Media clips
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The Court’s decision in Brown sparked a disruption of white supremacy and Jim Crow in the South and forced the federal government to pass civil and voting rights legislation.
However, a new report by the Economic Policy Institute makes the argument that while the 1954 Supreme Court decision did achieve the goal of raising awareness about the inherent segregation and unfairness in the separate but equal concept, it has failed miserably at its central mission: to desegregate schools in the United States.
The report states, “[B]y focusing the nation’s attention on subjugation of blacks, it helped fuel a wave of freedom rides, sit-ins, voter registration efforts, and other actions leading ultimately to civil rights legislation in the late 1950s and 1960s. But Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission—to undo the school segregation that persists as a central feature of American public education today.”
The Grio April 22, 2014 -
“No politician at this point wants to be defending the performance of the economy today, and you shouldn’t be. It’s still really bad,” said Josh Bivens, director of policy and research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Hill April 22, 2014 -
Mainstream economists have been disgracefully slow in responding to this historic shift in who gets what. When Larry Mishel and his colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute began reporting on the growing gap between workers’ productivity and their pay in the mid-1980s, the first reaction of the economist establishment was denial. When they could no longer ignore the data, economists blamed the workers themselves for not being educated enough for the new information age.
The Nation April 22, 2014 -
The case essentially alleges white-collar wage theft. The engineers were not victimized by the usual violations of labor law, but by improper hiring practices against their interests. The result, however, was the same: Money that would have flowed to workers in the form of wages went instead into corporate coffers and from there to executives and shareholders.
When wage theft against low-wage workers is combined with that against highly paid workers, a bad problem becomes much worse. Data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute show that in 2012, the Department of Labor helped 308,000 workers recover $280 million in back pay for wage-theft violations — nearly double the amount stolen that year in robberies on the street, at banks, gas stations and convenience stores.
The New York Times April 22, 2014 -
“Because sales taxes are already highly regressive, the deduction makes them more so because federal income tax filers on the lower end of the income distribution do not itemize and hence cannot claim the benefit,” Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute explained in February. “Further, the provision (like all tax deductions) is worth more the higher a filer’s marginal tax rate, and this skews the benefits to high-income taxpayers.” In other words, high-income earners benefit more from the credit as they are more likely to itemize their taxes and the provision is worth more at higher marginal rates.
MSNBC April 18, 2014 -
Piketty presented his ideas during his April 15 talk (a fitting day to talk about taxes, as it’s the day when some 154 million Americans file their tax returns and pay around $1.4 trillion in federal income taxes) at an event held at Washington’s Economic Policy Institute and co-sponsored by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Piketty has just published a book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” in which he measures income inequality in some three dozen countries. Because he was in Washington, his talk largely focused on the gap in the United States and what to do about it.
The Washington Post April 18, 2014 -
Sixty years ago next month, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ended school segregation in the South, but the impact of that ruling isn’t readily apparent in schools today. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute argues that the Brown decision helped launch the civil rights movement and brought attention to the unfairness of separate but equal, in the long run it failed to achieve its main goal — desegregating schools. “The typical black student now attends a school where only 29 percent of his or her fellow students are white, down from 36 percent in 1980,” according to the Institute’s Richard Rothstein. A large part of the reason that America’s schools are segregated is because America’s neighborhoods are segregated.
While the circumstances of black students have improved dramatically since 1954, they have improved for white students as well. And even if low-income schools gain access to the resources they need — “high-quality early childhood programs… high-quality after-school and summer programs; full-service school health clinics; more skilled teachers; and smaller classes” — more integrated schools are key. Rothstein argues that fixing lapses in neighborhood integration policies is key to improving Brown v. Board‘s results. “Education policy is housing policy.”
The Wire April 18, 2014 -
“Every time you hear someone say ‘I can’t find the workers I need,’ add the phrase ‘at the wage I want to pay’,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., economic research organization.
When Ms. Shierholz compared the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the number of job openings by industry with data from the U.S. Census on the number of people who are unemployed by industry, she found there are more unemployed people than jobs in every industry.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette April 18, 2014 -
The Journal, being the literal journal of Wall Street, takes great pains to articulate the anguish of the wealthy while downplaying that contributing factor. “Higher earners’ share of the overall federal tax burden has been climbing fairly steadily,” theJournal‘s John McKinnon writes, “even before lawmakers negotiated the fiscal-cliff deal at the end of 2012.” He tells the story of a business owner that saw her taxes “rise from around $600,000 in 2012 to more than $700,000.” That’s a steep increase. And, McKinnon continues, it was “driven mainly by changes in investment-tax rates on the $2 million in dividends she received from her firm.” Oh. Well. Sorry? “She was really shocked by the increase,” her attorney said. “That one hit home.” Which home? Not the Aspen one, I hope.
It’s in the fifth paragraph that McKinnon mentions the role of increased incomes. “The share of overall income for the top 1%, now at around 17%, according to the Tax Policy Center,” he writes, “has roughly doubled since the early 1980s,” according to the Congressional Budget Office. Contrast the Journal‘s graph of how taxes on the top 1 percent have increased (at left, below) with the change in income by group as plotted by the Economic Policy Institute (at right, purloined from The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson).
The Wire April 15, 2014 -
“This year the U.S. economy is sending clear signs that not only are STEM jobs growing but the highly skilled shortages masked by the economic crisis are still there as well,” Compete America said in a statement after the 2015 cap was reached. “The U.S. needs to move on to the business of fixing its highly skilled immigration system before it loses more of the top foreign professional and job creators that make America’s fastest growing industries competitive.”
Facebook and Google might not be getting the lion’s share of the available H-1B visas, but that’s because under the current system those visas are going to large, and in some cases off-shore, consulting and IT firms, said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.
NBC News April 14, 2014