Media clips
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That uptick on the far right is significant. As the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens explained to The Week, there’s a debate among economists over how much of that fall is “cyclical” or “structural.” “Cyclical” basically means, “due to the recession.” If there aren’t enough jobs, people will get discouraged and leave the labor force. Which suggests that if government boosts aggregate demand with the right fiscal and monetary policies, it can create new jobs and bring them back in. “Structural” means some deep and foundational change in the economy. The aging of the population is one example: If a larger portion of our population is retiring, that will lower the natural ceiling on how high the labor force participation rate can go. “Roughly half of the decline since 2007 is unambiguously demographic,” said Bivens. “It’s that remaining half that people mostly argue over.”
The Week March 7, 2016 -
A researcher with the Economic Policy Institute says the federal government needs to recognize that it played a deliberate role in creating racially segregated neighborhoods in cities like St. Louis. At a Missouri History Museum Symposium Saturday, the think tank’s Richard Rothstein drew a direct line between today’s segregated schools and neighborhoods and two federal housing programs from the 1930s, 40s and 50s: public housing and subsidized construction. “We have a national myth that the reason our metropolitan areas are segregated is for informal reasons—private prejudice, differences in income, demographic trends, racial steering by real estate agents and so forth,” Rothstein said. “The reality is that the segregation that we see today was established by the federal government with help from state and local governments. It’s an officially established system.”
St. Louis Public Radio March 7, 2016 -
Sanders appears to be citing an estimate from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning group which has opposed free-trade agreements, which estimated a job loss of nearly 700,000. (Another group, Public Citizen, pegs the jobs loss at 1 million.) But these are not universally accepted estimates, with many economists say that the job losses in manufacturing cannot be easily blamed just on NAFTA.
He is citing research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The 51 percent figure refers to high school graduates between 17 and 20 years old who are not enrolled in additional schooling. This report is different from the official unemployment rate published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which does not break out data for 17- to 20-year-olds.
The Washington Post March 7, 2016 -
The February jobs report is the last significant batch of economic data before Federal Reserve policymakers meet this month to determine whether to enact another small hike in a key interest rate. The mixed data on job gains and wages in the wake of recent financial market turmoil could lead central bank officials to hold off on a rate increase. “Continued months of strong job growth should eventually translate into durable accelerations in wage growth, but it hasn’t happened yet,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute think tank. “Given this, job creation and economic expansion should continue to be encouraged, not tamped down with another interest rate hike from the Federal Reserve at their next meeting.”
Los Angeles Times March 4, 2016 -
In 2001, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute tallied up the job losses from the North American Free Trade Agreement (better known as NAFTA) passed in 1993. Only California lost more jobs from NAFTA than Michigan, EPI estimated. Michigan shed more than 46,000 jobs, 40,000 of them in manufacturing alone—mostly in the automotive sector.
The Washington Post March 4, 2016 -
Mr. Johnson, who came to the T.V.A. in 2013 after working his way up the ranks to become chief executive of the investor-owned utility Progress Energy (now a part of Duke Energy), has generally won favorable reviews. That includes a 2015 report by the liberal Economic Policy Institute saying the agency appeared to be “on a more sustainable financial path” under his leadership.
The New York Times March 4, 2016 -
Economist Monique Morrissey of the progressive Economic Policy Institute on Thursday delivered some hard evidence of the problems facing the average American retiree with release of her updated Economic Inequality Chartbook: 32 interactive graphs that show how the shift from defined benefit pensions to 401(k)’s “has failed the majority of workers.” This shift, which relieves much of the burden and risk of saving for retirement from employers and places it on employees’ shoulders, has increased wealth inequality for older workers and left them on average with meager resources, even as their periods of retirement grow longer.
Los Angeles Times March 4, 2016 -
You have a better chance of retiring in dignity in the United States if you are white. African-American and Latino workers are far less likely than their white peers to have any savings in a 401(k) plan or other retirement account, according to “The State of American Retirement,” a report released by the Economic Policy Institute on Thursday. The report finds that among households headed by someone aged 32 to 61, just 41 percent of black families and 26 percent of Latino families had any retirement account savings at all, compared with 65 percent of non-Latino white families.
Monique Morrissey, the EPI retirement policy expert who authored the report, told reporters on Thursday that the data on African-American families is particularly disconcerting, because when pensions were more common, participation in employer-based retirement plans was a rare area of relative equality with whites.
The Huffington Post March 4, 2016 -
According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, “retirement disparities have grown with the shift from traditional pensions to retirement savings accounts.” People who are rich, white, college-educated, and married are far more likely to participate in a 401(k) plan than others. More than two-thirds of people in the top fifth of the income distribution are enrolled in 401(k)s, compared to just 4 percent of the poorest fifth; about half of white workers are enrolled, versus 32 percent of black workers and 20 percent of Hispanics. While there are also disparities in pension use, it’s far starker among defined-benefit plans.
Think Progress March 4, 2016 -
The privatization of retirement plans has helped make retirement inequality even greater than income inequality. Over the past couple decades, the shift from pensions to 401(k)s has driven retirement inequality to an all-time high, making it harder for the majority of Americans to retire comfortably—or at all, as new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows. “We used to have a fairly egalitarian retirement system. We don’t anymore,” EPI economist Monique Morrissey said during a press call Thursday. Morrissey says that’s largely due to the rise of 401(k)s as primary retirement plans, which she says was never supposed to happen. Initially, 401(k)s were created to be a supplement to pensions.
The American Prospect March 4, 2016