As it happens, Democrats, including presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, have some ideas on how to do that. They would raise the minimum wage. They would offer financial assistance with child care and out-of-pocket medical expenses. They would finance public works, make it easier for unions to organize new members, and make attending public colleges debt-free. In short, they would do the sorts of things that progressive intellectuals, like those at the Economic Policy Institute, have been promoting for a long time.
Huffington Post
July 19, 2016
CEOs now make almost 280 times what a typical American worker pulls in annually, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). But it’s not just disgruntled workers with stagnant wages – the group that many say has found a voice in Donald Trump – who are being left in the financial dust by the chief executives of U.S. corporations.
Fiscal Times
July 19, 2016
Slavery was America’s original sin. But a close second is purposeful government policy that denied opportunity. After World War II, as Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute chronicled, the Federal Housing Administration would deny loans, or loan guarantees, to builders unless they promised not to sell to blacks. So, as white families bought homes that appreciated into wealth that enabled them to finance businesses and educations, black families realized none of that.
Hartford Courant
July 18, 2016
Average hourly nominal wages have grown 2.0-2.2 percent annually over the past six years, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with growth in the last year credited to low inflation rates. Growth in income inequality has accompanied growth in wages over the past few years: the top 5 percent of earners experienced the fastest wage growth between 2012 and 2015. That disparity has fueled activist campaigns like the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Fight for $15 campaign.
Christian Science Monitor
July 18, 2016
Maryland’s minimum wage increased to $8.75 from $8.25 this month, the first of several yearly bumps approved by state lawmakers two years ago to bring the rate to $10.10 an hour by 2018. David Cooper, an analyst for the liberal Economic Policy Institute, called attempts to predict the cost of the bill “pure speculation” and a “total shot in the dark.”… The hike is dramatic but not unprecedented, Cooper said. Santa Fe, New Mexico, raised its minimum wage by 65 percent — from $5.15 to $8.50 an hour — 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.
Baltimore Sun
July 17, 2016
One of the most striking trends over the past several decades has been explosive growth in executive compensation, especially relative to the average worker’s salary. The ratio went from 20 to one in 1965, according to calculations of CEO pay at America’s largest companies by the Economic Policy Institute, to 301.9 to one in 2014. The dramatic rise was fueled in part by a shift in compensation plans toward stock options, which allowed chief executives’ pay to rise with the market. Accordingly, the market’s dropoff last year might be responsible for a decline in CEO pay, and a corresponding downtick in the CEO-to-worker pay ratio, EPI said.
Houston Chronicle
July 15, 2016
Even so, advocacy groups say higher wages for hourly workers are important, particularly in the Washington area, where the cost of living is among the highest in the country. For a single person in the District to make ends meet, they need to make at least $20 an hour working full-time, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. For a single worker with a child, that figure is $37 an hour.
The Washington Post
July 15, 2016
Occupy Wall Street made popular the idea of a country divided between the 99% and the 1%, but its really the chief executives of the nation’s biggest businesses that are pulling away in the income race and leaving everyone else behind, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. “CEO compensation at the largest firms dipped temporarily in 2015, but remains 940.9 percent above its 1978 level,” the report says. “This growth in CEO compensation far exceeded the growth of the stock market . . . . This shows that executives have done far better than the firms they have led and executive pay cannot be simply attributed to better firm performance.”
Fortune
July 15, 2016
As late as 1965, America’s corporate elite were in sync with Morgan’s advice. That year, the CEOs of America’s 350 largest corporations earned 20 times more than their median worker. But in the 1980s corporate boards began removing the compensation straitjacket. Last year the typical CEO earned over $15 million a year—more than 276 times the pay of their average workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Nation
July 15, 2016
But Robert Scott, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., notes that the vast majority of employment associated with new investments by foreign companies has been in the form of acquisitions of existing U.S. companies – called “insourcing.” During the 15 years between 1990 and 2005, there was a net loss of 4 million U.S. jobs as a result of insourcing, he said. “When foreign investors buy established U.S. businesses, employment overall goes down,” Scott said.
Forbes
July 15, 2016