A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal advocacy group, found that the children of parents who worked unpredictable schedules could have inferior cognitive abilities, in areas like verbal communication, and struggle with anxiety and depression. “Parents’ variable schedules require irregular family mealtimes and child bedtimes that interfere with children’s healthy development,” the study said.
The New York Times
August 27, 2015
Think your city is expensive? Maybe you can use a little perspective. The Economic Policy Institute has updated its family budget calculator, which estimates what it would cost for someone to live what they describe as a “modest but comfortable” life in 618 metro and rural areas across the United States.
The Washington Post
August 27, 2015
Many workers in the Dallas area do not make enough money to support themselves or their families in a “secure yet modest standard of living,” according to the liberal Economic Policy Institute. It costs $27,617 for a single person with no children to meet his or her basic needs in the Dallas area, based on an updated Family Budget Calculator released today by EPI. That’s much higher than what a minimum-wage worker earns a year.
Dallas Morning News
August 27, 2015
Many workers in the Dallas area do not make enough money to support themselves or their families in a “secure yet modest standard of living,” according to the liberal Economic Policy Institute. It costs $27,617 for a single person with no children to meet his or her basic needs in the Dallas area, based on an updated Family Budget Calculator released today by EPI. That’s much higher than what a minimum-wage worker earns a year.
Business Insider
August 27, 2015
The comparison of the three cities was part of a study of 618 U.S. communities by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research center. For the family of four, health care was the most affordable in Pittsburgh, at $621 a month, compared to $895 in Sacramento and $896 in Austin. The full report is online at www.epi.org.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
August 27, 2015
Such concerns are not academic. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, the U.S. lost 3.2 million jobs between 2001 and 2013 after China was given entry in the World Trade Organization. Three-quarters of those positions were higher paying manufacturing jobs.
CBS Moneywatch
August 27, 2015
Where do you think it costs more to live: D.C. or New York City? The Economic Policy Institute released a new report showing that in an economic comparison between the two cities, it’s cheaper to get by in the Big Apple. EPI created a calculator and entered in actual monthly costs for a family of four on things like housing, which in D.C. costs $1,469 a month and $1,440 a month in New York City, according to the report. When child care, transportation and health care are factored in, it ends up costing $106,493 a year to live in D.C. and $98,722 in New York City.
Fox 5 DC
August 27, 2015
The past week has been a dramatic one on Wall Street, but as a general rule, policy makers — particularly those at the Federal Reserve — should not overreact to short-term movement in the stock market. The market is a not a good gauge of overall economic health, and even large swings do not by themselves provide much ground for assessing economic health. Stock market volatility significantly affects the wealth of only a select group of the U.S. population — around 90 percent of stock wealth is owned by only 10 percent of Americans (this drops to a bit over 80 percent if you include indirectly owned stock wealth), and more than half of Americans own no stocks at all. In short, the stock market simply does not have a significant effect on the spending power of the vast majority of American households, and therefore provides little insight into the overall health of the economy.
The New York Times
August 27, 2015
A family of four can meet its basic needs for $49,114 a year in Morristown, Tenn.—about half the income needed to raise a family in New York or Washington. There are 140 communities and regions where a family can meet basic needs such as rent, health care and taxes for less than $60,000 a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator released Wednesday. The data also shows how families in any part of the country can struggle to make ends meet, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Even in Morristown, two adults working full-time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would fail to provide for their family without assistance.
Wall Street Journal
August 26, 2015
The average ratio, meanwhile, was 204 times median employee pay. That’s significantly less than past average ratios calculated by the AFL-CIO or the Economic Policy Institute, where the ratios topped 300 times median worker pay and were calculated using worker pay data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Washington Post
August 26, 2015