Why aren’t Americans getting bigger raises? You can see why thanks to graphs like this one from the Economic Policy Institute, which says wages are “stuck in the mud.”
Slate
June 8, 2015
More recently, a number of Fed rate setters have come out and warned over economic data. In the first quarter the U.S. economy shrank 0.7 percent and the second quarter recovery has been tepid so far as consumers have not responded to lower gasoline prices by spending their money on other items. “Even though job growth was solid, it needs to be sustained over a longer period of time in order to significantly tighten the labor market to the point where we finally see significant wage growth,” wrote Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank.
Reuters
June 8, 2015
The problem, by the way, isn’t that the US is only creating low-wage jobs. An analysis by the liberal Economic Policy Institute found that over the past year, the economy has been adding high-, low-, and middle-wage jobs “in proportion to the rate that those jobs already exist in the economy.”
Christian Science Monitor
June 8, 2015
According to new research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, young adults between the ages of 21 and 24 who graduated college in 2000 and entered the workforce rather than grad school earned an average of $18.41 an hour. Today, that figure is $17.94, a 2.5 percent drop, even as the relative burden of student loan debt young adults carry upon graduation has mushroomed. “Much of it has to do with the Great Recession and the aftermath and the weak economy,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and one of the study’s authors. “We haven’t pulled ourselves out of that.”
NBC News
June 8, 2015
An analysis by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute found that the Fed’s actions did indeed help shore up employment and, with it, workers’ ability to command higher wages — while the gain in stock prices attributable to quantitative easing may be lower than previously thought.
The Washington Post
June 5, 2015
But Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute says there are still plenty of challenges. “There’s much less federal investment in youth employment programs and services,” she says. “So it is almost entirely on the private sector to provide summer employment opportunities.”
Marketplace
June 5, 2015
Data released this week by the Economic Policy Institute found that young female grads make an average of three dollars less than their male peers. The report found that “while young male college grads earn an average hourly wage of $19.64 early in their careers, their female counterparts earn an average hourly wage of just $16.56.” That’s a gap of 18.6 percent. The EPI report is a quick hit, and the numbers don’t make distinctions for different majors and different jobs. But the American Association of University Women has been documenting the wage gap for people in their first year out of college, and those numbers are incredibly specific and point to similar issues.
Salon
June 5, 2015
Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute, argues in an August 2014 fact sheet that the Fed should look for 3.5 percent growth. In the first quarter of 2015, wages were up 2.6 percent from the year before — a growth rate that many economists say doesn’t have a real impact on regular people’s lives.
Huffington Post
June 5, 2015
According to a new report published by the Economic Policy Institute titled The Class of 2015, the labor market has improved for college graduates but still has a long way to go before it reaches pre-recession levels. And once the data are broken down into race and gender, it’s obvious that unemployment is more of a reality for some groups than others.
The American Prospect
June 5, 2015
Arguments about why the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal would be good for middle-class Americans boil down to claims that it will boost U.S. exports. From an economic perspective, this is not a good case: The textbook argument for why efforts to liberalize trade are good for national income is that such efforts make imports cheaper, and increased exports are mostly a side-show.
But proponents of TPP are not stressing that the deal would cheapen imports, for a couple of reasons. First, barriers to imports to the U.S. are already low, so the proposed Pacific trade deal would have little traction in boosting imports to the U.S. Second, cheaper imports have ripple effects that make the case for liberalized trade problematic because they result in a contraction of domestic producers competing with importers and an expansion of export sectors that leads to lower wages for most Americans and increased inequality.
Wall Street Journal
June 4, 2015