs exceeded rent in 500 out of the 618 regions examined in the study.
Mic
July 19, 2016
Others argue that Baltimore’s proposed hike is “dramatic but not unprecedented.” The Economic Policy Institute’s David Cooper said that Santa Fe, N.M., raised its hourly minimum by 65 percent, to $8.50, in 2004. “Cooper said the concerns voiced then were similar to those raised about Baltimore’s bill, but have not materialized in Santa Fe. The unemployment rate there fell by about a percentage point in the three years after the hike, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and per capita income increased slightly during that same time period, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.”
Politico
July 19, 2016