Josh Bivens, with the Economic Policy Institute, said he’s glad politicians are talking about the problems in our economy. He believes the economy still hasn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession and pointed out that, even before the recession, hourly wage growth was stagnant. “Now, if you ask me, will my son be better off than me 30 years from now, the economy is going to be a lot richer,” he said, “but yet we do such a bad job equitably delivering the fruits of that growth that I’m not sure he’ll be better off,” he said. “If he ends up in the bottom quarter of the income distribution, he may well not be.” Bivens said the U.S. is a rich nation with lots of potential; it’s good for Buffett to remind us of that, but the key is to generate growth where everyone benefits.
Marketplace
March 1, 2016
Trump says his trade plans and tax cuts will “make America great again,” triggering growth as fast as 6 percent. Most analysts question that projection, but they agree that the economy has underperformed since 2009. That’s captured in the “output gap,” a term economists use to describe the difference between actual and potential GDP. At current rates of growth, it probably won’t be closed before 2026, estimates Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Bloomberg
March 1, 2016
Key to the success of these right-wing politics—brought to us by the corporate establishment, not the Tea Party—has been four decades of outrageous union-busting, that begin in the 1970s, was given credibility by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and has accelerated ever since. More than any other factor — as reports by the Economic Policy Institute and others have documented—this has led to three decades of declining wages and living standards for the majority of Americans.
Salon
March 1, 2016
First, raise wages. No one who works full-time should live in poverty — and that starts with raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It also means passing equal-pay laws. The gender pay gap can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional wages over a lifetime of work for women doing the same jobs as their male colleagues. And finally, it means protecting workers’ right to organize. And finally, it means protecting workers’ right to organize. Unions help workers secure higher wages for their members, by as much as 20 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, but they also increase wages for all workers, union or not.
The Boston Globe
February 29, 2016
Advocates for the poor dispute that assertion. After the reductions in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, the percentage of adults ages 25 to 54 with jobs in those states grew more slowly than the national average, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based liberal think tank.
The Associated Press
February 29, 2016
Yet, as was documented in testimony by immigration experts Ron Hira of Howard University and Hal Salzman of Rutgers, most of the H-1B visas aren’t being used to hire people with specialized skills. “The vast majority of H-1Bs who are coming in have no more than ordinary IT skills,” Hira testified.
Los Angeles Times
February 29, 2016
Finally, companies can cut profit margins or top-level salaries to meet higher wage mandates. This last mechanism is one reason such policies get so much pushback from business, and it is particularly germane in an economy where income inequality stands at historically high levels. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, the real earnings of low-wage workers in Alabama are down 6 percent compared with 1979, while those of the state’s highest-paid workers are up 17 percent.
The Washington Post
February 29, 2016
Cruz’s wealth, with $1.2 million in combined income with his wife in 2014, placed them well above the $423,000 threshold of the top 1 percent of earners in Texas, according to a 2015 Economic Policy Institute report.
Reuters
February 29, 2016
Clinton also commended Wall Street for helping to create “the nation’s wealth,” when, in reality, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the “economic cycle that began in 2000 and ended late [2007] was one of the weakest on record for working families, despite strong overall economic growth.”
Salon
February 29, 2016
Here too we’ve had years of warning: Real wages for most U.S. workers have been relatively stagnant since the 1970s, while those for the top 1 percent have increased 156 percent, and those for the top 0.1 percent have increased 362 percent, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
February 29, 2016