The 84-page report by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Economic Policy Institute shows that Texas’ average jobless rate was 5 percent in 2014, but it was 9.5 percent for blacks. In the Dallas metro area, the average rate was 5.1 percent last year, but it was 9.6 percent for blacks. Nationally, the black jobless rate was 10.3 percent, compared with a national average of 6.2 percent.
Dallas Morning News
August 19, 2015
Corporate executives predictably condemn the rule, saying it would stigmatize companies with large pay disparities between the boss and other employees. That’s the point: The ratio between CEO pay and average worker pay has ballooned in the past few decades, despite gains in employee productivity. CEOs now make nearly 300 times as much as average workers, compared to 30 times in 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
August 19, 2015
In June China sold $1 billion per day more to the U.S. than it purchased. If the yuan falls 10 percent it, will make Chinese goods so much cheaper that our trade deficit with China will likely increase by about $66 billion annually. That translates into a likely loss of 190,000 to 640,000 American jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Al Jazeera America
August 19, 2015
In his immigration paper, however, Trump argues that only half of American college graduates with science, technology, engineering, and math degrees find degrees in their field. He also referred to a 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute—a nonprofit labor think tank that advocates for low- and middle-income workers—that found two-thirds of new college-educated IT job holders under the age of 30 were hired through the H-1B guestworker program.
Boston.com
August 19, 2015
A recent study from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, showed that chief executives of large public companies saw their pay soar in recent decades. That study said average CEO compensation was $16.3 million in 2014, an increase of 997% since 1978, compared with 10.9% growth for the typical worker.
Los Angeles Times
August 18, 2015
“I’ve never heard of impounding them,” Daniel Costa, an immigration expert at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an email. He added, “You’d probably have to pass a law requiring the person to prove that they were a citizen or otherwise in a lawful immigration status, and if they couldn’t prove it, then they probably wouldn’t hand over the money in the first place. Otherwise how would you know what to impound?” If by “impound” Trump means “tax,” then his plan may be technically feasible, depending on how it’s structured. The government could pass a law requiring any person sending money to Mexico to prove their immigration status; those who didn’t prove they were in the U.S. legally would have to pay a tax. But that plan faces multiple issues. “[It] turn Western Union cashiers into de facto immigration officials,” Costa noted.
Politico
August 18, 2015
Union membership has been declining for decades. A 2013 analysis by Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that supports workers’ rights, found a strong correlation between the decline in union membership and growing income inequality.
The Huffington Post
August 18, 2015
As the Economic Policy Institute surmised earlier this year, increased trade deficits push jobs out of better-paying industries. And at a time when income inequality is running rampant in the U.S., workers don’t need even more “free” trade agreements that will further strip this nation’s economy of middle-income jobs.
The Huffington Post
August 18, 2015
While China lowered the value of its currency on three consecutive days last week, for a total of 4.4 percent, the largest decline in two decades, a respected Washington think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, released a report detailing exactly how the United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000. The report, “Manufacturing Job Loss: Trade, Not Productivity is the Culprit,” clearly links massive trade deficits to closed American factories and killed American jobs.
The Huffington Post
August 18, 2015
Some people don’t think degrees are a silver bullet to solve the middle class’s job woes, though. “We have college jobs and we have non-college jobs. Both of them have done very poorly in terms of wage growth over the past dozen years,” said Larry Mishel, president of left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute and a labor market economist. “What we should be focusing on is why have wages done so poorly,” he said. Mishel said the the wage stagnation is largely attributable to a decline in the bargaining power of the middle class, due largely to a drop in union membership. “For the middle class … the union decline is a really, really big deal,” he said.
NBC News
August 17, 2015