Media clips
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Elise Gould, a Ph.D. economist who directs health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, told me in an e-mail that “Fairness in health care is about what kind of society we would like to create for ourselves. Efficiency is about making sure that health care is provided in a timely and cost-effective manner. The ACA promotes both fairness . . . by making health care more accessible and affordable . . . and efficiency in various ways, such as increasing the availability of preventive medicine, reducing the use of last resort health care (ER visits) relative to health maintenance and treatment at earlier stages of illness.”
Those are good points, but I still wanted to know whether the U.S. has a moral obligation to provide health insurance.
“Do we have a moral obligation to provide health care to people who would otherwise die in the streets?” Gould asked. “Unabashedly, I say yes and would venture to guess that most people would as well.”
The Washington Post February 28, 2014 -
There is a lot to celebrate about the pre-kindergarten program in the D.C. public schools. In fact, some aspects of the program are so strong that school officials would be smart to borrow them for application in later grades. This is all explained in the following post by Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, a project of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute that recognizes the impact of social and economic disadvantage on many schools and students, and works to better the conditions that limit many children’s readiness to learn.
Weiss looks at an exemplary pre-K program called Jubilee JumpStart Center in the culturally diverse Adams Morgan section of Northwest Washington, where there will be the screening of a film called “Ready for Kindergarten: The Impact of Early Childhood Education,” tonight, Feb . 27. (You can find details here.)
The Washington Post February 28, 2014 -
(At the 3:30 mark) According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart’s trade deficit with china, between 2001 and 2006, well, it helped destroy 200,000 jobs in this country. An estimated 133,000 of those were manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing is a long-term investment, with the potential for long-term benefits for any economy.
The Ed Show February 28, 2014 -
A study published Wednesday by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute showed that abolishing overseas currency manipulation, a task few economists think would be easy, could bring millions of jobs to the U.S., especially in the manufacturing-intensive states of Sen. Brown and Rep. Levin.
Wall Street Journal February 28, 2014 -
Education Inaccessible
Further, some teens need to work to help earn their way through college. When jobs become scarce, education can become inaccessible, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington research group funded in part by labor unions.
“Teen jobs matter a lot less if you go to college, but having a work history may be the difference between putting yourself through school or not,” she said.
Bloomberg February 26, 2014 -
Elise Gould, a Ph.D. economist who directs health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, told me in an e-mail that “Fairness in health care is about what kind of society we would like to create for ourselves. Efficiency is about making sure that health care is provided in a timely and cost-effective manner. The ACA promotes both fairness . . . by making health care more accessible and affordable . . . and efficiency in various ways, such as increasing the availability of preventive medicine, reducing the use of last resort health care (ER visits) relative to health maintenance and treatment at earlier stages of illness.”
Those are good points, but I was still wanted to know whether the U.S. has a moral obligation to provide health insurance.
The Washington Post February 26, 2014 -
At the 3:30 mark
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart’s trade deficit with china, between 2001 and 2006, well, it helped destroy 200,000 jobs in this country. An estimated 133,000 of those were manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing is a long-term investment, with the potential for long-term benefits for any economy.The Ed Show February 26, 2014 -
Since the Great Recession, reports of rising income inequality in the U.S. have pretty much followed the same basic storyline: The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. So on, so forth.
It’s easy to associate the economic downturn with the 1 percent’s seemingly meteoric rise in wealth leading up to the recession, but it was hardly an overnight occurrence. The rich have been on an unprecedented tear for decades, as illustrated in a new analysis of IRS income data by the new report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Indeed, the widening income disparity has become so acute that President Obama called it the “defining challenge of our time’ in his recent state of the union address.
Since 1979, the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 19%, while the average income of the top 1 percent grew more than 10 times as much—by 200.5%.Yahoo Finance February 21, 2014 -
But some liberal economists argue that the bursting of the dotcom bubble and later the great recession laid bare the legacy of NAFTA. According to a 2006report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the treaty led to the loss of an estimated one million American jobs in its first decade. A 2012 poll found that 53 percent of Americans wanted the government to “do whatever is necessary” to amend or leave NAFTA, while only 15 percent wanted to remain in NAFTA as-is.
The Atlantic February 21, 2014 -
The minimum wage has potent implications for our national discussion of inequality and upward mobility. Republicans have been paying lip service to the idea of reducing inequality and increasing upward mobility, but so far policy proposals have been sparse. The minimum wage is a perfect solution. It requires little government spending and is unlikely to have any significant effect on the deficit. It certainly doesn’t violate the “no new taxes” pledge. So a minimum wage hike would be the perfect conservative solution to inequality: targeted at working people (rather than the unemployed), minimal bureaucracy and no new revenue for the government. And studies show it would work. Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute finds that the declining value of the minimum wage has been a major driver of increased inequality. Citing the work of David Autor, he finds that more than half of the growing divide between workers at the median and workers at the lowest 10% of the income distribution can be explained by a declining minimum wage.
Salon February 21, 2014