Media clips
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“The classes were smaller and more personal, and I’ll be able to pursue all three of my interests,” Favia says. “For me, it’s a better place.”
However, Favia says she does think the new rating system would be helpful for other students in regards to expected loan debt and future employment prospects.
With college graduates facing an unemployment rate of 8.5%, according to the Economic Policy Institute, some entering college students welcome the White House’s pragmatic approach to providing information about colleges.
USA Today June 5, 2014 -
The disconnect between growth and poverty reduction is a key finding of a sweeping new study of wages from the Economic Policy Institute. The liberal-leaning group’s policy prescriptions are open to debate, but this piece of data the researchers find is hard to dispute: From 1959 to 1973, a more robust United States economy and fewer people living below the poverty line went hand-in-hand. That relationship broke apart in the mid-1970s. If the old relationship between growth and poverty had held up, the E.P.I. researchers find, the poverty rate in the United States would have fallen to zero by 1986 and stayed there ever since.
New York Times June 5, 2014 -
From the 1950s until some time in the 1970s or 1980s, the U.S. economy was the proverbial rising tide lifting all boats. Living standards were rising for the broad middle class. Economic growth was driving down the poverty rate. Then something shifted.
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute is launching a new initiative to study what drove that shift – and what can be done to reverse it – that places a large part of the blame on U.S. labor market policies. The initiative is already drawing attention from the administration of President Barack Obama, whose labor secretary, Tom Perez, will give a keynote speech at the launch event for the effort Wednesday morning.
The lengthy EPI analysis seeks to lay out the case for what went wrong and then to chart a policy path forward. But it also takes a few detours into a more utopian past, examining what the world would have looked like if these inequality trends had not arisen.
Wall Street Journal June 5, 2014 -
By law, schools aren’t segregated. In reality, many are. “Education policy is a housing policy,” says Economic Policy Institute Research Associate Richard Rothstein in a new paper published to commemorate the 60thanniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling Brown v. Board of Education.
“Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission,” Rothstein writes. Today, black students generally attend schools where only 29 percent of their fellow students are white, down from 36 percent in 1980. (He also notes that in 1954, the percentage was zero in Southern states. So something has changed.)
Rothstein goes on to say that without desegregating neighborhoods, we can’t desegregate schools. As a liberal thinker, one of Rothstein’s preferred solutions is to aggressively enforce a new rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to require municipalities, white suburbs included, to integrate. Conservatives and libertarians blanch at such an idea, but there may be other ways to address a problem that neither Republicans nor Democrats can deny. The libertarian Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey suggests greatly expanding school choice, an idea supported by the vast majority of African Americans.
National Journal May 23, 2014 -
In 2010, the Republicans won control of the executive and legislative branches in 11 states (there are now more than 20 such states). Inspired by business groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, they proceeded to rewrite the rules of work, passing legislation designed to enhance the position of employers at the expense of employees.
The University of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer, who wrote an eye-opening report on this topic last October for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, looked at dozens of bills affecting workers. The legislation involved unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, child labor, collective bargaining, sick days, even meal breaks. Despite frequent Republican claims to be defending local customs and individual liberty, Mr. Lafer found a “cookie-cutter” pattern to their legislation. Not only did it consistently favor employers over workers, it also tilted toward big government over local government. And it often abridged the economic rights of individuals.
The New York Times May 23, 2014 -
Some are actually hurting kids. In a new report out last week, Gordon Lafer, a political economist at the University of Oregon, reviewed the growing low-budget-charter sector in Milwaukee, which has the oldest charter system in the country, and found startling results with national implications. Cost-cutting charters such as the Rocketship chain offer a narrow curriculum focused on little more than reading and math test prep, inexperienced teachers with high turnover, and “blended learning” products designed to enrich charter school board members’ investment portfolios. Lafer “questions why an educational model deemed substandard for more privileged suburban children is being so vigorously promoted—perhaps even forced—on poor children…” [Economic Policy Institute, 4-24-14] Others have pointed out significant problems with zero-tolerance, strict discipline charters made famous by the “no excuses” KIPP chain of schools. [EdWeek, 2-20-13]
The Washington Post May 23, 2014 -
A report last year by the Economic Policy Institute found that the retirement system largely benefits higher income workers the most because they can actually contribute enough to make 401(k) plans work for retirement.
“Retirement-income inequality has grown in part because most 401(k) participants are required to contribute to these plans in order to participate, whereas workers are automatically enrolled in defined-benefit pensions and, in the private sector, are not required to contribute to these plans,” the liberal-leaning think-tank found. “Thus, higher-income workers are much more likely to participate in defined-contribution plans. In addition, higher-income workers have more disposable income and a higher investment-risk tolerance, receive larger tax breaks, and are more likely to work for employers that provide generous matches.”
CBS Moneywatch May 23, 2014 -
Talk of progress on inequality “sounds a bit hollow” right now, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, which conducts research on the economic condition of low- and middle-income families. She said she’d like to wait for further evidence confirming gains for lower-income workers.
Bloomberg May 23, 2014 -
The legislation, SB 1372, has passed one Senate committee by a 5-2 vote and will come before the Appropriations Committee this week. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first bill in the nation that seeks to diminish economic inequality through corporate tax reform. Odds are it won’t be the last.
The gap between the compensation packages of CEOs and their employees’ pay is a relatively new phenomenon. In 1965, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs made 20 times what their median employee made. By 2012, the ratio had risen to 273 to 1.
That could mean that today’s CEOs are 14 times better than their mid-20th century predecessors, or that today’s workers are 14 times worse.
Los Angeles Times May 23, 2014 -
They are your neighbors, your fellow congregants, some of the men and women crammed beside you on the subway or bus. Day in and day out, they are coping with upended lives, struggling to squeeze back into a work force that has squeezed them out.
Nationally, more than three million unemployed people have been searching for work for longer than six months, nearly three times more than there were in 2007, before the Great Recession began, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group based in Washington.
The numbers tell part of the story. The rest often remains unspoken: the emotional and financial burdens of joblessness; the mounting sense of self-doubt, the awkward silences among friends who grasp for words of comfort and the job offers that vaporize after seeming so tantalizingly within reach.
The New York Times May 23, 2014