Media clips
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It’s a genuinely bare-bones budget. It takes a wage of nearly $12 an hour earned by 1 2/3 full-time workers to reach an income of $40,000 a year for a family with two adults and two children. More than 50 million workers receive less than that pay or are unemployed and trying to find work.
To be sure, there have been increases in wages over the years, but they have gone mostly to the very top. Even for the American worker right in the middle, pay has risen by barely 10% in real terms over the last 40 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Contrast that with the near tripling of pay for the top 1%.
Los Angeles Times October 24, 2013 -
The right has long had a set of institutions that serve a similar role. The best known of these is the Heritage Foundation, which after its establishment in 1973 helped craft the conservative policy revolution that started with the election Ronald Reagan and crested, finally, during the presidency of George W. Bush. Heritage served multiple roles during that span—as an incubator of ideas, a supplier of arguments, and a source of talent. The brains and money behind Heritage saw the think-tank as an antidote to the prevailing liberal consensus in Washington, as put forth by places like the Brookings Institution (and academia generally) and reinforced by the New York Times(and rest of the media establishment). But there was a certain irony in this mandate: Whatever the ideological sympathies of these supposedly liberal institutions, or the people within them, they were not avowedly political organizations. On the contrary, they strove to maintain—and, I would argue, succeeded in maintaining—a strict posture of non-partisanship and even non-ideology. Other think-tanks and organizations had more clearly progressive outlooks, but even they tended to be heavily analytical and/or narrowly focused. They did invaluable work. (The Economic Policy Institute‘s annual State of Working America may be the single most important non-government report on inequality.) But one niche remained unfilled.
The New Republic October 24, 2013 -
Week in Charts: India has fastest inflation of G20, and marijuana license fees
Still recovering from the all-night kegger your colleagues threw to celebrate annual Boss’s Day on Wednesday? Here’s a statistic to sober you up: The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 273 in 2012, down from 383 in 2000, but far higher than 20 in 1965, according to analysts at the Economic Policy Institute. Those statistics are based on the 350 publicly owned firms with the largest revenue each year, and take into account realized options.
Wall Street Journal October 24, 2013 -
The gap between skyrocketing CEO pay and relatively stagnant compensation for everyone else has been widening for decades. While annual CEO compensation increased by 726.7% between 1978 and 2011, average worker compensation only went up 5.7% during the same time, according to a 2012 study by the Economic Policy Institute.
MSNBC October 24, 2013 -
The recession could be the defining event in the lives of millennials. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, young college graduates faced an unemployment rate of 10.1 percent in 2011, but an underemployment rate almost twice that. Furthermore, pay for new graduates decreased 8.5 percent between 2000 and 2012.
The Washington Post October 24, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute points out a big hole in the BLS calculations:
In today’s labor market, the unemployment rate drastically understates the weakness of job opportunities. This is due to the existence of a large pool of “missing workers”—potential workers who, because of weak job opportunities, are neither employed nor actively seeking a job. In other words, these are people who would be either working or looking for work if job opportunities were significantly stronger. Because jobless workers are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work, these “missing workers” are not reflected in the unemployment rate.
By EPI’s gauge, there were in August, 4.97 million “missing workers.” If they were seeking work, the unemployment rate for that month would have been 10.1 percent, not the actually reported 7.3 percent.
Daily Kos October 24, 2013 -
The Labor Department announced Tuesday that the unemployment rate took a dip last month, falling slightly to 7.2 percent from 7.3 percent in August.
Not accounted for in that calculation were the more than 5 million people who have given up looking for work. Known as “missing workers,” these Americans have vanished from the job market and subsequently the official calculation of the country’s unemployment rate. As you can see, their ranks continue to swell:
As noted by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (who produced the two graphics in this post), if these missing persons were counted in our nation’s jobless rate, the situation would look a lot worse — like above-10-percent bad:
The Huffington Post October 24, 2013 -
Let’s start with the basics: 148,000 jobs were added in September. “If we were to put the 148,000 in context, it’s lower than the previous 12 month average, which was 185,000 jobs per month,” says Elise Gould from the Economic Policy Institute. “We also see that the unemployment rate was little changed. It went from 7.3 percent in August to 7.2 percent in September.”
Gould says that overall, this report tells us that the U.S. is far from a full recovery. But, looking at the jobs numbers from month-to-month doesn’t always give the most accurate assessment of the economy. The yearly data often paints the clearest picture.
Marketplace October 24, 2013 -
An increase will add vitality to the D.C. economy by putting money in the pockets of people who are most likely to spend it. A $10.10 wage — the rate proposed for the entire country by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) — would help 36,000 D.C. workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The estimated $58 million in increased wages would be spent at markets, clothing shops and hardware stores, aiding D.C. businesses large and small. The direct and indirect effects would help thousands of children. And arguments that minimum-wage earners are dominated by teenagers don’t hold up to scrutiny. Almost all affected workers — 95 percent — would be age 20 or older. Economists have studied the impact of minimum wage increases for decades. And the vast weight of the research finds that they raise workers’ take home pay without leading to notable job cuts.
The Washington Post October 18, 2013 -
The sequester is merely one manifestation of Congress’s love for austerity in the post-recession era. From the inception, recovery programs have never been as large or robust as they needed to be, despite evidence that even harsher austerity regimes kept much of Europe mired in slumps.
The Economic Policy Institute displays the harvest graphically (see above). The chart shows that the recovery has barely progressed, falling well below the growth of every recovery period since before the 1980s. Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of EPI have more here. If post-2008 government spending had matched that of earlier recoveries, 5 million more people would be employed today.
Los Angeles Times October 18, 2013