Imports from China by Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and biggest importer, eliminated or displaced over 400,000 jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research group that has long targeted Walmart’s policies. The jobs, mostly in manufacturing, represent about 13 percent of the 3.2 million jobs displaced over those same years that the study attributes to the United States’ goods trade deficit with China. Walmart’s Chinese imports amounted to at least $49 billion in 2013, according to the study, which was based on trade and labor data. Over all, the United States’ trade deficit with China hit $324 billion that year. “Walmart is one of the major forces pulling imports into the United States,” said Robert E. Scott, an economist at the institute and the study’s author. “And the jobs we’re losing are good-paying manufacturing jobs, which pay higher wages and provide better benefits.”
Walmart has long been the subject of criticism from groups like the Economic Policy Institute over its role in flooding the United States with cheap imports. Under pressure, Walmart in 2013 announced that it would increase its sourcing of American-made products by $50 billion over the next 10 years.
The New York Times
December 9, 2015
The world’s largest retailer likely accounted for 15.3 percent of the growth in the U.S. goods trade deficit with China in the same period, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) said in a report on Wednesday. United States goods trade deficit with China increased almost fourfold to $324.2 billion in the 12 years till 2013, with Wal-Mart accounting for $48.1 billion of the total, the EPI said. “Wal-Mart has aided China’s abuse of labor rights and its violations of internationally recognized norms of fair trade by providing a vast and ever-expanding conduit for the distribution of artificially cheap and subsidized Chinese exports to the United States,” the EPI said.
Reuters
December 9, 2015
Government benefits, specifically medical benefits, do more than just help people pay their bills, according to Josh Bivens, the research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The government, by providing a benefit like Medicare, serves as a “countervailing power in the provider market,” Bivens says, which can help keep costs down (at least a little bit) across the health care market. There’s also a concern about how to identify those who need the most help in the absence of government benefits, also known as transfers. “There are a lot of problems with transfers, but they are pretty well-targeted,” Bivens said. That is, the majority of them go to the poor. With a very flat UBI scheme, there is very little targeting, which means people with good jobs may get more than they need, while the unemployed, elderly, disabled and single parents could end up with too little.
The Huffington Post
December 9, 2015
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s import of goods from China displaced over 400,000 jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a U.S.-based nonprofit think tank. According to the study, cited by the New York Times, Wal-Mart’s Chinese imports amounted to at least $49 billion in 2013.
International Business Times
December 9, 2015
The tax is a new idea that could add even more disincentive to companies contemplating an inversion, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute. “The Obama administration proposals are good on tamping down on inversions. I think the exit tax is an extra little benefit that will reduce the incentive even further,” he said. “I tend to be pretty skeptical of tax-based solutions to lots of problems, but these are actually useful tax-based solutions.”
Think Progress
December 9, 2015
Saying affirmative action is constitutional because diversity is good, wrote the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein in a piece about the Fisher case on SCOTUS blog, “dodges the nation’s racial legacy and avoids our constitutional and moral obligation to remedy the effects of centuries of slavery and legally sanctioned segregation. Without acknowledging we were doing so, we have engaged in a legal sleight of hand, substituting enriching the educational experience for remedying past injustice in designing affirmative action policy.”
MSNBC
December 9, 2015
Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., told 24/7 Wall Street that it’s “hard to find a state where outcomes for African-Americans are very good.” Not one state has better socioeconomic outcomes for blacks than for whites, according to the report.
International Business Times
December 9, 2015
The seeds were first sown by the Great Recession, when millions lost their jobs and many ended up in work paying closer to the minimum wage. “We had a lot of folks having to take jobs that were much lower paying than any they had previously had, a lot of jobs in retail and the service sector, because those were the first ones to come back coming out of the recession,” said David Cooper, economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. Workers who used to be middle class wound up in these low paying jobs and “recognized that pay in these jobs was just unlivablely low.”
Think Progress
December 9, 2015
Already, those who are plugged into this debate have separated into camps. There are those, found mostly among the labor union-oriented left, who believe that most of these workers are being misclassified as independent contractors and ought to receive all the benefits and protections of employeehood — workers compensation, tax withholding, contributions to social security, unemployment insurance, overtime, minimum wage, etc. To even talk about creating a new category for the on-demand economy is at best a distraction from the real problems most workers face.
The Washington Post
December 9, 2015
Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute said the most problematic group is prime-age workers. “They’re 25 to 54 years old — so you get rid of any demographic shifts that are happening with baby boomers retiring, or young people sheltering in school,” Gould said. “There are still 1.17 million missing (prime-age) workers who have left the labor force, who have stopped actively looking or haven’t started actively looking.”
Marketplace
December 9, 2015