This week, economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, analyzed federal data and found that despite widespread notions that the poor eat really well and work very little, the latter is indisputably false.
The Washington Post
May 26, 2015
According to the Economic Policy Institute: “Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016 would return the federal minimum wage to roughly the same inflation-adjusted value it had in the late 1960s.”
New York Daily News
May 26, 2015
It started, as these things often do, with a two-part exposé in the New York Times, one focusing on the lousy pay and the other on the health threats. This provoked howls of outrage, and was in turn followed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo invoking “emergency measures,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) citing federal legislation on product safety she’s introduced and of course New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio presiding over a “day of action.” The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute declares nail salon abuses a function of “national policy failures.”
Wall Street Journal
May 26, 2015
New research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute finds that the majority of working-age poor people without disabilities do work. “When you look at that group, you see that nearly two-thirds of them are working and more than 40 percent of them are working full-time,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist with the group. “So there are full-time workers out there who can’t lift their families out of poverty.” Gould said more than 50 percent of people living in the Los Angeles metro area earn less than what the group estimates living on a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle would take. “Raising the minimum wage to $15 would put a substantial dent in that number,” she said.
NBC News
May 26, 2015
That question prompted Fortune to examine which U.S. city residents would benefit the most from a $15 per hour minimum wage. We asked David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, for help.
But when you examine how much it costs to live in that region—which Cooper measured using regional price parity, the price of goods and services in that area versus the national average—you get a different picture. The RPP there is 85, on a scale where the overall national RPP is equal to 100, which means goods and services in that area are cheaper than the national average. To take that factor into account, we looked at the most expensive places to live, as measured by RPP, and used the U.S.’s average share of sub-$15 per hour earners—42.4%—as a cutoff for the share of low-wage workers.
Fortune
May 26, 2015
Between 2009 and 2012, the pre-tax income of Florida’s richest 1 percent — those who made at least $378,342 in 2012 — grew by an average of nearly 40 percent, according to a report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Miami Herald
May 26, 2015
The figures come from Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning research and advocacy group. At my request, she examined whether the recession has shifted the economy’s job distribution. To do this, she divided businesses into three groups by their pay. Today’s average hourly pay is $25. Low-paying employment is dominated by restaurant and hotel jobs (2015 average hourly rate: $14.12) and retail jobs ($17.21). Midlevel jobs include manufacturing ($23.90), health care and education ($24.97) and construction ($26.91). Finally, high-paying jobs included professional and business services ($29.59), finance ($31.10) and utilities ($36.02). The table below highlights her results. It shows how jobs were distributed in 2000, 2007 — again, the economy’s pre-financial crisis peak — and in 2015.
It’s striking how little has changed. There’s been a small and gradual increase in low-paying jobs and a parallel loss of midlevel jobs. Both trends preceded the recession and have continued. Gould characterizes these shifts as “very slight.” Some economists contend that weak overall wage growth (about 2 percent annually) reflects a large influx of poorly paid workers whose low wages drag down the average. To Gould, the stable low-wage share contradicts that. “The weakness in wage growth is not driven by the mix of jobs being created but rather by labor market slack,” she notes. This justifies, she argues, continued expansionary policies to add jobs and intensify pressure for higher wages.
The Washington Post
May 21, 2015
It is true that after long being flat at around 17 million, the number of factory jobs in America started a steady decline around 2001, the same time China entered the World Trade Organization. This is the alleged “turning point” cited by commentators such as Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute. But this is like saying the sun rose after the rooster crowed. U.S. factory jobs plunged even when the yuan soared vis-à-vis the dollar. There is simply no correlation between the long-term trend in factory jobs and movements in China’s currency.
Wall Street Journal
May 21, 2015
The Atlantic
May 21, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group influential with Democrats in Congress, said the United States-Japan trade deficit reached $78.3 billion in 2013, with currency manipulation being “the most important cause.” That gap, it estimates, displaced 896,600 jobs in the United States.
The New York Times
May 20, 2015