Perhaps the most data-driven work on the program is Ms. Harting’s, drawn from a graph created by the Economic Policy Institute, using data generated by Messrs. Pinketty and Saez. The data, which come from the period 1979 to 2007, show income growth for the bottom 90% staying relatively stagnant, sometimes even dropping into negative territory, before hitting 5% in the final year. The line representing the top 1% of households, meanwhile, ends up 224%.
Wall Street Journal
October 16, 2015
Twenty-six states have increased their minimum wage since January 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
CNN Money
October 16, 2015
This is the main statistic used to argue that the middle class is struggling mightily. If you take inflation into account, the typical family’s income is lower today than it was in 1995,according to analysis of census data by the Economic Policy Institute…
Fortune
October 16, 2015
Still, there’s little evidence that 401(k)s will be as significant a source of income for retirees as pensions were back in the day, said Monique Morrisey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute who did the analysis. “There’s very little money in these things [401(k)s],” she told HuffPost. “Yes, they’re gonna increase, but not enough.”
The Huffington Post
October 16, 2015
Sadly, these conditions are hardly unique in the Apple supply chain. As the political economist Isaac Shapiro explained on the Economic Policy Institute website, Apple’s 2014 report acknowledged a compliance rate regarding its own standards of only 70 percent—down from 77 a year earlier. Its enforcement of the hours these workers put in is also down from the previous year. They are exploited this way despite the fact that Apple’s labor costs amount to a tiny fraction of its profits, especially given the fantastically generous compensation packages its top executives enjoy. Shapiro pointed out that in 2011 and 2012, the top nine members of Apple’s executive team received compensation packages equal to that of fully 90,000 Chinese factory workers.
The Nation
October 16, 2015
Still, being on track to get hit and actually paying the tax are different things, says Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute. “Health insurance providers are going to provide plans that are cheaper,” she says. “And, all else equal, cheaper plans are thinner plans — which means that consumers are going to have to pay more out-of-pocket.”
NPR
October 15, 2015
The second argument made for raising the minimum wage is that it hasn’t kept up with the growth in productivity. According to the Economic Policy Institute, if the minimum wage had kept up with productivity it would be $18.67 an hour. The problem with this metric is that a wage is not based on the productivity of the entire economy, but rather the productivity of the individual, the firm, and the industry itself. For a more accurate measure we must look at the productivity of the specific industries that employ minimum wage workers.
The Hill
October 15, 2015
The restaurant industry, for instance, employs about 10 million people in the U.S. and is growing. However, the jobs are mostly low-wage, with very few benefits. Waitresses make an average of $10.15 per hour, a figure that already includes tips, and one in six restaurant workers lives below the poverty line, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Huffington Post
October 15, 2015
Mr. Sanders’s campaign has said previously that he is using research from the Economic Policy Institute that uses a different, broader definition of unemployment that includes people with a part-time job who want full-time work and people who are not actively looking for a job because they think there are few opportunities. The E.P.I. data also uses a slightly different age bracket to calculate “youth unemployment” — from age 17 to 20 — and the data is limited to high school graduates.
The New York Times
October 14, 2015
Sanders’s figures come from a report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. (Our friends at PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have fact-checked this claim, and Sanders’s staff has pointed to this report.) The report shows that minority youths are less likely to have a job than white youths, and that black youths traditionally have had high unemployment rates.
Sanders’s statistics refer to high school graduates between 17 and 20 years old and not enrolled in additional schooling. This report is different from the official unemployment rate as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS does not specifically break out data for the 17- to 20-year-old age range. Instead, this report looks at employment status for high school graduates who are unemployed, working part-time and “marginally attached to the labor force” (meaning, “those who want a job and have looked for work in the last year but have given up actively seeking work in the last four weeks”).
The Washington Post
October 14, 2015