Media clips
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The answer, if this pseudo-argument deserves one, is that $15 is at least where the current minimum hourly wage of $7.25 would be if it had kept up with worker productivity since the 1960s, according to various experts.
For example, the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that, if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth since 1968, as it did for the two decades before, it would now be $18.67 per hour. Ah, the good old days.
That figure makes President Barack Obama’s request for a raise to $10.10, after asking for $9 earlier in the year, sound modest.
The Chicago Tribune December 13, 2013 -
Some of the improvement in the employment picture results from people dropping out of or not entering the workforce because of weak job opportunities, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that studies the issues of low- and middle-income workers…..
But the CBO also said that extending the program would increase direct spending by consumers by the same amount — $25.7 billion over 2014-15. An extension also would increase government revenues modestly, about $500 million, over the 2014-23 period, the office said.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, a benefits extension creates spending that supports 310,000 jobs — jobs that will be lost if the program is discontinued.
NBC News December 13, 2013 -
Josh Bivens, Researcher and Policy Director at the Economic Policy Institute: At this point, the agonizingly slow recovery from the official end of the Great Recession can be almost entirely explained by austerity in the public sector. The chart below shows growth in real public spending (state, local, and federal, and including transfer payments like unemployment insurance and Social Security, as well as direct spending like hiring teachers to staff public schools) following the trough of recessions since 1954.
At this point in the recovery, public spending following recovery from the Great Recession is by far the weakest on record. Particularly instructive is comparing the past 4 years with the 4 years following the recession that ended in 1982. That early 1980’s recession was extraordinarily steep – unemployment rose to a higher peak than during the Great Recession. Yet 4 years following its end all economic slack it caused was gone, whereas today’s economy is far from fully recovered. Yet if public spending following the Great Recession had mirrored its trajectory following the recession ending in 1982, the U.S. economy would essentially be back to pre-Great Recession health.
The Atlantic December 13, 2013 -
For example, the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that, if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth since 1968, as it did for the two decades before, it would now be $18.67 per hour. Ah, the good old days.
The Chicago Tribune December 11, 2013 -
The Wall Street Journal produced a video (see below) surveying the economy and as the video attests, the economy has seen recovery from the worst pits it reached in 2010. Back then, the unemployment rate stood as high as 10 percent; at latest tally in November, the figure stood at 7.0 percent, as was documented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But as Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal and non-profit Washington D.C.-based research organization, the Economic Policy Institute, recently told AOL Jobs, “We’ve actually made very few improvements to the labor market. You also have to consider all the jobs we should have been adding over these past five years, instead of trying to recoup the jobs that have been lost.”
AOL Jobs December 11, 2013 -
How much does growth stand to suffer? Well, according to the U.S. Labor Department, the cost of extending federal benefits through 2014 would be about $25 billion. But the economic impact of cutting them off would be larger. That’s because the unemployed reliably spend the benefits they get, creating a “multiplier effect” in the economy. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics (MCO), estimates that every dollar of unemployment benefits generates about $1.55 in economic activity, meaning that the federal benefits set to end later this month will cost the economy about $39 billion in spending next year (which would, in turn, have supported 310,000 jobs, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute).
Bloomberg December 11, 2013 -
“There is a need for Social Security to be growing, not shrinking, because the other parts of the retirement stool have fallen apart,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization.
Many Americans are on course to struggle financially in retirement even though the overall amount of money being set aside for retirement is growing. As of mid-2013, Americans had more than $20 trillion in retirement assets through 401(k)-type plans, traditional defined benefit pensions, IRAs, and annuities, according to a report released earlier this month by the Investment Companies Institute, which represents mutual funds, and the American Benefits Council, and the American Council of Life Insurers.The Washington Post December 11, 2013 -
Embracing the urge to say something about the “meaning” of PISA to the extreme, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took the release of the scores as an opportunity to stage PISA Day, a 5-hour (!) media event involving other groups who, as economists at the Economic Policy Institute explain, generally support a political agenda favoring policies that have been branded as “reform.”
The Washington Post December 9, 2013 -
A study published this year by Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, found that much of the difference between U.S. scores and those of high-ranking nations is because the United States has a higher proportion of disadvantaged students. But the researchers found that the scores of the most disadvantaged U.S. students have been improving markedly over the years, while scores for their counterparts in many top-ranked nations have fallen precipitously.
In contrast, the highest-scoring U.S. math students are nowhere near their peers in top-ranking countries, Carnoy said.
Los Angeles Times December 9, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., economic research organization, issued its monthly report Friday on the “missing workers,” people who normally would be in the labor force but have sidelined themselves because of poor economic conditions. The report estimates 5.6 million people should be in the workforce but are not. If those people were actively seeking work, the unemployment rate would be 10.3 percent.
Pittsburg Post-Gazette December 9, 2013