Blow asked Sanders about his campaign to win over black voters in an interview. Sanders said (as he’s said before) that the media is to blame. He argued that black voters would listen if reporters would only cover the substance of the senator’s speeches on the campaign trail. He’s said again and again that African Americans are at a disadvantage in the U.S. economy. “I have talked in 20 different speeches that 51 percent of young African-American kids are unemployed and underemployed,” he argued, citing research by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “I don’t know that it’s made the newspapers yet.”
The Washington Post
September 15, 2015
Though research from the Economic Policy Institute this year showed that job prospects are getting better for the 2015 college grads than their predecessors, the new federal data tool makes it clear that the benefits of college education are not equal across schools.
Boston.com
September 15, 2015
Southern California Public Radio
September 15, 2015
The bigger issue for the economy is what will happen over the long term. It’s not just about the first rate hike, but about whether interest rates continue going up, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. If the Fed continues to raise rates, that’s likely to slow the steady job growth the economy has been seeing in the last couple of years. Workers are just now starting to gain a little bit of power in the economy, Bivens said. If the Fed leaves interest rates low, unemployment is likely to continue to fall, giving workers more leverage with their employers, who will find fewer and fewer qualified applicants to replace them with. In that case, employers would be likely to do things like raise wages to keep or attract talented workers. “The real question at hand is, do we follow the example of the 1990s and let the unemployment rate get really low?” said Bivens. “If [the Fed] experiments, we could see some real wage gains for American workers.” But if interest rates rise, the trend could reverse. “The bigger danger,” said Bivens, will be if “this quarter-point increase signals that the Fed thinks that the economy shouldn’t generate lower unemployment.”
The Huffington Post
September 15, 2015
The pay of chief executives has also been attacked by Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. According to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, CEOs’ pay in 2013 was nearly 300 times the pay of the average worker.
Reuters
September 14, 2015
“It seems weird you have to lobby an institution like the Fed,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, one of the groups behind Fed Up. “But the Fed is a real-world institution and they have a lot of cross-pressure coming from loud, influential voices who want a rate increase. To my mind the arguments coming from those loud, influential voices are flawed and not based on a good reading of the data. But if we stay silent they could well carry some influence.”
Politico
September 14, 2015
“Taken as a whole, these numbers demonstrate that the main problem in the labor market is a broad-based lack of demand for workers – not available workers lacking the skills needed for the sectors with job openings,” Elise Gould, a senior economist and director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a research note Wednesday. She said the data “is further evidence that the economy has ways to go before it can be considered healthy.”
U.S. News & World Report
September 14, 2015
“We are almost at the sweet spot of unemployment for business, but that is not how I think we should make policy,” said Josh Bivens, a monetary policy expert at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “We should make it for the vast majority of American households that make a living on wages.”
Bivens argues that the Fed should be willing to tolerate inflation slightly higher than the target of 2 percent in order to drive up demand for labor enough to spur an increase in wages. But even so, he doesn’t think inflation will reach that level without 3.5 percent wage growth. In late August, Bivens and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz joined dozens of grassroots activists from the “Fed Up” campaign at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium to protest a potential interest rate hike.
The Huffington Post
September 14, 2015
According to a May 2015 Economic Policy Institute report, guest workers, like those sponsored through the H-2A or H-2B visa programs designated for agriculture and other similarly skilled programs, earn “about 11 percent less than” green-card holders and “their wages do not significantly differ from unauthorized workers’ wages.” Essentially, guest workers are just as likely to be subjected to low wages as undocumented immigrants. That’s in part because H-2 visa holders are tied to their employers to keep their visas valid, so they can’t change employers or jobs while working in the United States.
Think Progress
September 14, 2015
Mr. Cuomo’s proposal “is an increase outside the bounds of what has been studied,” said David Cooper an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. “It is hard for me to really say what the effects would be.” Mr. Cooper said that even assuming the full $15 an hour increase weren’t phased in until 2021, it would raise the wages of more than 3.1 million employees across the state across the state.
Wall Street Journal
September 11, 2015