Media clips
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On average, Wal-Mart pays its workers $12.67 an hour — which means that a huge number of its 1.4 million U.S. employees make a good deal less than that. By paying so little, the Bentonville behemoth compels thousands of its employees to use food stamps to feed their families and Medicaid to pay their doctor bills. It compels taxpayers to pick up a tab that wouldn’t even exist if the company paid its workers enough to get them out of poverty.
The Washington Post July 19, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute posted a blog this week comparing the federal minimum wage to productivity rates. According to the blog, which also contained a chart based on figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth since 1968, the wage would be $18.67 per hour. And if median wages had tracked productivity increases, it would be $28.42 instead of closer to $16 today
Sacramento Business Journal July 16, 2013 -
“I’m most worried about this in places like government, where it’s important to have people representing different income brackets,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
“But the only people who have the experience to get a job on Capital Hill are the people who can afford it — the people whose parents were able to support them through their unpaid internships. That’s very bad for our democracy.”
Pittsburgh Post Gazette July 16, 2013 -
The basic premise is that Americans don’t need things like food stamps or the minimum wage to help them, because they’re already so much better off than poor people in the world around them. The Economic Policy Institute can’t help but disagree. Its Family Budget Calculator notes that a family of three would require an income of $45,000 a year to cover basic needs in Simpson County, Miss., the U.S. region with the lowest cost of living for a family of that size.
MSN Money July 16, 2013 -
It takes $88,615 per year. That’s how much money a new report by the Economic Policy Institute suggests a family of four (two parents and two kids) would need to live comfortably in this area.
EPI looked at a number of factors, including housing, food, transportation, child care, health care, other necessities and taxes. When you add all that up, the District (including the surrounding suburbs in Maryland and Virginia) ranks second in the nation, just behind New York City ($93,502). Boston, Philadelphia and Milwaukee round out the top five, respectively. The cheapest place for a family of four: Marshall County, Miss., where the cost is almost half that at $48,144.
NBC News July 16, 2013 -
There is no doubt that the gaps are huge. Using government data on worker pay, the Economic Policy Institute has calculated that the ratio of C.E.O. pay to employee pay was 273 to 1 in 2012, or 202 to 1, depending on how stock options were accounted for. Either way, that is far higher than it has been for most of the past 50 years.
The New York Times July 16, 2013 -
There was a time Americans could count on Congress to see the fall in the value of the minimum wage and act to reduce the number of working poor people. If Congress acts on the proposal of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, the Economic Policy Institute estimates about 30 million workers would see a rise in pay.
Los Angeles Sentinel July 12, 2013 -
If that was the Bush administration’s view, it may have had a point. According to research by economist Thomas L. Hungerford of the Economic Policy Institute, there is no evidence in the data since 1947 that the corporate tax rate affects economic growth. This conclusion is disputed by conservative tax analysts, but as I have pointed out previously, there is no evidence that cutting the tax on dividends had any impact whatsoever on economic growth.
The Fiscal Times July 12, 2013 -
Poverty – or, more generally speaking, deprivation – is a notoriously difficult thing to define. Whether or not you experience it has to do with how many mouths you have to feed, where your family lives, whether you pay for child care, what your daily transportation options look like, even how society philosophically defines a family’s minimum needs to get by. The federal poverty line, on the other hand, doesn’t take into account most of these nuances. It is, by definition, a stark line, not a geographically sophisticated matrix.
And for a family of four, right now, it’s $23,550.
In an effort to address the concerns of advocates and researchers, the federal government came out two years ago with a Supplemental Poverty Measure (although it isn’t used to determine any federal benefits). But even that effort misses dramatic regional variation in costs like child care (the monthly cost for a one-child household in rural Mississippi is $334; in Washington, D.C., it’s $1,318).
How, then, do you calculate what it really costs for a family to have some minimum level of security? The Economic Policy Institute offers a more comprehensive calculator, one that was recently updated for 2013 and that now includes 600 communities across the country and six family types. The EPI Family Budget Calculator includes geographically adjusted costs for housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, other necessities, and taxes, in search of what it takes to achieve a “secure yet modest living standard.”
The Atlantic Cities July 12, 2013 -
We Need Some Money: Living modestly in the D.C. area requires $88,615 for the average family of four, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. That makes this the second-most expensive region in the country, behind only New York (finally, a category where every Washingtonian is happy to cede the top spot to Gotham). The median household income for the region is slightly less than that figure, and the median income for the District is more than $25,000 less.
Washington City Paper July 12, 2013