“We’ve seen a lot of states taking action in light of federal inaction,” said David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which notes 26 states and the District of Columbia have set a higher minimum wage than the federal level… About 28 million American workers, or a quarter of the workforce, currently make less than $12 an hour, estimates Cooper at the EPI. Another 7 million would indirectly benefit by increased pay as employers adjust their wages accordingly, he added….”At its high point, in 1968, the minimum wage was equal to about $9.65 in today’s dollars. If you adjust for inflation, that means at $7.25, it’s worth about 25 percent less than it was a generation ago,” said the EPI’s Cooper. “It’s lost 10 percent of its value since it was last raised.”
CBS Moneywatch
July 22, 2016
Lawrence Mischel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, calculated that the wage hike, which will go into effect in 2017, amounts to a 3.2% annual increase. “That’s good, but it’s not other-worldly. The fact is those wages are not all that high. For a leading sector, they should pay more,” Mischel said.
The Guardian
July 22, 2016
Robert Scott, an economist whose research on trade policy has been favorably cited by Donald Trump’s campaign, rebuked the Republican presidential nominee on Thursday by criticizing his plan to negotiate trade deals and combat currency manipulation by imposing tariffs on Chinese imports. Trump’s campaign has cited research by Scott, a senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, saying as recently as last month in a campaign email that “according to the Economic Policy Institute, enforcing restrictions on currency manipulation as Trump has proposed could create up to 5.8 million jobs in just three years,” followed by a link to a 2014 report authored by Scott
Morning Consult
July 22, 2016
All that said, Robert E. Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, has argued that the United States could penalize countries that manipulate their currencies more severely than it does, which would improve U.S. manufacturers’ competitive advantage on the global stage and is more important that restructuring trade deals. (The liberal think tank, incidentally, was cited by Mr. Trump in a recent speech; its leader later called Mr. Trump’s approach to trade policy a “scam.”)
The New York Times
July 22, 2016
Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, has heard that claim a lot since she published research showing that women earn $4 an hour less than men right out of college. Gould and EPI researcher Jessica Schieder published a paper on Wednesday explaining why the pay gap has little to do with real choice. “People were not understanding the full picture,” Gould told The Huffington Post.
The Huffington Post
July 21, 2016
Nearly half of American families have no retirement savings at all, the Economic Policy Institute reported in March.
Fiscal Times
July 21, 2016
Manufacturing has crossed the Rio Grande, as CNN Money writer Patrick Gillespie put it on March 31. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the U.S. lost over 682,000 jobs to Mexico between 1997 and 2013 because of NAFTA.
Forbes
July 20, 2016
Hunger remains persistent because millions of Americans are still struggling financially as a result of the crash. Post-recession wage growth, though real, has been wildly unequal. A recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that “between 2000 and 2015, wages for the bottom 60 percent of male workers were flat or declined” and that wage gains have been largely concentrated among high earners.
The Atlantic
July 20, 2016
Critics may point to the jobs women choose. But a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute complicates that idea, tracing all the different forces pushing women toward lower-paying jobs from a young age through their entire careers. In fact, only about a third of the pay gap can be attributed to chosen profession, the EPI writes. If men and women were paid equally within the jobs they already hold — even if women still held a disproportionate amount of lower-paying jobs — more than two-thirds of the gender gap would be closed. That’s controlling for education and other factors. Women are more highly educated in general, the paper’s authors write, but they “cannot educate themselves out of the gender wage gap.”
Marketplace
July 20, 2016
“Opaque global monetary policies combined with unfocused, poorly negotiated international trade agreements are undermining the entire project of globalization as proponents of these policies face a growing backlash among voters,” he writes. As Trump did in his speech in Pennsylvania, Barrack name-checks the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that’s been critical of trade agreements.
Bloomberg
July 19, 2016