Media clips
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On Thursday’s edition of MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner, Gabriel Snyder, editor of The Atlantic’s Wire magazine, cited EPI’s research showing the close relationship between earning the minimum wage and being in poverty, calling it an amazing chart.
MSNBC December 6, 2013 -
Cowan and Kessler’s argument, on both the policy and the politics, has already been thoroughly demolished (see here and here, among other places). But what’s fascinating is the swift and decisive pushback their op-ed generated.
MSNBC December 6, 2013 -
A 2012 study published by the Employment Policies Institute found that states that increase the Earned Income Tax Credit by 1 percent saw a 1 percent drop in state poverty rates.
Others disagree. Christian Dorsey, director of external and governmental affairs for the Economic Policy Institute, said tax credits should not let employers skimp on wages.
“Businesses have a responsibility to pay workers enough to keep them out of poverty,” Dorsey said. “The idea that we would simply not look at wages is passing off the problem to someone else.”
Reuters December 6, 2013 -
In a powerful report published this year by the Economic Policy Institute, author Algernon Austin notes: “…The average unemployment rate for blacks over the past 50 years, at 11.6 percent, is considerably higher than the average rate during recessions of 6.7 percent.” Even worse, Austin noted that over the last 50 years, the black unemployment rate remained at a level either even or higher than during a typical recession.
The Daily Beast December 6, 2013 -
But others criticized attempts to shape the results to serve a particular reform agenda and downplayed the significance of the test. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute and Martin Camoy of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education attacked Duncan for holding a day-long event with policy experts whom they argue share the administration’s thinking.
“Those with different interpretations of international test scores will see the reports only after the headlines have become history,” they wrote in a blog post.
Both authored a study last year pointing out that PISA doesn’t provide data broken down by socio-economic groups until well after the initial release, and the level of inequality in the U.S. helps explain its mediocre scores. When controlling for income, the U.S. ranks far better, they argued. The OECD, in turn, acknowledges differences in background have a “significant impact.”
Governing December 5, 2013 -
Critics of the media circus surrounding PISA Day, like the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented think tank, contend that politicians, business leaders, and journalists like to focus on PISA rankings because PISA is the test on which American students do the worst—and thus the results paint a portrait of failing American schools that are responsible for our economic woes. These critics point out that some nations that have historically done well on international exams, like Iceland, were especially hard hit by the recession, and thus there is little reason to believe that better performance on these tests would aid the U.S. economy. After all, we are already producing more college graduates than we can employ in good jobs.
Richard Rothstein and Martin Carnoy write:
Today, threats to the nation’s future prosperity come much less from flaws in our education system than from insufficiently stimulative fiscal policies which tolerate excessive unemployment, wasting much of the education our young people have acquired; an outdated infrastructure: regulatory and tax policies that reward speculation more than productivity; an over-extended military; declining public investment in research and innovation; a wasteful and inefficient health care system; and the fact that typical workers and their families, no matter how well educated, do not share in the fruits of productivity growth as they once did.
That statement contains a lot of sense, and gets to an important underlying point: that test results and education policies are too often considered in isolation from other social and economic realities.
Slate December 5, 2013 -
This graph, from the Economic Policy Institute’s David Cooper, neatly illustrates the minimum wage’s precarious relationship to the poverty line. The dotted blue line at right shows what would happen if Congress were to pass the current bill proposed by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller (their bill would gradually raise the wage in three steps):
All of the historic dollar values are converted into 2013 dollars. Historically, the poverty line has remained relatively constant.
It’s important to note that families living just above the federal poverty line are still struggling by many measures. But as long as the federal government bothers to identify a basic income threshold essential to scrape by, it seems only fair to hold the same government to that standard in its minimum wage policy.The Atlantic December 5, 2013 -
But despite his skepticism, Baker said there was reason to be encouraged. He and other liberal activists applauded Obama’s embrace of the minimum wage ahead of an expected Senate vote to raise pay to more than $10 per hour.
Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, said he was also pleased to see Obama insist on the need for broad-based wage growth — something absent from his summertime economic push.
The Hill December 5, 2013 -
After proposing an increase to $9 in February, Obama last month endorsed a Senate bill that would raise the rate to $10.10 over two years.
“The president is talking about what I think the country ought to be talking about,” says economist Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based research group that focuses on the needs of lower-income workers. “It does reflect a shift in the center of gravity.”
Bloomberg December 5, 2013 -
As the president pointed out:
“The problem is, that alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years. A child born in the top 20 percent has about a two in three chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20 percent has a less than one in 20 shot at making it to the top. He’s 10 times likelier to stay where he is.”
The Economic Policy Institute’s “State of Working American, 12th Edition,” released last year, echoed that sentiment, finding that “U.S. mobility is among the lowest of major industrialized economies.”
The New York Times December 5, 2013