Media clips
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Education Inaccessible
Further, some teens need to work to help earn their way through college. When jobs become scarce, education can become inaccessible, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington research group funded in part by labor unions.
“Teen jobs matter a lot less if you go to college, but having a work history may be the difference between putting yourself through school or not,” she said.
Bloomberg February 26, 2014 -
Elise Gould, a Ph.D. economist who directs health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, told me in an e-mail that “Fairness in health care is about what kind of society we would like to create for ourselves. Efficiency is about making sure that health care is provided in a timely and cost-effective manner. The ACA promotes both fairness . . . by making health care more accessible and affordable . . . and efficiency in various ways, such as increasing the availability of preventive medicine, reducing the use of last resort health care (ER visits) relative to health maintenance and treatment at earlier stages of illness.”
Those are good points, but I was still wanted to know whether the U.S. has a moral obligation to provide health insurance.
The Washington Post February 26, 2014 -
At the 3:30 mark
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart’s trade deficit with china, between 2001 and 2006, well, it helped destroy 200,000 jobs in this country. An estimated 133,000 of those were manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing is a long-term investment, with the potential for long-term benefits for any economy.The Ed Show February 26, 2014 -
Since the Great Recession, reports of rising income inequality in the U.S. have pretty much followed the same basic storyline: The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. So on, so forth.
It’s easy to associate the economic downturn with the 1 percent’s seemingly meteoric rise in wealth leading up to the recession, but it was hardly an overnight occurrence. The rich have been on an unprecedented tear for decades, as illustrated in a new analysis of IRS income data by the new report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Indeed, the widening income disparity has become so acute that President Obama called it the “defining challenge of our time’ in his recent state of the union address.
Since 1979, the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 19%, while the average income of the top 1 percent grew more than 10 times as much—by 200.5%.Yahoo Finance February 21, 2014 -
But some liberal economists argue that the bursting of the dotcom bubble and later the great recession laid bare the legacy of NAFTA. According to a 2006report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the treaty led to the loss of an estimated one million American jobs in its first decade. A 2012 poll found that 53 percent of Americans wanted the government to “do whatever is necessary” to amend or leave NAFTA, while only 15 percent wanted to remain in NAFTA as-is.
The Atlantic February 21, 2014 -
The minimum wage has potent implications for our national discussion of inequality and upward mobility. Republicans have been paying lip service to the idea of reducing inequality and increasing upward mobility, but so far policy proposals have been sparse. The minimum wage is a perfect solution. It requires little government spending and is unlikely to have any significant effect on the deficit. It certainly doesn’t violate the “no new taxes” pledge. So a minimum wage hike would be the perfect conservative solution to inequality: targeted at working people (rather than the unemployed), minimal bureaucracy and no new revenue for the government. And studies show it would work. Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute finds that the declining value of the minimum wage has been a major driver of increased inequality. Citing the work of David Autor, he finds that more than half of the growing divide between workers at the median and workers at the lowest 10% of the income distribution can be explained by a declining minimum wage.
Salon February 21, 2014 -
Sure, Davidoff is right that sky-high CEO pay deserves a broader look across the board. After all, it’s a big driver of income inequality. As the Economic Policy Institute has found, “Executives, and workers in finance, accounted for 58 percent of the expansion of income for the top 1 percent and 67 percent of the increase in income for the top 0.1 percent from 1979 to 2005.” Not only that, but taxpayers are subsidizing these big pay packages thanks to a loophole allowing corporations to write off CEO pay that is “performance based.” (Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, has introduced legislation to fix that particular problem, but given what the Republican-held House is interested in these days, I wouldn’t expect it to come up for a vote anytime soon.)
US News and World Report February 21, 2014 -
Since then, according to Doug Hall, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network at the Economic Policy Institute, other economists have done similar studies at the state and county level when a minimum wage change makes labor more expensive in one jurisdiction than in a neighboring one.
The chart above shows the results of more than 1,400 different studies. The x-axis shows the size of the employment effect, and the y-axis shows that statistical power of the analysis.
The Fiscal Times February 21, 2014 -
Economist at the Economic Policy Institute Heidi Shierholz says that despite projecting job loss, the CBO’s latest report on the minimum wage hike also shows how lower wage workers will
The Hill February 21, 2014 -
On Thursday afternoon, the faculty senate will review this proposal to tie the president’s salary to that of the school’s lowest-paid employees. Such workers at the public liberal arts college currently make$24,500 a year, which would translate into a $245,000 salary cap for the president — roughly $80,000 less than Ian Newbould, the college’s interim president, presently makes.
The move comes at a time of budget difficulties for the college, which lost roughly $3.5 million in expected tuition this academic year when it failed to fill enrollment numbers for its freshman class. It also comes at a time when higher-ed costs are ballooning across the United States and when executive pay is under increased scrutiny. This fall, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted to propose a rule requiring companies to disclose the ratio of CEO pay compared to their median worker’s. In 2012, according to the Economic Policy Institute, that ratio was 273-1.
The Washington Post February 21, 2014