An estimated 66,000 H-2B visas are distributed on an annual basis. But employers often us the H-2 visa programs to take advantage of legal guest workers. An Economic Policy Institute study found that temporary legal guest workers are as likely to be subjected to low wages as undocumented workers.
Think Progress
December 21, 2015
Josh Bivens, a Fed watcher at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, and a critic of Wednesday’s rate increase, is even more pessimistic. He estimates that if the Fed raises the federal funds rate at the pace that Fed officials believe will be necessary, it will slow economic growth in a meaningful way by the time of the November election. “An increase of 0 to 1.4 percent would have a noticeable effect on the economy,” Bivens said.
The Huffington Post
December 18, 2015
Should only wealthy people be able to have kids in America? According to a new report, childcare center fees for two children is higher than median rent payments in every single state in the United States. Another recent report shows that childcare costs more than in-state college tuition in most states.
The New Republic
December 18, 2015
There is an old adage that is typically passed down by elder black relatives to young children: You have to be twice as good as white people. But according to this graph from the Economic Policy Institute, the adage should be updated: You have to be twice as good as white people to get the same education, but you’ll still be twice as unemployed. The graph shows the racial unemployment gap grows exponentially smaller with more education, but the unemployment rate for black Americans who have graduated with at least one degree is still nearly double that of similarly educated white folks.
The New Republic
December 18, 2015
Indeed, some counterargue that Fed policies have stimulated the economy, resulting in job creation, falling unemployment, and recovering middle-class housing values. “To the extent that the Fed pushed the economy closer to full employment, it reduced inequality,” Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, argued in a June analysis.
Christian Science Monitor
December 17, 2015
Josh Bivens, who studies Federal Reserve policy for the progressive Economic Policy Institute, called an interest rate hike a “mistake” in remarks at a Dec. 1 congressional briefing for that very reason. Bivens and other, mostly liberal, economists who believe it is too soon for an interest rate hike argue that lackluster inflation is actually a sign that the Fed’s other area of concern, the job market, is not growing fast enough. “I am against the hike, because to me you hike interest rates when you are trying to cool down an economy that is overheating and threatening to generate wage and price inflation,” Bivens said in an interview this week. “There is just no evidence of that in the data. In fact, both wages and prices are growing much more slowly than they should be if the economy is healthy.”
The Huffington Post
December 17, 2015
The financial sector also benefits from hard-on-inflation policies, since high inflation erodes the value of their investments. “Unexpected increases in inflation are wealth transfers from creditors to debtors,” explains Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “The finance sector really, really dislikes unexpected inflation.”
Mother Jones
December 17, 2015
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