To think through smart protectionism, consider the controversial history of NAFTA. Sanders and Trump have blasted the trade agreement for, as Jeff Faux, the founding president of the Economic Policy Institute, put it, opening “the door through which American workers were shoved, unprepared, into a brutal global competition for jobs that has cut their living standards and is destroying their future.”
The Atlantic
July 13, 2016
The top 350 US CEOs earned 5.1% less last year than in 2014, bringing home an average of just $15.5m, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. The dip in earnings had little to do with the increased attention to income inequality or discrepancy in pay between top executives and low-wage workers. Instead it’s all down to last year’s turbulent stock market.The report, released on Tuesday by the left-leaning firm, comes at a time when both the S&P 500 and Dow have reached new record highs.
The Guardian
July 13, 2016
In 2015, the average chief executive at the largest corporations in the U.S. earned 276 times what a typical worker made ― about $15 million, a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute reports. The number actually fell a bit from 2014 ― when CEOs on average made around $16 million ― because of declines in the stock market. Still the ratio of CEO pay to normal person pay remains so high it’s almost kind of funny ― except for how that money could be put to more productive uses.
The Huffington Post
July 13, 2016
As Bernstein and Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute also observed, black unemployment is more volatile than that of whites — it rises faster in slack times and falls faster as the economy moves toward full employment: “Between 1979 and 2014, the average annual black unemployment rate changed by 1.7 percentage points for every 1-percentage-point change in the national unemployment rate,” Wilson wrote. Real wage growth for black households will also grow faster than in white households, albeit marginally.
Los Angeles Times
July 12, 2016
CEO pay was slightly down from the year before in both raw-dollar terms and in comparison to worker earnings, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s updated figures. Stock markets struggled in 2015, causing the figures to dip from a $16.3 million average compensation and a CEO-to-worker pay ratio north of 300-to-1. But CEO pay is still up 46.5 percent from its 2009 levels despite the decline in executive earnings that mostly come in the form of stock options, EPI notes
Think Progress
July 12, 2016
In its latest study on CEO pay, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports that the CEOs of America’s 350 largest publicly traded firms (as measured by their total sales) made an average of $15.5 million each in 2015, down about 5 percent from what they earned in 2014. Even with that drop, large-company CEOs earned a whopping 276 times the average annual pay of the typical U.S. worker in 2015. What’s more, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in 2015 remained “light years” beyond the 20-to-1 ratio of 1965, according to the study by EPI, a nonprofit think tank focused on low- and middle-income workers.
CBS Moneywatch
July 12, 2016
The Black and Brown revolution is coming. People of color will be a majority of the American working class by 2032, according to a new study released by the Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI). That is just 16 years from now, or four presidential elections away. Fifty years ago this working class population shift would have been impossible for some people to imagine. Now a Black and Brown America is becoming everyone’s reality. Let that truth sink in for a second.
Ebony
July 11, 2016
Despite the fact that the unemployment rate is now below 5% and there are more than 1 million fewer unemployed people than there were a year ago, all is not rosy in the labor market. There recently were 1.4 unemployed workers for every job opening — or to put it another way, there were 14 workers looking for work for every 10 job openings — according to a report released in February by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that studies low- and middle-income workers.
MarketWatch
July 11, 2016
Rising inequality is one of the major problems developed economies face today — and the US is no exception. The top 1% of American earners captured 20.1% of all the income in the US in 2013, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Business Insider
July 9, 2016