If passed, the rate would be the highest of any city in the nation—an honor (or curse, depending on your views) that currently belongs to SeaTac, Washington, the city that’s home to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and currently has a minimum wage is $15.24, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s minimum wage tracker.
Last week, David Cooper with the Economic Policy Institute told Fortune that if the federal minimum wage had kept up with American workers’ productivity, it would land in the $18 or $19 per hour territory.
Fortune
September 16, 2015
But a new study from the Economic Policy Institute— an admittedly left-leaning but tenaciously exact think tank in Washington — reminds us of the clarion differences that exist in the way Democrats and Republicans see economic growth and, increasingly, the need to address a widening inequality among earners.
Detroit Free Press
September 16, 2015
As pointed out by writer Nelson Schwartz, one explanation for this may lie in another study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute. That report indicates that even as labor productivity has improved steadily since two thousand, the benefits of improved efficiency have nearly all inured to companies, shareholders and top executives rather than to rank-and-file employees. Remarkably, wage declines in low paying occupations were much worse, falling nine percent for restaurant cooks and six percent for home health aides.
WYPR
September 16, 2015
Labor conditions and recessionary effects don’t explain everything, argues Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. To fully explain why wages haven’t gotten the same jolt from the Fed’s rock-bottom interest rates as other parts of the economy, he points a finger at another branch of the government: Congress. Bivens argues that fiscal policy following the recession failed to stimulate sufficient demand. “After the recession, fiscal policy has been historically austere,” he says. Despite two rounds of stimulus passed in 2008 and 2009, Bivens says the government still did too little in the way of programs like infrastructure building and providing unemployment benefits. Bivens isn’t alone in that notion. Yellen called fiscal policy an economic “headwind” in a 2013 speech. “In the year following the end of the recession, discretionary fiscal policy at the federal, state, and local levels boosted growth at roughly the same pace as in past recoveries,” she explained. “But instead of contributing to growth thereafter, discretionary fiscal policy this time has actually acted to restrain the recovery.”
International Business Times
September 16, 2015
Blow asked Sanders about his campaign to win over black voters in an interview. Sanders said (as he’s said before) that the media is to blame. He argued that black voters would listen if reporters would only cover the substance of the senator’s speeches on the campaign trail. He’s said again and again that African Americans are at a disadvantage in the U.S. economy. “I have talked in 20 different speeches that 51 percent of young African-American kids are unemployed and underemployed,” he argued, citing research by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “I don’t know that it’s made the newspapers yet.”
The Washington Post
September 15, 2015
Though research from the Economic Policy Institute this year showed that job prospects are getting better for the 2015 college grads than their predecessors, the new federal data tool makes it clear that the benefits of college education are not equal across schools.
Boston.com
September 15, 2015
Southern California Public Radio
September 15, 2015
The bigger issue for the economy is what will happen over the long term. It’s not just about the first rate hike, but about whether interest rates continue going up, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. If the Fed continues to raise rates, that’s likely to slow the steady job growth the economy has been seeing in the last couple of years. Workers are just now starting to gain a little bit of power in the economy, Bivens said. If the Fed leaves interest rates low, unemployment is likely to continue to fall, giving workers more leverage with their employers, who will find fewer and fewer qualified applicants to replace them with. In that case, employers would be likely to do things like raise wages to keep or attract talented workers. “The real question at hand is, do we follow the example of the 1990s and let the unemployment rate get really low?” said Bivens. “If [the Fed] experiments, we could see some real wage gains for American workers.” But if interest rates rise, the trend could reverse. “The bigger danger,” said Bivens, will be if “this quarter-point increase signals that the Fed thinks that the economy shouldn’t generate lower unemployment.”
The Huffington Post
September 15, 2015
The pay of chief executives has also been attacked by Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. According to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, CEOs’ pay in 2013 was nearly 300 times the pay of the average worker.
Reuters
September 14, 2015
“It seems weird you have to lobby an institution like the Fed,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, one of the groups behind Fed Up. “But the Fed is a real-world institution and they have a lot of cross-pressure coming from loud, influential voices who want a rate increase. To my mind the arguments coming from those loud, influential voices are flawed and not based on a good reading of the data. But if we stay silent they could well carry some influence.”
Politico
September 14, 2015