Raising taxes on the rich often gets proposed as a way of combating the rise of financial inequality. But how important is tax policy, really?
Andrew Fieldhouse, a federal budget policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute and the Century Foundation, has a new paper out of EPI that does a great job of illustrating the limits of tax policy in this area.
The Washington Post
June 18, 2013
Over the past three decades, there has been improvement, a narrowing of the gap. As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute points out, the median hourly wage for women in 1979 was 62.7 of the median for men. In 2012, it was 82.8 percent:
Daily Kos
June 18, 2013
The U.S. jobs picture is bleaker than the most recent jobs reports may make you think. The economy added 175,000 jobs last month, but at the rate things are going, it would take almost a decade to get back to prerecession employment levels. A Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics digs in on the bad news: The number of job openings in the U.S. actually fell by 118,000 in April to 3.8 million.
How bad can 3.8 million job openings be? The Economic Policy Institute looks at the number and sees that “the main problem in the labor market is a broad-based lack of demand for workers—and not, as is often claimed, available workers lacking the skills needed for the sectors with job openings.” To bolster this point, they put forward this chart:
National Journal
June 18, 2013
There’s nothing new or surprising about this chart from the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz. It’s just a reminder that the U.S. labor market is still in very bad shape — despite recent improvements:
The Washington Post
June 18, 2013
The Department of Labor released its latest report on job openings yesterday, and while not much changed from last month, it was a reminder that the labor market is still pretty much murder. With more than 11.7 million unemployed Americans still out there, the government estimates that there are 3.8 million jobs to be had — a ratio of 3.1-to-1, as shown on this graph from the Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic
June 18, 2013
For young college graduates the unemployment rate is 8.8 percent, and the underemployment rate, which includes those who have given up looking for a job or who are working part time because they cannot find a full-time job, is about.
The New York Times
June 18, 2013
A 2012 report from the Economic Policy Institute showed that by increasing the minimum wage to $10 per hour, more than a half a million Massachusetts workers would benefit from the raise, and create thousands of new jobs.
Boston Magazine
June 13, 2013
Things are gonna get better. That’s at least according to blacks and Latinos living in the U.S.
Although blacks and Latinos were hit hardest by the housing crisis and financial downturn of recent years, both groups say they are happy and the economy will improve.
ABC News
June 13, 2013
These numbers mirror a simultaneous trend in eroding security among ambitious black Americans with shrinking access to middle-class jobs. It’s true that the country’s middle class is collapsing for everyone, but that trend is most profound among African-Americans. In 2008, as black folks flocked into higher ed, the Economic Policy Institute found that 45 percent of African-Americans born into the middle class were living at or near poverty as adults.
The Root
June 13, 2013
According to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, CEO compensation at large U.S. companies was 243 times that of the average U.S. worker. At Whole Foods that multiple is 19, capping compensation for top execs at $705,000.
Wall Street Journal
June 13, 2013