Government benefits, specifically medical benefits, do more than just help people pay their bills, according to Josh Bivens, the research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The government, by providing a benefit like Medicare, serves as a “countervailing power in the provider market,” Bivens says, which can help keep costs down (at least a little bit) across the health care market. There’s also a concern about how to identify those who need the most help in the absence of government benefits, also known as transfers. “There are a lot of problems with transfers, but they are pretty well-targeted,” Bivens said. That is, the majority of them go to the poor. With a very flat UBI scheme, there is very little targeting, which means people with good jobs may get more than they need, while the unemployed, elderly, disabled and single parents could end up with too little.
The Huffington Post
December 9, 2015
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s import of goods from China displaced over 400,000 jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a U.S.-based nonprofit think tank. According to the study, cited by the New York Times, Wal-Mart’s Chinese imports amounted to at least $49 billion in 2013.
International Business Times
December 9, 2015
The tax is a new idea that could add even more disincentive to companies contemplating an inversion, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute. “The Obama administration proposals are good on tamping down on inversions. I think the exit tax is an extra little benefit that will reduce the incentive even further,” he said. “I tend to be pretty skeptical of tax-based solutions to lots of problems, but these are actually useful tax-based solutions.”
Think Progress
December 9, 2015
Saying affirmative action is constitutional because diversity is good, wrote the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein in a piece about the Fisher case on SCOTUS blog, “dodges the nation’s racial legacy and avoids our constitutional and moral obligation to remedy the effects of centuries of slavery and legally sanctioned segregation. Without acknowledging we were doing so, we have engaged in a legal sleight of hand, substituting enriching the educational experience for remedying past injustice in designing affirmative action policy.”
MSNBC
December 9, 2015
Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., told 24/7 Wall Street that it’s “hard to find a state where outcomes for African-Americans are very good.” Not one state has better socioeconomic outcomes for blacks than for whites, according to the report.
International Business Times
December 9, 2015
The seeds were first sown by the Great Recession, when millions lost their jobs and many ended up in work paying closer to the minimum wage. “We had a lot of folks having to take jobs that were much lower paying than any they had previously had, a lot of jobs in retail and the service sector, because those were the first ones to come back coming out of the recession,” said David Cooper, economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. Workers who used to be middle class wound up in these low paying jobs and “recognized that pay in these jobs was just unlivablely low.”
Think Progress
December 9, 2015
Already, those who are plugged into this debate have separated into camps. There are those, found mostly among the labor union-oriented left, who believe that most of these workers are being misclassified as independent contractors and ought to receive all the benefits and protections of employeehood — workers compensation, tax withholding, contributions to social security, unemployment insurance, overtime, minimum wage, etc. To even talk about creating a new category for the on-demand economy is at best a distraction from the real problems most workers face.
The Washington Post
December 9, 2015
Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute said the most problematic group is prime-age workers. “They’re 25 to 54 years old — so you get rid of any demographic shifts that are happening with baby boomers retiring, or young people sheltering in school,” Gould said. “There are still 1.17 million missing (prime-age) workers who have left the labor force, who have stopped actively looking or haven’t started actively looking.”
Marketplace
December 9, 2015
Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, agrees that overall computerization creates and changes more jobs than it destroys, but he says Bessen is “too bold” to say that it leads to an increase in demand for skilled labor in all occupations. “If there was a shortage of advanced jobs you would not see recent college grads working for free as interns,” Mishel says. ” You would not see wages of college grads stagnant for the last 13 years.”
U.S. News & World Report
December 9, 2015
Our friend and former colleague Jared Bernstein has mounted a small but strategic retreat in the campaign to have the Fed continue focusing on full employment. He has written that Friday’s jobs report, though not stellar, was good enough to make a December increase in interest rates a near-certainty. He then argues that this might not be the worst thing in the world: “Even while I do not see much rationale for an increase, especially given elevated underemployment and the stark lack of inflationary pressures, given their recent messaging, a non-liftoff in December would suggest the economy is a lot worse than they thought in some secret way they’ve been keeping from us. Such a negative surprise would be ill-advised. “Presuming that they won’t want to go there, it’s now all about the ‘path to normalization:’ how fast they raise. … [I]f I’m Chair Yellen, my message to the hawks is: ‘OK, you got your rate liftoff even though the data weren’t really there for it. Now back…off and let’s go back to being data-driven about future increases.’”
Jared is right that the larger economic question is not just about a 25-basis-point increase this month but about how rapidly interest rates climb over the next year or so. But we’re still really uncomfortable with starting lift-off before the data support it. Once you start indulging faith-based arguments about monetary policy, you’ve lowered the bar for data-driven analysis, making smart policy choices harder and harder to sustain.
Wall Street Journal
December 7, 2015