Media clips
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Josh Bivens, director of research and policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said economic conditions in recent years had few precedents, making it hard to predict the pace of the recovery. Traditional models assume the Fed can restore growth by cutting interest rates, but the Fed has held interest rates near zero since late 2008, and that has proved insufficient. That has left forecasters guessing, he said.
“You can definitely be sympathetic with them,” he said. “We’re just in uncharted territory.”
New York Times June 20, 2014 -
This is especially true for African-American and Latino workers who generally have fewer assets and rely almost exclusively on their paychecks to support themselves and their families. Therefore, anyone concerned about eliminating economic inequality—everything from disparities in income and wealth to gulfs in opportunity and mobility—must also be concerned about wage growth and eliminating racial wage gaps. Granted, broad-based wage growth is not a complete panacea for all racial disparities in economic outcomes. Wealth, the value of cash and assets that a household owns after accounting for debt, is lower for the vast majority of black and Latino workers even when compared with white households with similar incomes. But broad-based wage growth would help to narrow persistent wealth, opportunity, and mobility gaps.
A report released by the Economic Policy Institute this month documents the fact that since 1979, wages have grown slower than productivity for everyone except the top 5 percent of workers. That means a very large majority of workers have reaped fewer of the economic rewards they helped to produce over the last 34 years. Most of it has gone to those at the very top of the wage scale. As there has been an ever-shrinking share of the pie for the majority of workers to divide, African-Americans and Latinos have gotten only crumbs and racial wage gaps have remained stubbornly hard to close.
National Journal June 20, 2014 -
Members of Congress have a plan to get major corporations to bring profits they have stashed overseas back into the U.S.: offer them an 84 percent discount on the taxes they owe on that money.
The lawmakers’ stated goal is to generate enough revenue to preserve the federal Highway Trust Fund, which is expected to run out of money later this summer. But economists and analysts from multiple organizations in Washington are baffled by the idea that Congress wants to resurrect a program that failed miserably its first time around, and doesn’t promise anything better in the future.
“In politics, bad ideas never go away, even after being shown to be bad,” wrote Thomas L. Hungerford, of the Economic Policy Institute. “A repatriation tax holiday is a case in point.”
The Fiscal Times June 20, 2014 -
Yet the Golden State is also coming up with some of the most forward-thinking ideas. De León’s approach, called the California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program (CSC), was signed into law in 2012 by Governor Jerry Brown. It aims to combine the best of old-style defined-benefit plans (traditional pensions that guarantee workers a set level of yearly income in retirement) with the flexibility and mobility of a 401(k). CSC will cover workers in California who don’t currently have access to formal retirement savings via their work. “I’m a big fan,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute who recently testified before Congress on retirement security. “It’s probably the farthest along of all the retirement-reform ideas in terms of practical implementation.”
Time Magazine June 20, 2014 -
(also in Morningstar)
“One not surprising result is that employees are more satisfied in metro areas with very low unemployment,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “These cities have unemployment at least one percentage point below the national average.” And all of Glassdoor’s five most popular cities for employee satisfaction are also on the 10 highest ranking cities for social mobility, according to a separate survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, D.C.Market Watch June 17, 2014 -
According to Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute, this was the biggest discrepancy since 2007. Her explanation for this? African Americans don’t give up. Yes, African American employment has not recovered at the rate of White employment, but that’s not all.
The other factor to consider, Wilson wrote last month, is that unemployed African Americans are more resilient and less likely to give up their job searches.
Ebony June 17, 2014 -
A study conducted by Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute found that the discrepancy between Black and white unemployment is the highest it has been since 2007, and that Black resiliency is to blame.
Over the past year, without fail, African-American unemployment has exceeded white unemployment by at least 200 percent. In the past two months, the Black unemployment rate was 2.2 times greater than the overall rate.
Researchers say that part of the disparity is a result of African-Americans being “less likely to give up the search for a job than other unemployed workers.”
Explained simply, there are more unemployed Blacks who continue to seek work, stay in the labor force and are labeled as “unemployed.”
“Discouraged workers” aren’t calculated in the unemployment rate. These workers are “those persons not in the labor force who want and are available for work, and who have looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months, but were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.”
BET June 17, 2014 -
The average pay for a Starbucks barista is about $8.80 an hour, according to employment site Glassdoor. Store managers earn about $45,000 a year, on average.
Many U.S. workers are struggling to stay ahead, with six out of 10 respondents in a recent CNNMoney poll saying they no longer believe the American dream is achievable. For most Americans, wages either fell or flatlined from 2000 to 2013, according to a recent study from the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
About half of college students fail to finish their degrees because of debt, lack of support or challenges with balancing life and work, Starbucks said in a statement.
Schultz said he had encountered cynicism since announcing the plan, including about the lack of a requirement that employees remain with the company after they graduate.
CBS Moneywatch June 17, 2014 -
That means the pay gap between employees and their bosses continues to widen, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s latest report released Thursday.
Average CEO compensation came in at $15.2 million in 2013, according to the left-leaning think tank. That includes salary, bonus, restricted stock grants, options exercised and long-term incentive payouts for chiefs at the top 350 U.S. firms by sales.
Private-sector, non-supervisory workers, meanwhile, earned an average of $52,100.
CNNMoney June 13, 2014 -
Last month, the unemployment rate for white Americans was 5.4 percent. For black Americans, it was more than twice that, at 11.5. Why?
Writing in The Guardian, Jana Kasperkevic points to a compelling theory advanced by Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute. Black unemployment is high, Wilson suggests, not only because black joblessness is high (for reasons well documented in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent Atlantic cover story), but because black people are more resilient when it comes to sticking to their job search.
The key to understanding Wilson’s point is knowing that unemployment doesn’t measure the number of people who are, well, “unemployed” in a conventional sense of the word—without a job. What the unemployment rate measures is how many people are actively looking for work. If someone gives up on his or her search, he or she is no longer counted as unemployed. In May, Kasperkevic writes, “there were over seven million Americans who want a job but were not counted as part of the labor force.”
The Atlantic June 13, 2014