With the money being spent by the federal government on mass deportations, Oregon could hire 9,500 teachers or more than 6,000 nurses.
A new calculator released by the Economic Policy Institute will figure the cost of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign in any state, county or city, along with the equivalent value of various social services. The calculator shows deportations have cost $3 billion in Oregon.
Gordon Lafer, professor in the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon and research associate at the institute, said it is shocking to see such a high price tag while so many people are struggling to pay for food, housing and health insurance.
Public News Service
August 10, 2026
A report recently released by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive (though officially nonpartisan) think tank, found that tripling union membership in the U.S. would deliver a 14.5 percent raise for the median worker, amounting to more than $7,700 in annual earnings.
Orlando Weekly
August 10, 2026
$2,358 per person.
It’s a number that shows the impacts of President Donald Trump’s destructive economic agenda and bigoted anti-immigrant agenda in stark relief.
According to a new tool launched by the Economic Policy Institute, that’s the whopping amount American taxpayers are shelling out on average to fund Trump’s mass deportation push.
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On its website, the institute lists various things that this huge pot of money could be going toward instead. For example, the organization estimated the money could fund 931,963 school teachers, more than 1 million firefighters or just under 12 million Americans on Medicaid.
MS NOW
August 10, 2026
Nearly all Black adults—regardless of their education level—experienced a deterioration of their financial position last year, including adults with a college education, according to SHED. The share of Black individuals with higher education doing okay or living comfortably declined by nearly seven percentage points last year, the Economic Policy Institute reported.
The Root
August 10, 2026
Ben Zipperer, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, argues that finance’s employment slowdown has everything to do with higher interest rates starting in the second half of 2022, and little to do with AI.
“Very few employment changes right now are due to AI. Were AI driving a substantial reorganization of the labor market, we’d be seeing much faster productivity growth than the current slow rates,” Zipperer texted NOTUS.
NOTUS
August 10, 2026
Sebastian Hickey, an analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, disagrees. “There continues to be an orthodox view that the minimum wage is destructive to economic outcomes, but 90 per cent of high-quality studies show that it doesn’t increase unemployment,” he said.
The Times (UK)
August 10, 2026
Some economists, such as Ben Zipperer from the Economic Policy Institute, said AI’s impact on jobs has so far been more limited than what some doomsday scenarios initially predicted.
Fortune
August 10, 2026
“People leave the labor force because they don’t see opportunities for themselves in it, and so they’re not actively looking for a job,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute.
CBS Moneywatch
August 10, 2026
The sector that lost the most jobs in July was local government education. That category is mostly K-12 public school roles, which were down almost 50,000.
Such a sharp drop could be a flaw in “seasonal adjustment,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She said many teachers are laid off in the summer.
“At the same time, local education employment has fallen every month since March,” Gould said — as in, when school is still in session. “We know that there have been funding cuts at the Department of Education. Worse budget cuts may be coming, and that could cause even more uncertainty about hiring or keeping teachers on staff.”
Marketplace
August 10, 2026
In August 2019, there were more than 223,000 U.S. school bus drivers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The research group reported in August 2025 that there were only 202,000 drivers, a 9.5 percent decrease.
My Leader Paper (Missouri)
August 10, 2026