Media clips
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De Blasio, along with City Council members Letitia James, Jessica Lappin, Donovan Richards, Steve Levin, Ydanis Rodriguez and Jumaane Williams, will be living on minimum wage for a week as part of the Workers Rising challenge organized by UnitedNY and New York Communities for Change.
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According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, an adult with a child in New York needs $67,153 a year to get by. That means working a full-time at $32.28 an hour.
Minimum wage workers earn $10,000 to $18,000 per year. City Council members made $161,236 last year.
New York Daily News July 23, 2013 -
That should bolster state and local government employment — even as the sequester continues to take a toll on federal jobs. In all, job numbers in 34 states have not yet surpassed their 2008 levels, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. Three states — Nevada, Illinois and Mississippi — are still burdened with unemployment rates of 9 percent or higher, and 17 states have unemployment rates above the national average of 7.6 percent.
Minneapolis Star Tribune July 23, 2013 -
“There’s been a lot of misconceptions about the minimum wage,” said David Cooper, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington. “A good portion of those affected are teenagers, but it also affects a good portion of older people with families.”
The federal numbers report only those who make the exact amount of the minimum wage, Cooper said, but there are millions of other people who make just slightly more than that wage, and many of those are at least 20 years old and/or parents of young children.
A family budget calculator created by the EPI estimates that a single parent trying to raise one child in Palm Beach County needs to make $51,593 a year in order to achieve a “secure yet modest living standard.”
This calculation includes spending $1,183 a month on housing, $943 on health care and $480 on transportation.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel July 23, 2013 -
In the fall of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate topped 10 percent for the first time in a quarter century, causing policymakers and analysts to lament the catastrophe that had befallen the American public. Yet throughout that entire prior period the average rate of African American unemployment had been 12.2 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. And while the gap between poverty for blacks and whites has narrowed over decades, at 27.6 percent the black poverty rate is nearly double the overall rate of 15 percent.
In other words, as EPI scholars wrote in a 2012 book on working America, “African Americans have essentially been living through a perpetual, slow-moving recession.”
Pritchett earns slightly more than the median wage for black women, which was $13.13 in 2011, according to EPI. Black men, meanwhile, earned a median wage of $14.26. White women earned a median wage of $15.89, while white men topped the list with a median wage of $19.76.
Huffington Post July 23, 2013 -
Currently, 28 percent of all workers are in jobs that keep them at or below the poverty line for a family of four ($23,005 in 2011). And this is the way it’s going to be for at least another decade, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
AOL Jobs July 23, 2013 -
The “Dear Colleague” letter circulated by Baucus and Camp in support of their plan proposes a “blank slate” — specifically, that all tax expenditures would be repealed, unless they were demonstrated to advance one of the following goals: “(1) help grow the economy, (2) make the tax code fairer, or (3) effectively promote other important policy objectives.” A high bar that sounds promising in theory, but these vague criteria require some unpacking to be understood fully. For starters, Thomas Hungerford of the Economic Policy Institute rightfully adds the unstated but immutable Congressional prerogative, “(4) effectively promote important political objectives such as reelection.”
The Fiscal Times July 23, 2013 -
Another study released Monday by the Economic Policy Institute reinforces the link between race and economic status. “Nearly half (45 percent) of poor black children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty,” study author Algernon Austin writes, “but only a little more than a tenth (12 percent) of poor white children live in similar neighborhoods.” Race and economic situation are linked, just as race and the application of justice are linked. It seems safe to assume, then, that blacks see entrenched poverty and low social mobility as symptomatic of racial bias, and whites to see it as warranted.
The Atlantic July 23, 2013 -
C-SPAN July 23, 2013
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If you’re like most of us, you don’t have profit money from large corporations flowing into your bank account like a fire hose. But some do — they make up a tiny percentage of our country, but they have most of the power. There are, however, ways to fix that.
I know — nothing new there, right? What is new is a fantastic interactive website where you can start to figure out what happened, why it happened, and how we can fix it. Check it out: Inequality.Is.
Upworthy July 22, 2013 -
Indeed, McDonald’s may have inadvertently triggered more support for a movement that has so far only had weak political momentum — to raise the minimum wage.
“[The budget] shows that what they’re paying is something you can’t live on — that people have to have two jobs, and much higher wages in order to support themselves,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a labor-market economist. “They demonstrated, inadvertently, that they don’t pay a living wage.”
He says that the minimum wage should be at least 50% of the average wage. Right now, at $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage is just about 37% of the average wage, which Mishel said was $19.76 in 2012. (Some states set their own minimum wages, which can be seen in this chart.)
If the minimum wage were bumped to 50% of the average wage, it would be $9.88, which works out to $20,550 a year before taxes.
Forbes July 22, 2013