The Affordable Care Act includes a tax on high-cost insurance plans that’s both a funding mechanism for the law and meant to encourage patients with a menu of generous health benefits to choose only necessary services. But the tax could wind uphurting workers who pay premium dollars for not-so-premium health plans, according to a new report from the left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute.
“[The tax] was sold as being on ‘Cadillac Coverage.’ The idea was that there were some people out there that are getting thousands and thousands of dollars worth health insurance premiums,” said Elise Gould, the director of health policy research at EPI and the author of the report. “But the reality is that health insurance premiums can be expensive for many different reasons, not just because they have generous coverage.”
The Huffington Post
May 9, 2013
If shortages were widespread, Burtless and other economists argue, wages would be rising rapidly as employers competed for scarce skilled workers. There’s scant evidence of this. From April 2012 to April 2013, average hourly manufacturing wages rose 1 percent, reports the Labor Department. Over the same period, the gain for all private nonfarm workers was 1.9 percent. Among computer programmers, inflation-adjusted wages have remained flat for a decade, says a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
The Washington Post
May 7, 2013
Robert Rector and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation have made a splash byreleasing a paper claiming that the immigration reform bill being weighed in the U.S. Senate will cost the government $5.3 trillion. Or, more precisely, that undocumented immigrants under current law will cost the government $1 trillion, and legalizing those immigrants will increase that to $6.3 trillion. Subtract one from the other and you get the $5.3 trillion total cost estimate.
The study represents the most notable attack on the reform effort to date from a conservative group, and in conjunction with the Economic Policy Institute’s attempts tothrow cold water over the high-skilled immigration sections of the bill, suggests the effort is facing flack from both sides.
The Washington Post
May 7, 2013
The hypothetical mom salary stagnated as U.S. wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent of GDP in 2012. For many workers, wages have been stagnant for the past decade, according to the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Reuters
May 7, 2013
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 30 million workers would benefit from the hike in the minimum wage and that would help generate about 140,000 new jobs.
The Chicago Sun Times
May 7, 2013
An economist with the labor-focused Economic Policy Institute called the report a disaster, saying it would take five whole years for the current rate of growth to return the country to full employment.
“This is a classic ‘hold-steady’ report — enough job growth to keep the unemployment rate stable but not much more,” EPI’s Heidi Sheirholz said in a statement. “In good times, this would be fine, but at a time like this, it represents an ongoing disaster.”
The Huffington Post
May 7, 2013
Job growth picked up in April, with the economy adding 165,000 new jobs. Still, the unemployment rate barely budged downward and the length of the average workweek actually declined from 34.6 to 34.4. (Here’s the report in charts). Economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institutecalled this “a substantial drop that is not a good sign for future hiring.” And although the number of jobs created was above that needed to keep up with the natural growth of the labor force, Shierholz said that at the growth rate seen this year — around 196,000 jobs a month — “it will take more than five years to return to the prerecession unemployment rate.” For high-school graduates, the economy keeps getting worse.
Seattle Times
May 7, 2013
“Yes, this was better than people were expecting. That’s the source of the breathless, happy responses that come out right away,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “But as you sit back and say, ‘What does this say about the labor market,’ it’s not so good, because it remains more of the same.”
The actual change in unemployment, she notes, was from 7.57 to 7.51 percent. At this rate of jobs growth, Shierholz says, it would take more than five years to get back to the pre-recession unemployment rate.
NPR
May 7, 2013
Economist Heidi Shierholz of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, using data from researchers at the Boston Federal Reserve, found that approximately 6 million people have left the labor market since 2008. Of those, nearly three-quarters — 4.4 million people — left for cyclical reasons.
CBS News
May 7, 2013
“This is a classic ‘hold-steady’ report — enough job growth to keep the unemployment rate stable but not much more,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “In good times, this would be fine, but at a time like this, it represents an ongoing disaster.”
CNNMoney
May 7, 2013