Average pay for a big-company CEOs is $16.3 million, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. In 2014, that was 303 times what the typical worker earned. The CEO-to-worker gap today isn’t the highest ever (in 2007 it was 345-to-1) but it has exploded since 1978, the point at which income inequality in the United States generally started to worsen.
Yahoo Finance
July 24, 2015
New York ranks among the top 10 states for its minimum wage, but factor in the cost of living, and it falls to the bottom 10. West Virginia’s middle-of-the-pack minimum wage, on the other hand, is actually fairly valuable compared with other states, when considering prices. “Even in some states that have enacted higher minimum wages most recently, the relative value of those is still quite low when you’ve made this adjustment,” said David Cooper, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, which often advocates for pro-labor policies. The measure factors in goods, housing and other services, with housing showing a much wider gap between extremes than the other categories. “That is the single largest driver when it comes to regional price differences, so policymakers wanting to do something about this or sensitive to these things need to look at what housing policies look like in these regions,” Cooper said.
The Washington Post
July 23, 2015
Historically, the poverty rate has tracked the overall economy, but that’s no longer true. The period between the 2001 and 2007 recessions was the first expansionary business cycle on record in which the poverty rate increased, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of Census Bureau data.
Harper's Magazine
July 23, 2015
But even this number grossly underestimates what families need to get by, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator. A single parent with three kids living in El Paso, Texas, for example, would need to earn $68,393 to live comfortably and cover the basic expenses like housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and childcare. In Spokane, Wash., that number is $72,050. In Chattanooga, Tenn., it’s $63,592. In Rochester, New York, a single parent raising three kids needs to bring in $102,417.
Fusion
July 23, 2015
An increasing number of American children from low-income backgrounds are coming to kindergarten lagging in both academic and non-cognitive skills critical to educational success, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute. As the report states: “Such early-in-life inequalities point to the need for substantial interventions to reduce them, including early educational interventions, to ensure that children arrive in kindergarten ready to learn and for compensatory policies to support these children throughout the school years (from kindergarten through 12th grade).”
The Washington Post
July 22, 2015
That increase testifies to how little the economic recovery has been felt in America’s poorest households. While the top 1% of wage earners saw their real incomes grow by 34.7% in the post-recession years, hourly wages for the vast majority of workers fell over the same period, according to data from Berkley economist Emmanuel Saez and the Economic Policy Institute.
MSNBC.com
July 22, 2015
For decades, currency manipulation has been used by U.S. trading partners, including Japan, China, Malaysia and Singapore, to gain a competitive advantage that shutters factories, hurts workers and devastates communities. The Economic Policy Institute estimates the U.S. could add as many as5.8 million jobs by eliminating currency manipulation.
USA Today
July 20, 2015
The federation in a report this year found retailers alone would hire 117,500 part-time workers as a result of raising the threshold to $984 a week, a slightly higher level than the administration ultimately proposed. “The more important result of the rule will be job creation,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. His organization has strongly advocated for the threshold to be raised for the first time in more than a decade. “Hours will be shifted from currently uncompensated salary workers to newly compensated hourly people.”
Wall Street Journal
July 20, 2015
The policy was established with the understanding that officials “will raise the threshold to accommodate changes in the economy, or inflation, or whatever,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that supports boosting the minimum wage and overtime threshold. “And they’ve just stopped doing that.”
Wall Street Journal
July 20, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey added that Bush “should be embarrassed about how misinformed he was.” Noting that the Republican presidential candidate also said Obama’s policy would also prohibit many bonuses, Eisenbrey added, “All of that is exactly wrong – and pretty much nonsense.”
MSNBC
July 20, 2015