These twin trends — rising inequality and wage stagnation — pre-date the recession. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think-tank, estimates that median wages have grown only six percent since 1979 after accounting for inflation.
The Washington Post
September 17, 2015
Valerie Wilson interview.
NPR
September 17, 2015
The numbers may explain some of the political furor going on in the country, said Lawrence Mishel, president and CEO of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “Anyone wondering why people in this country are feeling so ornery need look no further than this report,” Mishel said. “Wages have been broadly stagnant for a dozen years and median household income peaked in 1999.”
The Associated Press
September 17, 2015
Plus, that goal the Federal Reserve has for inflation is kind of arbitrary, says Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s just sort of a fudge,” he says. “It’s basically, we want a measure of quite low inflation, we’ll just say 2 percent.”
Marketplace
September 17, 2015
Richard Rothstein interview.
Diane Rehm Show
September 17, 2015
The new estimates will bolster calls from low-income labor activists to increase federal, state and local minimum wages. “If anybody was ever wondering why the people of this country are feeling so ornery and expressing that in their political choices, you should look no further than this report. There was incredible income stagnation across the entire income spectrum,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank.
McClatchy
September 17, 2015
Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute told NPR’s Pam Fessler that these numbers were not encouraging, especially considering 2014 was a year with strong jobs growth.” Unfortunately that did not translate into wage growth, income growth or significantly reduced poverty rates,” she said.
NPR
September 17, 2015
Ahead of the Census’ data release, experts had expected to see lower poverty rates and higher median income thanks to a stronger job market, but that failed to bear out. “If anyone was wondering why the people in this country were feeling so ornery, you should look no further than this report,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, said on a conference call to discuss the data. “There was incredible income stagnation across the spectrum.”
CBS Moneywatch
September 17, 2015
The case against the Federal Reserve raising short-term interest rates at the end of the Federal Open Market Committee meetings Thursday is so clearly strong that is should carry the day. The point of raising rates is to rein in an overheating economy that is threatening to push inflation outside the Fed’s comfort zone. But inflation has been running below the Fed’s target for years–and its recent moves have been down, not up. This subdued price inflation is not a puzzle; it’s the outcome of a labor market that remains so slack that nominal wage growth is running about half as fast as a healthy recovery would be churning out. And this slack is pretty easy to see so long as one is willing to look past the (welcome) progress in reducing the headline unemployment rate. The employment-to-population ratio of prime-age adults (25 to 54 years old) has recovered less than half of its decline during the Great Recession. Worse, progress in boosting this measure has stalled for all of 2015.
Wall Street Journal
September 17, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute has taken economist Emmanuel Saez’s research on U.S. income tax returns and produced an account of just how America-altering that transfer of income has been. Between 1935 and 1980—that is, between the year in which both Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act were enacted and the year Ronald Reagan was elected as president—of all the income growth (excluding government benefits and transfer payments) that Americans reported on their taxes, fully 70 percent was income accrued by the bottom 90 percent of American households.
The American Prospect
September 16, 2015
