That said, just about every measure finds they are struggling mightily. The Economic Policy Institute has reported that inflation-adjusted wages for recent college graduates have fallen by 7.7 percent since 2000. Last year, the San Francisco Fed produced this graph showing wages for recent college grads essentially hitting a flight ceiling around 2008 while overall wages continued to climb, however slowly.
The Atlantic
May 20, 2015
Such narrow portrayals of Baltimore and its residents are only possible if we exclude decades of state and federal policy from our frame of analysis. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute wrote something I suggest reading in its entirety. But to quote: In Baltimore and elsewhere, the distressed condition of African American working- and lower-middle-class families is almost entirely attributable to federal policy that prohibited black families from accumulating housing equity during the suburban boom that moved white families into single-family homes from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s—and thus from bequeathing that wealth to their children and grandchildren, as white suburbanites have done.
American Prospect
May 20, 2015
Recently, the president claimed that critics who say that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “is bad for working families … don’t know what they are talking about.” Skeptics would respond, “Show me the money. Show me the jobs and wages you’re going to generate for working Americans. Explain how the TPP is going to be different from the lousy trade deals we’ve had since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law in 1993.” The White House Council of Economic Advisors released a report touting the benefits of the TPP in pulling down barriers to U.S. exports abroad, but the report fails to mention the most important barrier to U.S. export success: several major trade partners (including TPP partners) managing the value of their own currencies for competitive gain vis-à-vis the U.S. Yet the Obama administration has refused to even discuss the currency issue in the TPP negotiations.
Newsweek
May 19, 2015
Yet, while the left and center-left now agree that inequality is both rising and something to worry about, they still disagree about its causes and what to do about it. “I think remarkably over the past year and half, there’s been a convergence that skill-biased technological change doesn’t do much to help explain the [increase in inequality during the] 2000s,” said Larry Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive economic think tank. “This really burst into the public sphere by Larry Summers calling educational upgrading essentially an evasion of the key issues.” But when I asked Jason Furman, the current CEA chair, about Mishel’s argument, he wasn’t convinced. “I personally think the rise in inequality has been large enough that there’s room for a lot of explanations without them having to compete with each other.”
The New Republic
May 19, 2015
The New York Times
May 18, 2015
Here is another change that might be a broader sign of a pending reset: A heavy burden of adjustment in the overall labor market is being borne by the young. Wages for the typical graduate of a four-year college have dropped more than 7 percent since 2000, and the labor force participation rate of the young has been falling.
The New York Times
May 18, 2015
Josh Bivens, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, estimates that increased globalization, aided by a strong dollar that led to a persistent trade deficit, reduced the annual earnings of the roughly 70 percent of American workers without college degrees by about $1,800.
The New York Times
May 18, 2015
In a recent study done by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, these sorts of statistics just jump off the page:
- Incredibly, 89 percent of minimum-wage recipients are over the age of 20 — not teens flipping hamburgers.
- Interestingly, 56 percent of those working for the minimum wage, which in New York is $8.75 an hour, are women.
- Many have children — 28 percent of those working for minimum wage have kids.
New York Post
May 18, 2015
In particular, U.S. automakers have long complained that they have been undercut and forced to shed jobs in recent years by Japan’s undervaluing of the yen — and they are pushing aggressively for the Portman-Stabenow amendment to give Americans more power to push back with its trading partners. Roughly 150,000 jobs would be created in Ohio alone if the currency issue is addressed, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
May 18, 2015
In 2003, after a decade of NAFTA, a report from the Economic Policy Institute by Robert E. Scott summarized the situation: Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1993, the rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2002 has caused the displacement of production that supported 879,280 U.S. jobs. Most of those lost jobs were high-wage positions in manufacturing industries. The loss of these jobs is just the most visible tip of NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy. In fact, NAFTA has also contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened workers’ collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits.
Salon
May 18, 2015