These economists, along with the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign, are part of a growing movement pushing for monetary policy that prioritizes full employment, and the wage growth that comes with it, rather than concerns about price inflation. “I think 2015 is too soon at the current economic pace” for a rate increase, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute. “There is strange eagerness to do it sooner rather than later, but the data just refuses to cooperate.”
Bivens noted that the same Fed projections that appear to show a consensus for raising rates in 2015 forecast slightly higher unemployment and slightly lower gross domestic product growth than previous estimates. Bivens said he wants the Fed to measure full employment on the basis of concrete wage growth, because wage growth accelerates when unemployment gets low enough that employers compete for workers. The Fed has a firm 2 percent inflation target, Bivens observed, but the criteria it uses to measure full employment are “not very firm.” Bivens and Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said they would like the Fed to tie a rate increase to annual wage growth of 3.5 percent, before inflation. Wages are currently 2.3 percent higher than they were at this time last year.
The Huffington Post
June 18, 2015
People with prestigious, lucrative jobs produce children who do better on math, reading, and memory tests, according to an analysis released today by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which looked at parent and teacher assessments of 18,000 children who started kindergarten in 2010.
“[The inequalities] represent bleak life prospects that portend serious problems for our society as a whole if we do not treat them as the moral and economic crisis they represent,” wrote Emma García, the report’s author. García used data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which is sponsoring a long-term study of a nationally representative sample of kids, through their fifth-grade year.
Bloomberg
June 18, 2015
One easy form of boosting productivity would involve government spending in infrastructure such as roads, bridges, ports and airports. Josh Bivens, director of research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, sees these investments as the “most reliable lever” to bolster productivity. Yet he notes that a 10-year, $2.5 trillion government infrastructure program would increase economic growth only 0.2 to 0.3 percent annually.
Associated Press
June 17, 2015
401(k)s, in fact, were never supposed to be the main savings tool of the American worker. They arose, as the Economic Policy Institute has put it, as an “accident of history,” after one employer took advantage of a provision regarding deferred compensation in a 1978 tax law.
U.S. News & World Report
June 17, 2015
Employees coming to work sick take longer to get well. Moreover, they spread their germs in the workplace. These setbacks reduce productivity by as much as 28 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
New York Observer
June 17, 2015
Several outside voices have weighed in favoring a delay: The International Monetary Fund called on the Fed to wait for more concrete signs of wage or price inflation before raising its target rate. Based on IMF forecasts, that means no move until 2016. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute on Monday also argued that the Fed could take its time since wage growth has been stagnant.
The Washington Post
June 16, 2015
The Boston Globe
June 16, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute found that 682,900 net jobs were lost to Mexico by 2010, and that 415,000 of these were in the manufacturing sector.
Fortune
June 16, 2015
The TPP does not stop participating countries from manipulating their currency. Currency manipulation artificially lowers the cost of U.S. imports and raises the cost of U.S. exports, which some, like the Economic Policy Institute, say is what has led to the high U.S. trade imbalance.
CBS News
June 16, 2015
In cities like Chicago and Detroit, public housing “became a black program,” says the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, “because the Federal Housing Administration created a different program for whites, which was a single-family suburban program.”
The Washington Post
June 15, 2015