All of the above is good news but not everyone has found a job. While the last three years have added over 6 million jobs, that is only two thirds of the nearly 9 million jobs that were lost in 2008-2009. Despite the good news the Economic Policy Institute http://www.epi.org/ calculates that the job shortfall is still 8 million.
Yahoo Finance
December 9, 2013
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington that focuses on low and middle income workers, estimates that there are some 5.7 million Americans – the majority of them of prime working age – who are not even looking for work anymore and aren’t counted in the monthly BLS figure.
It isn’t just low-wage menial workers who are sitting on the sidelines, said Elise Gould, an economist with EPI. “When we look at the unemployment rates of various demographic groups, it’s elevated across the board.”
The Fiscal Times
December 9, 2013
Deeper in the report, however, there was ammunition for supporters of another extension of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed.
“The share of unemployed workers who have been out of work for more than six months increased in November from 36.1 percent to 37.3 percent. Today, the long-term unemployment rate is more than double the average rate in 2007,” Elise Gould, an economist with the center-left Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an analysis of the jobs report
McClatchy
December 9, 2013
The economy will need to add an additional 1.3 million jobs to get back to how many people had jobs when the recession started. And the U.S. adult population has grown by more than 13 million people in those six years. So even getting back to the number of jobs before the recession won’t get the economy completely out of the hole. The Economic Policy Institute calculates the overall jobs shortfall is still at nearly 8 million jobs.
CNNMoney
December 9, 2013
Wage growth hasn’t stalled for the very top earners — senior executives and the highest paid workers in finance — who have seen their compensation soar compared to the typical workers, according to data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute.
According to EPI’s analysis, from 1978 to 2011, CEO compensation rose more than 725 percent, while pay for the average worker rose just 5.7 percent. As a result, while a CEO earned roughly 20 times the typical worker in 1965, that gap has exploded in the last 50 years.
NBC News
December 9, 2013
The American Legislative Exchange Council may be falling on hard times due to negative attention on “Stand Your Ground” laws following the death of Trayvon Martin. Dana Milbank and Lee Fang discuss.
As Think Progress noted an Economic Policy Institute report found, “For any problem a businessman might have from minimum wages to bargaining rights to corporate taxes, there’s an ALEC bill to fix it.”
MSNBC
December 9, 2013
The benefits, meant to be temporary, have been extended repeatedly, most recently through Dec. 28.
“If we allow these extensions to expire, it’s going to cause a lot more pain for Americans,” says Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She says the whole economy would take a hit if the unemployment benefits aren’t extended because unemployment checks are spent right away.
Marketplace
December 9, 2013
Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the liberal Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said he put little stock in the PISA results. He said educators and academics should “stop hyperventilating” about international test rankings, particularly given that students are already graduating from college at higher rates than can be absorbed by the labor market.
The New York Times
December 6, 2013
In other words, it will look as if the labor market has improved, even though it hasn’t. Indeed, some researchers argue that the expiration of benefits could even hurt the economy further by reducing consumer spending. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that this lapse could whittle 0.2 percentage points off GDP next year.
The Washington Post
December 6, 2013
On Tuesday, EPI Economic Analyst David Cooper joined NPR’s On Point to discuss the economic benefits and politics of raising the minimum wage.
NPR
December 6, 2013