The golden years aren’t turning out to be that golden for many current seniors and retirees, according to two reports that shed light on which older Americans are most likely to be economically vulnerable.
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds that black, Hispanic or female seniors, or people 80 and older are more likely to face economic woes than other older Americans.
“Public programs like Social Security and Medicare do a fairly decent job of keeping people out of absolute deprivation – absolute poverty – but there’s still a huge swath of the elderly that are living pretty close to the line,” said David Cooper, an economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, and co-author of the report.
NBC News
June 13, 2013
There’s nothing new or surprising about this chart from the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Sheirholz. It’s just a reminder that the U.S. labor market is still in very bad shape — despite recent improvements:
The Washington Post
June 13, 2013
The Department of Labor released its latest report on job openings yesterday, and while not much changed from last month, it was a reminder that the labor market is still pretty much murder. With more than 11.7 million unemployed Americans still out there, the government estimates that there are 3.8 million jobs to be had — a ratio of 3.1-to-1, as shown on this graph from the Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic
June 13, 2013
There’s a long way to go before the churn in the labor market looks normal. “The most striking aspect of the JOLTS data continues to be the low level of both hires and separations: Turnover in the labor market remains down sharply relative to before the crisis,” wrote Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in a note to clients before Tuesday’s data release. Voluntary quits are still 22 percent below their 2007 level, according to Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute.
The Fiscal Times
June 13, 2013
Problems are also increasingly apparent on the demand side: high unemployment and underemployment rates among college graduates.
The New York Times
June 13, 2013
“No economic adviser is going to get the House GOP to accept a more sensible budget approach or help us generate jobs,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “Hopefully, they’ll abandon the grand bargain approach.”
AP
June 13, 2013
It’s not unusual to see low-wage job growth when unemployment is high, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, which gets some of its funding from labor unions.
“Low-quality jobs are always available but go unfilled when there are other jobs,” Shierholz said. “At a time like this, workers have to settle for anything they can get.”
Bloomberg Businesweek
June 10, 2013
Economists said the lukewarm report probably did little to affect when the Federal Reserve might begin to taper its purchases of bonds, which it’s buying to hold down long-term interest rates.
The Economic Policy Institute, which advocates stronger efforts to increase employment, said in a statement that “at this pace, it will take more than six years to get back to the pre-recession unemployment rate.”
Bloomberg Businesweek
June 10, 2013
“The unemployment rate is really not that helpful right now in understanding trends in job opportunities because we’ve had so many dropouts,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group.
CNNMoney
June 10, 2013
Some economists estimate that at least 2 million jobs may be missing because of the austerity measures that the government sector has undertaken since the recession ended, including the biggest federal-government spending squeeze since the end of the Vietnam War. And those jobs may not be coming back any time soon. At the current pace of job growth, the economy may not be back to full employment until 2021, estimates the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
The Huffington Post
June 10, 2013