The policy was established with the understanding that officials “will raise the threshold to accommodate changes in the economy, or inflation, or whatever,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that supports boosting the minimum wage and overtime threshold. “And they’ve just stopped doing that.”
Wall Street Journal
July 20, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey added that Bush “should be embarrassed about how misinformed he was.” Noting that the Republican presidential candidate also said Obama’s policy would also prohibit many bonuses, Eisenbrey added, “All of that is exactly wrong – and pretty much nonsense.”
MSNBC
July 20, 2015
To wit: CEO compensation, according to the Economic Policy Institute, has increased 1,000 percent since 1978, while a typical worker’s pay has risen by 10.9 percent. Put another way, that CEO now makes 300 times more than the average worker; in 1978, the ratio was 30-to-1.
Newark Star Ledger
July 20, 2015
From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation, when adjusted for inflation, jumped 937 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Some experts blame the enormous increase on peer grouping.
San Francisco Chronicle
July 20, 2015
But the take on tying compensation to performance is not universally embraced. “A firm’s stock price goes up when the whole market goes up, and that has little to do with the performance of an executive,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Washington, D.C.- based Economic Policy Institute. Mishel blames the growth in performance-based pay on a more than 20-year-old policy that allows companies to use performance-based pay, such as stock options, as a tax deduction. And that, said Mishel, contributes to a growing pay gap between CEOs who run a company and workers who perform the tasks that govern productivity.
“This moves money to a certain group and away from the rest of us. God didn’t create the world this way. It was set up by human beings, and it can be changed,” Mishel said. The Economic Policy Institute’s annual corporate compensation study, released last month, determined that CEOs in the 350 largest U.S. firms received more than 300 times the income of typical non-managerial employees.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
July 20, 2015
Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of “The Making of Ferguson,” describes the long history of federally-sanctioned housing segregation, and whether the Obama administration’s news rules will create lasting change in cities across the country.
The Takeaway
July 17, 2015
You still see commentators who haven’t kept up invoking this story as if it were obviously true. But the case for “skill-biased technological change” as the main driver of wage stagnation has largely fallen apart. Most notably, high levels of education have offered no guarantee of rising incomes — for example, wages of recent college graduates, adjusted for inflation, have been flat for 15 years.
The New York Times
July 17, 2015
Some economists point out that if you’re trying to compete on price, rather than superior quality or innovation, addressing currency manipulation by trading partners like China and Japan would get the U.S. much further down the road, much faster. “We’re just not getting millions of manufacturing jobs back unless we get much closer to balanced trade — and they key to that is currency,” says the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens. “Everything else is tinkering on the edges.”
The Washington Post
July 17, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey, a vice-president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center research group, said: “Bush should be embarrassed about how misinformed he was.” Eisenbrey said the proposed rules do nothing whatsoever to bar employers from paying bonuses. “All of that is exactly wrong – and pretty much nonsense,” he said. Eisenbrey and Bernstein wrote a seminal article that helped persuade the Obama administration to change overtime rules.
The Guardian
July 17, 2015
It’s easy to dismiss pre-k as nonessential or overblown, but the array of skills integral to success—from creative problem-solving to effective communication—depends largely on how a kid performs in school from day one, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic
July 17, 2015