Media clips
-
(Also in Money News, MSN Money, al, htrnews.com, dnj.com, WUSA9, Fox News, The Telegraph)
Some of that decline comes from an aging country in which more people are retiring. But the share of working adults among the overall population is “still bouncing around at the bottom where it was during the worst of the recession” — evidence that meaningful wage gains across the economy are unlikely, O’Keefe said.The recovery hasn’t kept up with the expanding U.S. population. Researchers at the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimate that 7 million more jobs would have been needed to keep up with population growth.
The pain has been concentrated largely among lower- and middle-income workers, according to an analysis by the institute.
AP June 11, 2014 -
(Also in The Republic, Epoch Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Boston Globe, Times Leader
There’s a flip side to that, though, Van Horn suggests: “As the economy gets stronger, as it continues to grow, eventually some of those discouraged workers will come back into the labor market, and we’ll have a higher labor-participation rate.”But that hasn’t happened — yet.
“We know that the reason unemployment is so high right now is pretty simple: employers haven’t seen demand for their stuff pick up in a way that would require them to bring on more workers, put that factory back on line, get more people to work,” said Heidi Shierholz, chief economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented Washington think-tank.
“It’s going to be this way for a while. We’re in a long slog,” Shierholz said, noting that the recession of 2007-2009 was the harshest downturn since the 1930s Great Depression.
AP June 11, 2014 -
Government payrolls have shrunk, taking middle class pay with them. Local school districts have 255,400 fewer employees. The U.S. Postal Service has shed 194,700 employees.
And during the economic recovery, more people have left the job market than entered it. Just 58.9 percent of working-age Americans have jobs, down from 62.7 percent at the start of the recession.
Some of that decline comes from an aging country in which more people are retiring. But the share of working adults among the overall population is “still bouncing around at the bottom where it was during the worst of the recession” — evidence that meaningful wage gains across the economy are unlikely, O’Keefe said.
The recovery hasn’t kept up with the expanding U.S. population. Researchers at the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimate that 7 million more jobs would have been needed to keep up with population growth.
The News-Gazette June 11, 2014 -
Despite what the Wall Street Journal says, the tide stopped rising for the average worker in 1970. (Economic Policy Institute, updated by WCEG)
Moore and Vedder also assume, for some reason, that blue states invariably have liberal economic policies. One wonders where they get that idea. For example, California may be blue, but until very recently economic policymaking in Sacramento was hamstrung by the strong veto held by conservative Republicans in the Legislature.Finally, Price contradicts their assertion that “John F. Kennedy had it right that a rising tide lifts all boats.” This may have been correct when Kennedy said it, but it changed shortly after his presidency. As is shown by the chart above, first compiled by the Economic Policy Institute and updated and reproduced by Price, average wages started diverging from productivity gains in 1970. The gap has grown inexorably in the four decades since.
Los Angeles Times June 11, 2014 -
One newly trained butler was hired last year in the United Arab Emirates for $158,000, the BBC reports. That alone would place the butler in the top 8 percent of earners in the U.S., although of course that’s a mere pittance to the top .01 percent, who have a net worth of $100 million.
And the top 1 percent — as well as the top .1 percent and top .01 percent — have seen their wealth grow by staggering leaps. From 1979 to 2007, the top 1 percent took in over half of the total increase in U.S. income, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Worldwide, the number of millionaires rose to a record 12 million people in 2012, a jump of more than 9 percent, according to the World Wealth Report.
CBS Moneywatch June 11, 2014 -
The soft economy has forced many economists to reduce their yield forecasts.
Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, a research firm, says wage gains will pick up this year and bond yields will move higher.
But even he has cut his forecast for the 10-year yield to 3 percent at year end, from the 3.25 percent he forecast earlier. If he is right, that would leave the yield unchanged for the full year. Next year, he thinks the 10-year yield will edge up to just 3.5 percent, and he considers himself above the consensus.
Economists were pleased that the economy created 217,000 jobs in May. That sent U.S. payrolls to a record high. It was the first time since the late-1990s boom that the economy created more than 200,000 jobs a month for four consecutive months.
Nice as that was, job gains didn’t keep up with population growth. The economy would need to create 7 million more jobs to account for the increase in working-age people since 2008, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank supported by labor unions.
MSN Money June 11, 2014 -
Economists are somewhat divided over the broader impact of raising the overtime floor, a proposal that the Labor Department is still hammering out. Once they come up with their recommendations on how to make overtime pay available to more workers, the business community will have an opportunity to weigh in during a 90-day public-comment period.
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., recommended in November that the floor be raised to $984 a week, or nearly $25 an hour—a change that he says could help as many as five million salaried employees.
Yet Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington says that even if the threshold were raised as high as $20 per hour, just a few hundred thousand workers would be newly eligible for overtime. “This has been hugely overblown, the impact is likely to be relatively limited,” Mr. Baker adds.
Wall Street Journal June 11, 2014 -
Back in 1979, notes a new Economic Policy Institute report released last week, households in America’s statistical middle — the 20 percent of households making more than the nation’s poorest 40 percent and less than the nation’s most affluent 40 percent — averaged $16.72, after inflation, per hour worked. In 2012, households in this same statistical middle averaged $16.26 per hour.
Over roughly that same period, EPI analysts add, America’s top one percent of income-earners doubled their share of the nation’s income from paychecks, dividends, rent and business earnings, from 7.2 to 14.2 percent.
Moyers & Company June 11, 2014 -
To Dave in his piece, and also used some of Larry’s data:
Note: Most of the statistics come from David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute. His calculations include so-called spillover effects: Minimum wage researchers have found that employers often increase the pay of those earning slightly above the new minimum to roughly maintain their relative wage structure. A Congressional Budget Office report gets similar results to Mr. Cooper’s. For example, the budget office finds that 53 percent of affected workers work at least 35 hours per week, compared with 54 percent in the Cooper study.
…
As with the population as a whole, low-wage workers are more educated than in the past. In the late 1960s, less than half had finished high school and only 17 percent had attended any college at all.
The New York Times June 11, 2014 -
First, the new data: Americans with four-year college degrees made 98% more an hour, on average, in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89% five years earlier, 85% a decade earlier and 64% in the early 1980s. These figures are based on an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute and first reported in The New York Times.
Researchers conclude that over the long run not going to college will cost you about $500,000. That’s double the penalty for not getting a degree three decades ago. “The decision not to attend college for fear that it’s a bad deal is among the most economically irrational decisions anybody could make in 2014,” says The Times.
Time June 11, 2014