Media clips
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The trouble is that young college graduates working full-time earned, on average, $34,500 last year, according to the progressive Economic Policy Institute. Adjusting for inflation over the past dozen years, this translates into a shocking loss of $3,200.
Their predicament is similar to that of older workers also coping with unemployment and declining salaries, except that this young generation must ultimately shoulder the costs of entitlement programs such as Medicare as their parents retire.
“This is an unmitigated disaster,” said EPI economist Heidi Shierholz. “At a time like this, it’s the younger workers being screwed by the lack of broad-based demand for work to be done.”
The Fiscal Times July 10, 2013 -
The reality is that the economy isn’t employing nearly as large a share of the potential workforce as it once did. Heidi Shierholz of theEconomic Policy Institute offered an analysis Friday that compared the percentage of the working-age population employed today with the levels before the recession. In early 2007, 63.3 percent of working-age Americans had a job. The latest report pegs that percentage at just 58.7 percent.
Shierholz also looked at the ratio for those of prime working age, a somewhat fairer measure of conditions then and now. The percentage of people ages 25 to 54 who were employed in early 2007 was 80 percent. It dropped to 74.8 percent in late 2009. Although it has risen since then, it is still just 75.9 percent.
The Washington Post July 10, 2013 -
Friday’s employment report wasn’t bad. But given how depressed our economy remains, we really should be adding more than 300,000 jobs a month, not fewer than 200,000. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, we would need more than five years of job growth at this rate to get back to the level of unemployment that prevailed before the Great Recession. Full recovery still looks a very long way off. And I’m beginning to worry that it may never happen.
The New York Times July 10, 2013 -
And yet, Baucus and Camp face significant obstacles, from President Barack Obama’s limited interest in tax changes, to the partisan divide in Congress, to their reluctance to repeat the 1986 model that shifted some of the tax burden from individuals to corporations.
“People were ready for it” in 1986, said Thomas Hungerford, director of tax and budget policy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, which advocates for low- and middle-income workers. “Congress was ready for it. The administration was ready for it. And I just don’t see that now.”
Bloomberg Businesweek July 10, 2013 -
But Young said this at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, exactly fifty years ago on August 28. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute, “The Unfinished March—An Overview,” offers a compelling look at the economic vision that was laid out on that day and has since been forgotten. It also examines the continuing struggle to achieve that vision.
Most Americans associate the March with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech and celebrate the victories of the civil rights movement that followed. But report author Algernon Austin, director of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy (PREE), writes that there were “nine other speeches that day” and that the march organizers called for “decent housing, adequate and integrated education, a federal jobs program for full employment, and a national minimum wage of over $13.00 an hour in today’s dollars.”
The Nation July 5, 2013 -
Paige Gance of Reuters looked at EPI’s Family Budget Calculator and wrote, “It costs almost twice as much to live in New York City as it does in Marshall County, Mississippi, according to figures published Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. The median cost of modest living for an American family of four in the United States can be found in Newaygo County, Michigan, where $63,000 covers food, transportation, housing, child care, healthcare and taxes – but no extras such as vacations, eating out, or savings.”
Reuters July 5, 2013 -
In an op-ed for the Providence Journal, EPI Economist Monique Morrissey took on Rhode Island’s pension reform plan, which was the subject of two recent EPI papers. “Here’s something you probably don’t know about the new hybrid retirement plan for teachers and other government workers,” she wrote. “It actually increases costs for taxpayers even as it cuts benefits for most workers.”
Providence Journal July 5, 2013 -
Fast Co.Exist called EPI’s new website inequality.is a “visually-interesting riff on the theme” of income inequality, writing, “Rising income inequality is getting more difficult to ignore. Inequality.is, a fun interactive website, walks you through the problem (and helps give you ideas about the solution).”
Fast Co.Exist July 5, 2013 -
But Americans like Mr. Doernberg and the powerful labor lobby say that what the tech industry really wants is to depress wages and bring in more pliant, less costly temporary workers from overseas. If there is such a talent shortage, they ask, why are wages for most engineers not rising faster? Labor groups have pushed for a requirement to offer jobs to equally qualified Americans before hiring foreigners, a provision that the industry has fiercely resisted.
The New York Times June 28, 2013 -
Most fast-food workers make close to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, putting many of them below the official poverty line of $23,283 for a family of four. At the hearing, Elise Gould, the director of health policy and research for the Economic Policy Institute, argued that the minimum wage doesn’t come close to meeting the needs of a family living in New York City.
According to a budget calculator tool devised by EPI, a two-parent, two-child family in New York City needs a minimum of $93,502 to pay for child care, housing, food, transportation, health care, taxes, and miscellaneous necessities like clothes and household supplies.
The Huffington Post June 28, 2013