Paige Gance of Reuters looked at EPI’s Family Budget Calculator and wrote, “It costs almost twice as much to live in New York City as it does in Marshall County, Mississippi, according to figures published Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. The median cost of modest living for an American family of four in the United States can be found in Newaygo County, Michigan, where $63,000 covers food, transportation, housing, child care, healthcare and taxes – but no extras such as vacations, eating out, or savings.”
Reuters
July 5, 2013
In an op-ed for the Providence Journal, EPI Economist Monique Morrissey took on Rhode Island’s pension reform plan, which was the subject of two recent EPI papers. “Here’s something you probably don’t know about the new hybrid retirement plan for teachers and other government workers,” she wrote. “It actually increases costs for taxpayers even as it cuts benefits for most workers.”
Providence Journal
July 5, 2013
Fast Co.Exist called EPI’s new website inequality.is a “visually-interesting riff on the theme” of income inequality, writing, “Rising income inequality is getting more difficult to ignore. Inequality.is, a fun interactive website, walks you through the problem (and helps give you ideas about the solution).”
Fast Co.Exist
July 5, 2013
But Americans like Mr. Doernberg and the powerful labor lobby say that what the tech industry really wants is to depress wages and bring in more pliant, less costly temporary workers from overseas. If there is such a talent shortage, they ask, why are wages for most engineers not rising faster? Labor groups have pushed for a requirement to offer jobs to equally qualified Americans before hiring foreigners, a provision that the industry has fiercely resisted.
The New York Times
June 28, 2013
Most fast-food workers make close to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, putting many of them below the official poverty line of $23,283 for a family of four. At the hearing, Elise Gould, the director of health policy and research for the Economic Policy Institute, argued that the minimum wage doesn’t come close to meeting the needs of a family living in New York City.
According to a budget calculator tool devised by EPI, a two-parent, two-child family in New York City needs a minimum of $93,502 to pay for child care, housing, food, transportation, health care, taxes, and miscellaneous necessities like clothes and household supplies.
The Huffington Post
June 28, 2013
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank known for its liberal bent, said that full-time minimum wage workers in the industry earn $15,080 a year.
The 1 million people working as restaurant cooks last year made $11.20 an hour on average, earning $23,300 over the year, according to the Labor Department. California, Texas and New York are among the states with the highest concentrations of such workers.
Los Angeles Times
June 28, 2013
It’s not really surprising to learn that full-time restaurant employees making minimum wage aren’t doing too great. What is surprising—and reasonably jaw-dropping—is just how much more money CEOs at the largest restaurant companies made in 2012 than those employees.
A new study from the Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey shows that a minimum-wage employee makes in a full year much less than an average top restaurant CEO makes in one day. The actual numbers: A full-time minimum-wage employee made $15,080 in 2012. The average top restaurant CEO earned $11,884,000. That’s 788 times as much as a minimum wage employee made.
National Journal
June 28, 2013
Plenty of pundits have responded to Mankiw’s thesis, but none more effectively than Josh Bivens and Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, who also contributed a paper to the special issue of the JEP.
It turns out that it’s not so much what you know, as Mankiw argues, but how much power you have, especially the power to extract economic rents. Bivens and Mishel show that the increase in the incomes of the top 1% over the past 30 years owes more to successful rent-seeking than it does to efficient and competitive markets rewarding education and skills.
MarketWatch
June 28, 2013
Studies have found that American students are disproportionately disadvantaged, compared with those of high-performing nations on international tests.
The New York Times
June 27, 2013
Between 1979 and 2009, the top 1% of Americans saw their income grow by 240.5%, while the bottom 20% only say a 10.8% increase in gains. Reducing the inequality could significantly alter the economy, said Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist, Sunday on Weekends with Alex Witt.
Bernstein said that yes, manufacturing is highly productive and causes overall economic growth but robotics take jobs away from people. The Economic Policy Institute reminds us that “you can have all the growth you want but if it’s not equitably distributed then a lot of families end up falling behind even as the economy improves,” he says.
MSNBC.com
June 27, 2013