Media clips
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Tom Hungerford interview.
The Real News Network March 30, 2015 -
Missouri and Illinois had among the highest rates of black unemployment in 2014, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. Missouri’s rise of 3.2 percentage points in black unemployment from 2013 to 2014 year was the second highest among the states, according to the study by EPI economist Valerie Wilson, which was released Thursday. Black unemployment fell in most states in 2014, according to the study, but spiked up in Wisconsin and Missouri.
St. Louis Post Dispatch March 27, 2015 -
A new report on unemployment trends by the Economic Policy Institute has some sobering findings on the varying unemployment trajectories that different racial groups experienced between 2013 and 2014, and what we can expect to see this year. According to the report, in 2014 the white unemployment rate across the United States was 4.9%. But the black unemployment rate was more than double that, at 11.4%. The GIF below breaks down the disparities between white and black unemployment by state in 2014. (The sample size for unemployment broken down by race wasn’t big enough for every state; this chart includes 32 states and the District of Columbia.) You can see that black unemployment dwarfs white unemployment across the country:
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Mic March 27, 2015 -
The unemployment rate for black people was 11 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and was 10.4 percent in February. Both rates are still higher than the peak the national unemployment rate reached at the worst point of the recession — 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Think Progress March 27, 2015 -
In Wisconsin, the state with the highest annual African-American unemployment rate, nearly 1 in 5 black people are unemployed. The states with the next highest rates of black unemployment were Nevada (16.1 percent) and Michigan (15.8 percent), according to a new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data released by the Economic Policy Institute on Thursday. The issue brief is a sobering reminder that black Americans continue to face troublingly high unemployment rates.
Huffington Post March 26, 2015 -
Unemployment among African-Americans in Wisconsin last year was the highest of any of the 50 states, according to a study released Thursday by the center-left Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. At 19.9% — or 1 in 5 working-age people — the black unemployment rate in Wisconsin is nearly three times higher than the highest state white unemployment rate (7% in Nevada) and significantly higher than the national black unemployment rate of 11%, the think tank found.
Milwaukee is merely the extreme of a national trend, according to Valerie Wilson, the author of the report. “Five years into recovery from the Great Recession, unemployment rates are finally nearing their 2007 levels, but the pace of recovery varies by state for different racial and ethnic groups,” wrote Wilson, who directs the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel March 26, 2015 -
A standard can be achievable by all students if it is minimal, but it cannot be achievable by all students if it is challenging (“‘Proficiency for All’ – An Oxymoron,” Economic Policy Institute, Nov. 14, 2006). In other words, we can’t have it both ways, even though we continue to think we can.
Education Week March 26, 2015 -
According to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, their combined wealth in 2007 was equal to that of “the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families.” By 2010, the Waltons’ fortunes increased while most people suffered. Their wealth was now “as large as the bottom 48.8 million families in the wealth distribution (constituting 41.5 percent of all American families) combined.” These are heirs, mind you. A single family holding more wealth than over two-fifths of all the nation’s families—a population equal to that of California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania combined. Perhaps even more instructive is what happened with the onset of the Great Recession, as Bivens noted, “Concretely, between 2007 and 2010, while median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent, the wealth of the Walton family members rose from $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion.” If the “wealth creating”
Salon March 26, 2015 -
While Edin and Schaefer address the growing advantage the working poor have over nonworkers, Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, raises a different set of issues. He agrees with the general finding that “government programs — transfers and tax subsidies — have helped lift low incomes, and poverty, correctly measured, has fallen.” But focusing on these findings, Mishel argues, diverts attention from the more serious problem of “the failure of the labor market to adequately reward low-wage workers.”
To support his case, Mishel points out that hourly pay for those in the bottom fifth grew only 7.7 percent from 1979 to 2007, while productivity grew by 64 percent, and education levels among workers in this quintile substantially improved.
The effectiveness of government programs rewarding work, according to Mishel, means that in practice, taxpayers “are subsiding low-wage employers,” who, he wrote, “are not putting in enough relative to the publicly provided social safety net.”
A report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, “The War on Poverty 50 Years Later,” which was published last year, provides support for Mishel’s case that falling private sector wages are a major factor in the problems of those in the bottom quintile of the income distribution. The following chart, Figure 1, shows that if there had been no new government initiatives after 1967, the poverty rate now would be higher than it was 48 years ago.
The New York Times March 25, 2015 -
Even the CPC budget’s massive increase in domestic discretionary spending is, as the Economic Policy Institute notes in its analysis of the plan, still below the historical norm.
VOX March 25, 2015