Last month, the City Council held a hearing on working conditions in the fast-food industry. What it revealed is troubling — fast-food restaurants are flourishing in New York City, but wages in the industry have remained pitifully low and stagnant.
Despite the fact that fast-food jobs grew at over 10 times the rate of other jobs in this city in the last decade, most workers are still making somewhere around minimum wage, which in New York State is $7.25 an hour.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that’s too little to survive in one of the world’s most expensive cities. In fact, a brand-new release of the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator shows that New York City’s cost of living is the nation’s highest.
The annual budget for a two-parent, two-child New York City family is $93,502 — about 40% higher than that of a similar Detroit family. That’s because child care here is more expensive than anywhere else. Housing costs are high, as are taxes and health care.
New York Daily News
July 11, 2013
The Economic Policy Institute has just updated their cost-of-living budgets to reflect how much a family needs to earn to get by in 2013.
Looking at over 600 locations and estimating community-specific costs, EPI found that families need more than twice the amount of the federal poverty line to have a secure yet modest living standard.
“Our family budget calculations show that the real costs for families to live modest — not even middle class — lives are much higher than conventional estimates show and virtually impossible for families living on minimum-wage jobs,” said Elise Gould, the Economic Policy Institute director of health policy research.
The Huffington Post
July 11, 2013
“At this pace, it will be more than five years until we get back to the prerecession unemployment rate,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote on Friday. “The numbers show that we have made surprisingly little progress over the last four years undoing the damage caused by the Great Recession.”
Shierholz’s entire post is worth your time, but we’ll highlight two tidbits for you: Shierholz pointed out that the employment-to-population ratio, coming in at 58.7% with Friday’s report, is still well below the 63.3% figure from December 2007, the month the recession started. Excluding young people and people near retirement age, so as to get a better take on the prime-age working population, she says the ratio for people 24-54 stood at 75.9%, up from a low of 74.8% at the end of 2009, but below the more than 80% rate of early 2007. “In other words, we are four years into the recovery, and we have climbed only about one-fifth of the way out of the hole left by the Great Recession.”
Wall Street Journal
July 11, 2013
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit group, has released the 2013 version of a budget calculator on its website – www.epi.org/resources/budget/ — that factors in the “real costs for families.” It lists families with one and two parents for up to three children in each case.
Winston-Salem Journal
July 10, 2013
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI):
The real costs for families to live modest, economically secure lives are much higher than conventional estimates show for all cities across the country. For minimum-wage workers, it is nearly impossible to meet basic family needs.
Put another way, the number of people truly living “in poverty” may be much larger than the government’s figure of 16%.
The EPI adds:
Like most of the old Southern states from Louisiana to Alabama and north into Kentucky, poverty remains high, and income and education much lower than the national average.
Elise Gould, EPI director of health policy research said when commenting on the new “What Families Need to Get By: The 2013 Update of EPI’s Family Budget Calculator” that:
“The fact that hardworking families are struggling to afford their basic needs makes clear how critical government policies are to ensure that our families can afford such basic necessities like food, child care, housing, transportation, and health care.”
Wall St. 24/7
July 10, 2013
So it took a think tank study to determine that New York City is the most expensive place to live in America?
I could have saved the money spent on the Economic Policy Institute report by dragging along one accountant with a calculator from my home in Queens as I emptied my wallet and sizzled my credit card on a single weekend in New York.
New York Daily News
July 10, 2013
I’m biased, but it seems liberals have the better story on the growth of inequality. The Economic Policy Institute has a fantastic Web page, inequality.is, where they walk through a more sophisticated story about how inequality was created by tax, globalization, macroeconomic and regulatory decisions and policies, and it can be fixed through the same mechanisms.
The Washington Post
July 10, 2013
An Economic Policy Institute study shows that for every unemployment dollar invested, it returns an estimated $1.64 to the economy.
New Jersey Star-Ledger
July 10, 2013
So how are we doing? Labor economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute says the country has made “surprisingly little progress” since the Great Recession battered the U.S. beginning in December 2007
AARP
July 10, 2013
“Those industries have lots of job openings all the time,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Where they might go unfilled in boom times, people have no options now,” she said.
LA Times
July 10, 2013