Cost information site How Much this week published a helpful infographic that shows what the average 1 percenter earns in census areas around the country, particularly in counties. The map itself is based on U.S. Census Bureau data pulled by the Economic Policy Institute and used in a report published last month. One of its findings: Americans don’t necessarily have to be millionaires to be placed in their region’s top earnings percentile.
U.S. News & World Report
July 8, 2016
But, 150,000 jobs per month won’t get the economy to the point where everyone who wants to work and is able to work can find a job, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute. That description of conditions in a labor market corresponds to what economists define as “full employment,” or the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” (NAIRU). That is the lowest level that unemployment can reach before labor shortages begin to result in sharp increases in wages, in turn pushing up wholesale and retail prices.
Marketplace
July 8, 2016
“The June jobs report is the kind we want to see more of,” Elise Gould, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, writes in an e-mailed statement. “287,000 jobs a month moves the recovery forward, not only pulling in the growing working age population, but also chipping away at remaining slack.”
Christian Science Monitor
July 8, 2016
Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, called Friday’s numbers “a welcome boost after the weakness in the last two months.” But she cautioned the U.S. remains far from full employment and that “that there’s still a fair amount of weakness to account for.”
Politico
July 8, 2016
For a family of four in the District of Columbia, it costs $106,493 a year to maintain a “decent yet modest standard of living” for expenses such as food, child care and housing, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator, released in August 2015.
U.S. News & World Report
July 8, 2016
But critics of the influx of foreign students to the U.S. warn that, without safeguards, the policy would turn U.S. colleges into green-card factories that crowd out American students, drive down salaries and discourage U.S.-born students from STEM careers. This is not just a Trump applause line. The labor-backed Economic Policy Institute doesn’t believe a tech-worker shortage even exists.
Bloomberg
July 8, 2016
“Employers rightly look at a paid internship as more of a real job,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “If you were paid for something, there was probably more valuable work done.” Even the unpaid interns who received full-time job offers were paid less out of the gate. At private companies, unpaid interns received a median job offer of about $34,400. Paid interns at private firms were offered jobs with a median salary of $53,521, NACE found. “An unpaid internship signals that you have been willing to work for nothing, therefore you might be willing to accept a lower job offer than a paid intern would,” says Eisenbrey. (Interns at EPI are paid, he says).
CNN Money
July 8, 2016
Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said he’d like to see NAFTA “fixed” to raise income for Mexican workers so “there is more demand for products made in the U.S.” Though Mexico was more closed before NAFTA, it’s not likely it would put up a wall to outside companies. The country benefits greatly from foreign investment. Prior to NAFTA, direct investment from the U.S. in 1993 was $2.5 billion. That grew to $9.3 billion in 2014, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. “I don’t know why Mexico would push [U.S. companies] out the door,” said Scott.
CNN Money
July 7, 2016
The Economic Policy Institute released a report in June measuring the gap between the rich and everyone else, also known as income inequality. The report shows Summit County has the largest disparity of income inequality when compared with the rest of the state. Mark Price, a labor economist, said the gap in income inequality in Summit County is most likely because of the ski resort community in Park City. “The places that tend to have the most inequality, at least for the way we measured it, are places that have a large concentration of top executives,” he said.
Utah Public Radio
July 7, 2016
For all of the progress African-Americans have made in climbing from Jim Crow into the middle class, one measure is a reminder of how hard it is to catch up when you start out so far behind: No matter how high or low the white unemployment rate, the black rate always doubles it. “That’s pretty much the norm” for as long as the data has been kept, said Valerie Wilson, an Economic Policy Institute economist who began tracking the numbers quarterly and by state last year for a deeper look at the gaps.
Buffalo News
July 7, 2016