It’s a great investment, especially in an age of low interest rates: Putting just $18 billion a year into roads, bridges, and waterways could create a $29 billion jump in GPD and more than 200,000 jobs in the first year, says Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute…There’s another potential problem. “With privatized infrastructure, you can run the risk of giving the private asset holders weirdly too-much power over future investment decisions,” says Bivens, at the Economic Policy Institute. “Think of the privatized parking meters in Chicago, with the holders of the meter rights suing to prevent, say, construction of parking lots elsewhere in the city.”
WIRED
November 10, 2016
Josh Bivens, director of research and policy for the Economic Policy Institute, said infrastructure spending could help. “In the campaign, Trump spoke (vaguely) about wanting to spend on infrastructure, so that would, all else equal, boost growth and job creation,” Bivens said in an email. “If he pays for this infrastructure boost by gutting spending elsewhere, he’ll ruin the job creation impact, however.” Although infrastructure spending might help at home, it won’t bring back any jobs from overseas.
USA Today
November 10, 2016
And not all economists agree with Perry. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has argued that trade is the culprit for lost manufacturing jobs, not technology. Autor has suggested that perhaps the sluggish economy and lower demand for manufactured goods has played a role.
The Washington Post
November 8, 2016
But preschool remains unaffordable for the vast majority of American families, including middle-income households. The cost of child care for a 4-year-old, which consists largely of preschool costs, is more than the costs of in-state public college tuition in nearly half of states, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Huffington Post
November 8, 2016
The financial disparity between the teaching profession and other similar jobs in the US is well documented. The gap between public teachers and other public officials ballooned to the largest point ever in 2015, according to report from the Economic Policy Institute. And compared to all college goers, teachers made 17% less than other similarly educated workers.
Business Insider
November 8, 2016
Too many Americans are ignoring their retirement savings, and that’s a big problem. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. median retirement savings stands at $5,000. There are myriad reasons for such an alarming, and inadequate, number, and we’ll get to those in a moment. But the EPI points the icy finger of guilt at the rise of the 401(k) plan. “The shift from pensions to 401(k)s has failed the majority of American workers and disproportionately harmed disadvantaged groups,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist with the EPI. She notes the median family between the ages of 32 and 61 has only $5,000 saved in a retirement account, while the top 1 percent of families has a million dollars or more. “For many groups – lower-income, black, Hispanic, non-college-educated, and unmarried – the typical working-age family has no savings at all in these accounts,” the EPI reports. “Our retirement system used to reduce inequality, but since the shift to 401(k)s it has only served to magnify it,” Morrisey says. “These accounts are accidents of history that were never designed to replace pensions, and it should come as no surprise that they have not worked for the majority of people. Decades after the rise of 401(k)s, pensions are still far more important to retired people. To make sure Americans are prepared for retirement, we need to defend existing pensions and expand Social Security.”
US News and World Report
November 8, 2016
Jobs and wages: With unemployment low and pay rising, it is tempting to declare the job market fully healed from the recession. And indeed there are some economists who believe the U.S. is at or close to “full employment,” meaning that pretty much everyone who wants a job either has one or can find one quickly.1 But the balance of the evidence suggests that there is still room for the job market to improve. In October, 78.2 percent of Americans in their prime working years, those ages 25 to 54, had jobs, down from 79.7 percent when the recession began in December 2007. That’s a gap of close to 2 million people. Another nearly 6 million are working part-time because they can’t find full-time work. “In my mind we still have a very incomplete recovery,” said Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
FiveThirtyEight
November 7, 2016
“We were talking about a $9 wage five years ago and now we’re talking about $15,” says David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “That’s a pretty dramatic change.”
Mother Jones
November 7, 2016
But it’s also bad news, because it’s still well below the 4 percent we hit in the boom of the late 1990s, and again at the peak of the business cycle in the 2000s. The Economic Policy Institute keeps a tracker of nominal wage growth, and points out that “it will take wage growth of at least 3.5 to 4 percent for workers to begin to reap the benefits of economic growth and to achieve a genuine recovery from the Great Recession.” If that’s our benchmark for a healthy economy firing on all cylinders, we’re still a ways off.
The Week
November 7, 2016
Why can’t we be compensated fairly? According to a recent study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, “The teacher pay penalty is bigger than ever. In 2015, public school teachers’ weekly wages were 17 percent lower than those of comparable workers — compared with just 1.8 percent lower in 1994 (Allegretto and Mishel 2016). This is a reality we face as educators.
The Washington Post
November 5, 2016