Media clips
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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 -
Ross Eisenbrey and Michael Tanner talked about the role of government in combating inner-city poverty in communities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Topics included the minimum wage, tax policy, and jobs. The discussion began with a history of racial segregation in U.S. cities and “white flight” to the suburbs.
C-SPAN May 7, 2015 -
… a common argument against including a currency-management provision in the trade pact is that it would somehow interfere with future Federal Reserve responses to U.S. recessions. Because the Fed’s purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities during the recovery from the Great Recession put downward pressure on the dollar’s value, some say that this could be defined as currency management and bar the Fed from such actions under the auspices of a currency provision in the proposed trade agreement–hamstringing U.S. policy in future recessions.
This is nonsense. Every macroeconomic policy will have some impact on exchange rates. Tax cuts that raise federal budget deficits lead, all else being equal, to lower dollar values. Yet no one has ever said this constitutes “currency management.” Infrastructure investments that boost productivity growth would have implications for the dollar’s value (depending on which sector’s productivity growth improved), yet nobody has ever considered such investments “currency management.”
The reason no one has ever confused these practices with currency management is because currency management is pretty simple to define: It is the practice of buying assets denominated in foreign currency for the purpose of weakening one’s own currency in an effort to run trade surpluses. So it’s easy to see why the Fed’s asset purchases in recent years would never somehow get scooped up in a well-crafted currency provision: The Fed bought domestic assets with an aim to lower domestic interest rates, not foreign assets with an aim to lower the value of the dollar.
It is obvious why opponents of including a strong currency provision in the Pacific trade pact would want to say that it would hamstring the Fed’s ability to fight recessions–an outcome that would indeed be a bad thing. But the argument is flat wrong – there’s no reason to think that a currency provision based on widely held definitions of what constitutes currency management would be construed as barring a central bank’s purchase of assets denominated in its own country’s currency. This feels like an opportunistic argument to stop a sensible call for the Trans-Pacific Partnership to address the biggest barrier to trade in the global economy.
Wall Street Journal May 7, 2015 -
What Gornick and Milanovic realized (helped by suggestions from a number of colleagues, notably Larry Mishel at EPI) was that true US market inequality might be being masked by another exceptional piece of the US system – delayed retirement, causing many older households to have positive market income where comparable households in other countries have no or very little market income. Thus, putting all households together and looking at their pre-tax-pre-transfer income inequality makes other countries’ distributions appear comparatively more unequal because people in other countries are more likely to retire earlier than in the US (and hence have zero or low market income).
The New York Times May 5, 2015 -
There are some clues as to why black immigrants might have lower incomes in spite of their advantages in a couple of research reports by the Economic Policy Institute. The economist Patrick Mason and I examined whether cultural differences between U.S.-born and foreign-born blacks might have an impact on their wages in “The Low Wages of Black Immigrants.” Many people believe that black immigrants possess cultural values that would lead them to greater economic success than U.S.-born blacks. Mason and I did not find evidence to support this view. U.S.-born and foreign-born blacks both had significantly lower wages than U.S.-born whites. In fact, after controlling for worker and labor-market characteristics, some black immigrants were even worse off than U.S.-born blacks. Thus, since both U.S.-born blacks and foreign-born blacks performed poorly in comparison with U.S.-born whites, the real issue may be that there is a penalty for being black in the American labor market.
The Huffington Post May 5, 2015 -
The American Prospect May 5, 2015
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This is an important post about the consequences of government-sponsored segregation in places such as Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, where violent protest has erupted over the deaths of black men at the hands of police. It was written scholar Richard Rothstein, who explains that whenever young blacks riot in response to police brutality or murder, “we’re tempted to think we can address the problem by improving police quality” — but that only won’t address the primary problems. Rothstein is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers.
The Washington Post May 4, 2015 -
Hillary Clinton could face a litmus test very soon. She is under pressure to take a position on a massive Pacific free-trade agreement sought by President Obama. Legislation supporting the pact is moving through Congress, and the left is mobilizing to fight it. “This is a chance to separate herself from what people fear about her, which is a continuation of some of the Clintonian economic policies that did not work out so well,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy institute, a progressive think tank.
For now, Mishel is reserving judgment. He said the candidate could yet delight liberal activists, noting that Clinton had the more progressive agenda when she ran unsuccessfully against Obama eight years ago. But he also pointed out that she would be spending a lot of time with Wall Street in the coming months, soliciting donations for her campaign. “We just don’t know where she is yet,” he said. “The unstated concern of some people, I think, is that she is too close to the financial center and needs to raise a lot of money. That can make someone shy about addressing the 1%. And it can push them into emphasizing ‘opportunity’ over inequality.”
The Chicago Tribune May 4, 2015