Andrew Fieldhouse, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, estimates that the plan would cost the country 2 million jobs in 2014 alone.
The Huffington Post
March 13, 2013
The budget plan that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveiled on Tuesday would eliminate 2 million jobs in 2014, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
If implemented, Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” plan would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.7 percent and increase the unemployment rate by 0.6 to 0.8 percentage points, EPI found.
The Huffington Post
March 13, 2013
About 17 percent of the women who would be affected by a minimum-wage increase have children and almost a quarter of them are their family’s sole breadwinner, according to David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute. Female minimum-wage earners also overwhelmingly live in the South, where every state except Florida has a state wage at or below the federal minimum.
The American Prospect
March 8, 2013
The JOLTS data are also useful for diagnosing what’s behind our persistently high unemployment. In today’s economy, unemployed workers far outnumber job openings in every sector. This demonstrates that the main problem 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.
—Heidi Shierholz, “Job Openings and Hiring Dropped in December, and Have Not Increased since Early 2012,” Economic Policy Institute, Feb. 12, 2013
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
March 8, 2013
THE CASE FOR $2 TRILLION STIMULUS – Fiscal Times’s Andrew Fieldhouse: “Ensuring a rapid return to full economic health using borrowed money is actually fiscally responsible — austerity will simply replace structural budget deficits with bigger cyclical deficits, and a poorer nation will have a harder time sustaining its debt. By boosting the economy and shrinking the cyclical deficit, efficient deficit-financed stimulus would even presently reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio. Accepting bigger budget deficits to boost demand is the only means of guaranteeing a full recovery as opposed to banking on its emergence perpetually four years away.” http://bit.ly/XVekGA
Politico
March 8, 2013
And the need is real. The federal government classified 10.5 million Americans as “working poor,” including 4.1 million full-time workers. Their ranks have been swollen by an economy that’s funneled 98 percent of all income gains to the top 10 percent of earners since 1980, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
San Jose Mercury News
March 7, 2013
Liberal-leaning economists say the move would help millions of workers without better prospects pay their bills. It would also pump more money into the economy through higher consumer spending, they argue.
“Unfortunately, for far too many people, the ladder that they’re on doesn’t have a whole lot of rungs,” said Doug Hall, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network at the progressive Economic Policy Institute.
NBC News
March 7, 2013
But the available data suggest that roughly half the workers likely to be affected by the $9-an-hour level proposed by the president are in families earning less than $40,000 a year. So while raising the minimum wage from the current $7.25 an hour may not be particularly well targeted as an anti-poverty proposal, it’s not badly targeted, either.
The New York Times
March 7, 2013
A majority of jobs added since the recession have been in low-wage sectors, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and one-in-four American workers will be in low-wage jobs for the next decade.
Think Progress
March 7, 2013
Over the past 40 years, those in the top 1 percent of earners saw their real annual wages go up by nearly 131 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Wages for those in the 90-99th percentile rose 45 percent. For everyone else, wages increased 15.2 percent.
CBS Moneywatch
March 7, 2013