The Huffington Post
January 19, 2016
The wages of middle-wage workers were either flat or in decline from the 1980s through the 2000s (except for a bump in the late ’90s), and wages for low-wage workers fell 5 percent from 1979 to 2013, according to an analysis from the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Christian Science Monitor
January 19, 2016
Wage hikes that became law prior to the present-day Fight for $15 era were more incremental and a matter of legislative “horse trading,” says David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. But because the value of the federal minimum wage has eroded so much—it’s been $7.25 since 2009— recent efforts to increase minimum wages at the local, state, and federal levels have focused more on what a worker needs to earn to live comfortably in a certain geographic area. That—along with the attention given to the United States’ vast income inequality—has made the cost of living a more prominent talking point in legislative negotiations and among worker advocates, Cooper says.
Fortune
January 19, 2016
Since 2009, salaries for CEOs at a number of U.S. firms have increased by 54.3 percent while ordinary wages have plateaued, according to the report. CEOs earn more than 10 times the amount they did 30 years ago, according to a report released last June from the Economic Policy Institute.
Newsweek
January 19, 2016
But one can’t help but wonder, if the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s pilot program has a hard time getting started in the city doing that much to end segregation, how will it work nationally? “Baltimore is actually trying to do something about segregation, which is more than a lot of places,” Richard Rothstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute who has written extensively about segregation told VICE. “But there’s still resistance. There’s always resistance.”
Vice News
January 19, 2016
Black unemployment in South Carolina is 11.8 percent, compared to 4.6 percent among whites, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And while 2012 Census figures show the per capita income for whites in Charleston was $37,193, it was $15,168 for blacks.
MSNBC
January 19, 2016
It means China sold $342.6 billion more worth of goods and services to America than America sold to China. That, in turn, means demand generated by Americans isn’t producing jobs in America, but in China instead: Back in 2013, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimated that we’ve lost 2.8 million jobs to China since 2001, mainly in manufacturing. This imbalance falls especially hard on the working class, since the jobs that are lost are overwhelmingly held by lower-income Americans. Where Trump goes awry is in recommending tariffs as a solution. As Robert Scott, EPI’s expert on the economics of international trade, explained to me, the basic problem is currency manipulation.
The Week
January 19, 2016
But for most of the economics profession, widening inequality of earnings has been primarily a reflection of widening differentials in worker skills in the face of changes in technology that require more advanced workers. Therefore, the logical cure is better education and training. Lawrence Mishel and colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute have been challenging this account for years. But only lately has the mainstream conceded that the EPI view is substantially right.
American Prospect
January 15, 2016
Same goes for inequality: Connecticut is the most unequal state as measured by the Economic Policy Institute’s top-to-bottom ratio, which divides the average income of the top 1 percent of taxpayers by the average income of the other 99 percent, but New York is almost tied with it, and Massachusetts comes in fourth place.
Bloomberg
January 15, 2016
Compensation of chief executive officers at top U.S. firms grew by nearly 1,000 percent since 1978, while a typical worker’s pay increased by just 11 percent during the same period, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-worker research and advocacy group based in Washington.
Bloomberg
January 15, 2016