Barack Obama’s petulant criticism last Friday of Democrats who do not support his proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership reminds me of the old tongue-in-cheek advice to young lawyers: “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither is on your side, pound the other lawyer.” The facts are definitely not on the President’s side. For two decades the trade deals negotiated by the last three presidents have lowered U.S. wages, lost jobs and generated a chronic trade deficit that requires our country to borrow more money every year in order to pay for imports. The president’s main argument that exports have risen, without mentioning that imports have risen much faster, is now transparently deceitful to anyone who can add and subtract.
The Huffington Post
May 11, 2015
Overall, the national unemployment rate fell to 5.4% Friday, its lowest point since 2008. But unemployment is still higher for blacks than any other race — 9.6% in April. “That definitely is a positive step in the right direction,” says Valerie Wilson, an economist who covers race and ethnicity issues at the Economic Policy Institute. “But it’s also an indicator of how much more progress needs to be made for African Americans.” Despite being almost six years into a recovery, the employment picture for blacks looks particularly grim in some states. Blacks in Illinois have an unemployment rate of 12.5% — more than double the national average. Michigan, Pennsylvania and California are above 12% too, according to an EPI report. The good news is that those rates have been steadily going down in the past year.
CNN
May 11, 2015
In general, wages for new college graduates, as for US workers, have stagnated since the recession. On average, entry-level wages for graduates are expected to be no better than 15 years ago, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.
The Boston Globe
May 11, 2015
Previous trade agreements have failed miserably in living up to the promise of new jobs. In fact, the North American Free Trade Agreement cost the United States 650,000 jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
San Francisco Chronicle
May 11, 2015
But advocates fighting for better wages and working conditions at McDonald’s argue that most fast-food workers are not in fact teenagers and struggling actors. “If he thinks McDonald’s provides opportunities for people who need to find a job quickly, I can’t argue with that,” said David Cooper, economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute. “But you have a lot more people taking jobs at McDonald’s who aren’t struggling actors or students. It’s people trying to support a family.” A study by Cooper shows that workers earning less than $12 an hour today are 36 years old on average and more than one in four are supporting children. Only 11% are teenagers.
CNN Money
May 8, 2015
Black America’s problems, like America’s, are unevenly spread. Many African-Americans live white-picket-fence lives, but some cluster in districts of utter dysfunction, especially in cities where old industries have vanished. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank, 45% of poor African-American children live in areas where 30% or more of their neighbours are poor. Only 12% of poor white children live amid such concentrated poverty.
The Economist
May 8, 2015
First, the good: black unemployment has recovered in several states. The bad news? Those states had some of the highest black unemployment rates in the first place, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. The black unemployment rate during the first quarter of this year was at or below its pre-recession level in six states: Connecticut, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Tennessee, according to the analysis. But the rates in those states were also among the highest in the country before the recession. EPI notes.
The Washington Post
May 7, 2015
Robert Scott, the director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, which focuses on low- and middle-income workers, also pointed to Nike’s role as a leader in outsourcing as the reason for his dismay at Mr. Obama’s speech locale. “What the president is going to do is visiting and promoting and talking to the winners,” he said. Scott objects to Nike because it has hundreds of thousands of overseas workers employed by its suppliers, and a comparably tiny workforce based in America. “Is that what a Democratic president should be doing? I don’t think so,” he said.
CBS News
May 7, 2015
Steve Inskeep talks to Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute about what he calls “government-sponsored segregation,” and how it has led to police-community tensions.
NPR
May 7, 2015
afrBut the separation between white society and the black ghetto, the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein explains, was deliberate. Even after the end of Jim Crow, decades of discriminatory housing and criminal justice policies have conspired to confine many black Americans in the ghetto — or prison — with little hope for the future. “Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its black population,”Rothstein writes.
The Washington Post
May 7, 2015