And just yesterday the Economic Policy Institute released a report titled “How To Raise Wages” that offers a path to curing wage stagnation through smart economic policy. A number of the policy ideas from CAP and EPI overlap and aren’t what you’d call “revolutionary,” though that’s not to take away from their worth. They endorse raising the minimum wage, infrastructure investment, stronger collective bargaining rights, paid sick leave, etc. EPI’s argument is straightforward and compelling: bad policy decisions helped create the extended period of wage stagnation we’re slogging through, so good policy decisions can help get us out of it.
Salon
March 23, 2015
One house just sold for north of $80 million, right around the time the Economic Policy Institute published a study concluding that “more than half” the residents of metro Los Angeles “are struggling to achieve economic security.”
Los Angeles Times
March 23, 2015
Some liberal groups such as the think tank Economic Policy Institute have advocated a salary threshold for overtime pay as high as $50,000. The administration is thought to be looking in the ballpark of similar rules in California and New York which are more than a third higher than the current federal threshold.
McClatchy
March 23, 2015
Today, the Economic Policy Institute — a liberal think tank that gets support from labor unions — released an 11-point “Agenda to Raise America’s Pay,” and it’s worth paying attention to because something like it will probably become Hillary Clinton’s economic plan.
The Washington Post
March 20, 2015
The liberal wonks at the Economic Policy Institute are having a moment right now. They’ve been warning for years that middle-class wages were stagnating. Suddenly, as they put it in a new paper out today, “There is now widespread agreement across the political spectrum that wage stagnation is the country’s key economic challenge.” They’ve long called the decline in unionization the biggest factor in that stagnation; Democrats are increasingly embracing that argument.
The Washington Post
March 20, 2015
Ayres’ ideological opposite, Larry Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, agreed — to a point. “People may not rally around income inequality — that’s a bloodless thing,” he said. But then he noted some common political applause lines. “If someone is talking about the middle-class squeeze, wage stagnation or trying to lift people out of poverty, they’re talking about income inequality,” he said.
Associated Press
March 19, 2015
CEO-to-worker pay ratios were hovering in the high 50s in the mid-1990s but have exploded since, reaching as high 383 in 2000 amid the stock- and options-fueled tech bubble, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The ratio fell to as low as 209 in the aftermath of the financial crisis and has since rebounded back above 300 in 2014.
Yahoo Finance
March 19, 2015
More than three-quarters of Hispanics in the Los Angeles metropolitan area have insufficient incomes to make ends meet, compared with about one-third of whites and nearly two-thirds of African-Americans, according to a study by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute.
“That’s pretty striking. It means there are many people who are barely getting by,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the economic think-tank and a co-author of the study released last week. “They are struggling to make ends meet. They’re not able to invest in their future or the future of their children.”
Los Angeles Daily News
March 19, 2015
Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington, says many of the industries that rely on the program, such as landscaping, have high unemployment rates in the United States. “There isn’t a big labor shortage,” Costa said. “If the program is going to exist it needs to be done in a fair way so that American workers have the first shot at the job.”
Baltimore Sun
March 19, 2015
Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., said the problem with people dropping out of the labor force began, not with Obama, but with Republican President George W. Bush. “The fact is that the Labor Force Participation Rate peaked in the year 2000,” he said. “They are blaming it on Obama, but it was actually declining between 2000 and 2007, before Obama ever got elected.
“(Obama) supported policies that would have helped with more jobs — everything from the stimulus package to the auto bailout,” Mishel said. “Given that the Republicans blocked every one of his initiatives, it is hard to hold the president accountable. This is criticism from people who lit the fire and then put up a blockade so that the fire truck couldn’t get through to put it out.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
March 18, 2015