But post-recession progress seen in the black and Hispanic unemployment rates, which have been as much as double the rate for whites in recent years, can be slowed by the Fed’s raising of the interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, the economists said. “Today’s actions are a worrisome backwards step,” said Josh Bivens, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit think tank that follows the impact of economic trends on the working class. “Despite years of steady progress restoring the damage inflicted by the Great Recession, a full economic recovery remains incomplete.”
International Business Times
December 17, 2015
That slowing is good to prevent the economy from overheating when there’s very strong wage growth, but that’s something a number of progressive economists think that there are not yet any signs of. And they fear the Fed’s decision is premature. “You’re supposed to raise interest rates when unemployment is too low, workers are making too aggressive wage demands and getting them and they’re threatening to set off wage and price inflation,” Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, told Mic. “That is just not the economy we have today, so I’m not sure why we’re going in that direction.” Bivens says he believes the rate increase doesn’t in and of itself threaten economic growth or demand in the economy too much, but that further increases could “keep the economy from improving the point it has today.”
Mic
December 17, 2015
Economist Josh Bivens, research and policy director for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, suggested in a blog post that a big reason behind weak inflation has been that workers have lost leverage and can’t demand higher wages like they used to, and that raising rates now might sap what little strength they’re gaining: The pressure to raise rates now, even in the face of a complete absence of inflationary pressures in the data, reflects a couple of strands of conventional thinking that are deeply damaging to prospect of workers’ wages rising anytime in the near future.
Quartz
December 17, 2015
Still, opinion is not unanimous. Some Fed policymakers have said they worry the world economy is too weak for the Fed to successfully march off on its own. Labor groups on Tuesday said pockets of employment and wage growth overall are still too weak to warrant tighter financial conditions. “There’s no reason to think that the pace of economic growth today is excessive and needs to be slowed because of incipient inflation,” Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, said in calling on the Fed not to hike. “Right now, lower unemployment that boosted wage and price growth would be an affirmatively good thing. Wages and prices are clearly growing too slowly.”
Reuters
December 16, 2015
As the Economic Policy Institute notes, public sector anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies, which the Center for Individual Rights has fought for decades, have been particularly effective in creating economic opportunities for women and Black people, “especially in contrast to the private sector.” Discrimination still exists everywhere, but it continues to be much more prevalent in the private sector where fewer protections – often won by working people speaking up for one another – exist.
NBC News
December 16, 2015
A new survey released by Bankrate.com finds that only 22 percent of employed Americans expect a bonus this year, while only 12 percent are anticipating a raise. It’s all a part of the slow wage growth that has continued to plague the U.S. economy, Josh Bivens, of the Economic Policy Institute, tells Bankrate.“The headline unemployment rate is a notably rosier indicator than lots of other measures of labor market slack, including the really slow pace of wage growth the last 5 to 6 years,” he says.
WTOP
December 16, 2015
According to the Economic Policy Institute, it is more expensive to send a one-year-old to daycare for a year than it is to send a college student to a state school in 30 states. Furthermore, the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis also shows that childcare costs over 30 percent of a minimum-wage income in every single state. This partially explains why the number of women in the American workforce has fallen from 74 percent in 1999 to 69 percent in 2014.
Bustle
December 16, 2015
Some remain skeptical, worrying the plan adds an unnecessary layer of confusion to an already complex debate. “It’s an interesting intellectual exercise but it wouldn’t be wise to actually legislate on this right now,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed think tank. He argues that policymakers should let ongoing worker classification disputes play in out in the courts before rushing to make any new categories.
International Business Times
December 15, 2015
But with an economy slow to recover from the worst financial shock since 1929, demand simply hasn’t been strong enough to push prices up, said Josh Bivens, research director at the progressive Economic Policy Institute. Laffer and other inflation hawks “wildly underestimated how far from full potential we were,” Bivens told International Business Times, noting that wage gains have only just recently shown increasing momentum.
International Business Times
December 15, 2015
Young college graduates may be more optimistic, but their inflation-adjusted wages are lower. The Economic Policy Institute, in a recent study, found that earnings for young college graduates have steadily declined since 2000.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
December 15, 2015