Media clips
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With improving incomes, 3.5 million people climbed out of poverty in 2015, pushing down the official poverty rate to 13.5 percent. The 1.2 percentage decrease in the poverty rate is the biggest drop since 1999. “[The Great Recession put us] in a deep hole, and this one year almost single handedly got us out of the hole,” said economist Lawrence Mishel of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. But, if we look back to where we were before the recession and as far back as the 1990s, we still have a ways to go.
PBS News Hour September 14, 2016 -
The Census data was “superb in almost every dimension,” said Larry Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, on Tuesday. After such a deep recession caused by a financial crisis, incomes were “submerged” for many years, he noted. “This one year almost single-handedly got us out of the hole. That’s worth celebrating.” EPI charted the difference between incomes for all households and for the non-elderly, or working age, Americans. Working-age households did better, Mishel said, highlighting the role the labor market played. A stronger job market doesn’t just mean more people employed, Mishel added. It means more hours worked for more people, and better wages for most workers. To be sure, incomes were helped along by stagnant inflation. If inflation had run at a more normal rate, Mishel said, incomes would have risen about 3%. And they have not yet regained the peak they set in 1999.
MarketWatch September 14, 2016 -
“This one year almost single-handedly got us out of the hole … and that’s worth celebrating,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute think tank, said on a call with reporters Tuesday…“We’re digging ourselves out of a pretty deep hole,” said Dr. Mishel. But if 2016 brings the similar levels of growth as last year did, he predicts, “most households will recoup their income losses from the Great Recession.” The wealthiest Americans, on the other hand, have fully recovered from the recession and are now even a few percentage points ahead. According to an analysis by EPI, there are a few forces that shaped the strong household income growth of 2015 – the likes of which the country hasn’t seen in half a century. First, the unemployment rate declined from 6.2 to 5.3 percent last year. “We may finally start seeing employers having to compete for workers, which is something we should have every year,” Mishel said…They key to getting back to a pre-recession America is to keep growing wages and lowering unemployment, according to EPI.
The Christian Science Monitor September 14, 2016 -
Many Americans are not prepared for retirement. In fact, “nearly half of families have no retirement account savings at all,” the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported. Just how much has the average American family saved up? According to the EPI, the mean retirement savings of all families is $95,776. But that number doesn’t tell the whole story. Since so many families have zero savings and since super-savers can pull up the average, the median savings, or those at the 50th percentile, may be a better gauge. The median for all families in the U.S. is just $5,000, and the median for families with some savings is $60,000.
CNBC September 13, 2016 -
These changes would have a major impact on the enduring strength of Obama’s overtime rule, according to a report released last month by the Economic Policy Institute, the labor think tank that helped craft the rule’s language. “Rep. Schrader wants to reproduce the very disaster for working people the Department of Labor is seeking to prevent: an inevitable and significant loss of guaranteed overtime coverage due to inflation and wage growth,” the report declares…”The guts of DOL’s rule is the indexation of the salary test for exemption. If it isn’t indexed it immediately loses its value and protects fewer workers, quickly becoming meaningless, as the current $23,660 level is today,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute and the brainchild of the overtime rule
American Prospect September 13, 2016 -
“We have a myth – I call it ‘de facto segregation,’ ” says Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., and author of the report “The Making of Ferguson.” “As if all the patterns of racial segregation across the country just sort of happened by accident. And that’s a myth.” While personal choices may have contributed to segregation, with families choosing to live in places where their neighbors looked like them, Mr. Rothstein says that government policies have been the biggest driver for the incredible levels of separateness that are seen today. Early on, the federal government built separate public housing projects for African-Americans and whites in urban areas…The difficulty in reducing segregation is rooted in part in society’s reluctance to admit that it’s a self-made problem. “There are many things we can do [to reduce segregation], but we’re not going to do them so long as we have the myth that segregation developed without intent and that it happened by accident, and therefore that it can only un-happen by accident,” says Rothstein. “It’s going to require policy as conscious to desegregate as it was to segregate.”
Christian Science Monitor September 10, 2016 -
In some instances, it’s a too-small nest egg that leaves retirees looking to fill the income gap. An analysis from the National Institute on Retirement Security found that 65 percent of American households are at risk of falling short in retirement. The mean retirement savings for households aged 56 to 61 is less than $164,000, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute, far short of the $1 million or more that industry experts recommend.
U.S. News & World Report September 9, 2016 -
Valerie Wilson, an economist at think tank Economic Policy Institute told CNN the black unemployment rate “would be unacceptable if that were the national rate.” According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Wages of black workers are more responsive to aggregate labor market changes. Doubling the national unemployment rate is estimated to reduce real hourly wages by at least 8 percent for the median black worker, compared to 3 percent for the median white worker.” This means that while the decline in unemployment can overall be seen as positive, the wages of people of color were disproportionately impacted over the course of the recession and its recovery compared to whites. Furthermore, despite the aforementioned increase in the number of black-owned businesses, they still only make up 7 percent of all U.S firms.
Complex September 9, 2016 -
In the debates about what is fueling widening inequality and persistent wage stagnation among lower earners, the decline of unions usually takes a back seat to globalization and automation. But a new study from the Economic Policy Institute suggests that weakened union power and shrinking union density may play a bigger role than previously thought. That’s because its not just union members who benefit from collective bargaining. According to the report, “unions, especially in industries and regions where they are strong, help boost the wages of all workers by establishing pay and benefit standards that many nonunion firms adopt.” Highly unionized states have driven the push for an increased minimum wage, for example. Employers of nonunion workers might raise pay to prevent workers from organizing or leaving for higher paying union jobs.
Next City September 9, 2016 -
According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, Ohio suffered some of the highest jobs losses of any state as a result of NAFTA. A recent report by EPI also states that America lost 2 million jobs in 2015 due to trade deficits with nations in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Ohio, along with fellow Rust Belt states Michigan and Indiana, made the top 10 list of states most affected. President Barack Obama has made passing the TPP trade bill a key priority during his last months in office.
Moyers & Company September 9, 2016