Media clips
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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 -
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