Media clips
-
The Economic Policy Institute has taken economist Emmanuel Saez’s research on U.S. income tax returns and produced an account of just how America-altering that transfer of income has been. Between 1935 and 1980—that is, between the year in which both Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act were enacted and the year Ronald Reagan was elected as president—of all the income growth (excluding government benefits and transfer payments) that Americans reported on their taxes, fully 70 percent was income accrued by the bottom 90 percent of American households.
The American Prospect February 4, 2015 -
The White House released its annual budget on Monday for fiscal year 2016. On the one hand, this may seem like a low-value exercise, given the dim prospects for its major initiatives passing a Republican-controlled Congress. But on the other hand, the raft of stories written about it prove the president continues to have unrivaled power in setting the terms of policy debate. And the terms set by the 2016 budget are really useful. Most of the big-ticket items were previewed: significant increases on tax rates for the highest-income households on income they receive simply from wealth-holdings, higher taxes on large transfers of wealth, tax cuts for low- and middle-income taxpayers, and substantial spending increases on community colleges, early childhood care, and infrastructure.
One item that wasn’t telegraphed by the White House included corporate tax reforms that would impose a minimum 19% tax on foreign earnings of U.S. firms with no opportunity for deferral. This is a very big step in the right direction, if still a little shy of perfect since deferral should be ended and U.S. firms should be taxed at the going corporate income tax rate regardless of where income is earned. But 19% is a lot better than today’s implicit 0% on income held abroad. Further, a large chunk of the budget’s infrastructure proposals is financed by a one-time tax of 14% on accumulated earnings of U.S. corporations held abroad. Again, this is much better than the frequently floated alternative of allowing U.S. firms to repatriate their foreign-held earnings at a preferential rate.
Wall Street Journal February 3, 2015 -
The field generates one in five jobs in the U.S., including 12 million in manufacturing, and another 17 million in areas supported by manufacturing, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute. The industry is also particularly good at creating more lucrative jobs for less-educated Americans. The average manufacturing worker without a college degree earns $1.78 more each hour than in other sectors, according to the report, which looked at American Community Survey data.
Bloomberg February 3, 2015 -
Nationally, the pay gap between college graduates and people lacking degrees recently reached a record high, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more per hour on average in 2013 than people without diplomas, up from 89 percent five years earlier and 85 percent a decade earlier.
The Washington Post February 2, 2015 -
A new report (PDF) from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, shows the state of the union as far as income inequality goes, and, well, it’s pretty harsh. See below for a state-by-state ranking, from top to bottom ratio.
Daily Beast February 2, 2015 -
The plunge in oil prices is great for Americans who drive with the average household expected to save about $750 on gas this year. But the rapid price drop is causing lots of layoffs for oil workers. Those losses could begin to spill over into other parts of the economy, especially in once fast growing parts of the country like Texas. “I don’t want to call this strong growth until it actually starts pushing up wages and prices,” says Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
CNN Money February 2, 2015 -
Linda Dempsey and Robert Scott talked about the Obama administration’s calls for more presidential authority in crafting international trade deals, as well as negotiations over the Trans Pacific Partnership.
C-SPAN January 30, 2015 -
The graph comes from the Economic Policy Institute, and it outlines one of the stranger facets of the recovery. Unemployment has fallen to normal levels — 5.6 percent unemployment was routine in, say, 1995, a year that few remember as some sort of labor market hellscape. But the fall in unemployment isn’t just driven by people getting jobs. It’s also driven by workers disappearing from the labor market.
VOX January 30, 2015 -
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, examined federal tax data, state-by-state, and found the national trend of lopsided growth persists. The center’s report is titled The Increasingly Unequal States Of America. The research was led by Estelle Sommeiller, a socio-economist at the Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales in France, and Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg, Penn. Price told NPR that since 1979, “in almost every state, there’s been more growth in income for the top one percent, than for the bottom 99 percent [of Americans].”
NPR January 30, 2015 -
Average income for the very highest-income workers in the District is 32.3 times higher than the average income for everyone else, according to a separate report by the Economic Policy Institute. If DC were compared to the states on that metric, it would rank eighth.
A family budget calculator from the Economic Policy Institute suggests that a two-parent, two-child household in the Washington area needs to earn $89,643 per year to cover the costs of housing, food, transportation, education, taxes, and other living expenses. This, too, reinforces how much more difficult it’s become to get by in DC. Full-time employment at $12.62 per hour translates into annual pay of just $26,250.
Washingtonian Magazine January 29, 2015