Meanwhile, the numbers of working poor are on the rise, said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. Workers earning less than $11 an hour — the equivalent of about $23,000 a year for those working full time — rose to 28 percent of the nation’s workforce last year, up from 23 percent in 2006, he said.
“The impact on educational achievement is going to be one of the biggest scars left from the recession,” Mishel said. “From everything we know, high persistent unemployment will do more damage to the educational prospects of low-income students than all the positive outcomes from educational reforms that people talk about.”
The Boston Globe
December 20, 2012
The proposed change to Social Security is particularly controversial in progressive policy circles. Last month, a group of 300 economists and policy experts—including former Clinton administration Treasury official Brad DeLong, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Economic Policy Institute president Lawrence Mishel—signed a statement opposing the specific Social security cut that the White House is proposing, saying there’s “no empirical basis” for the change, and that it “could exacerbate, rather than correct, an existing problem.”
MSNBC
December 20, 2012
Meanwhile, analysts note, efforts aimed at fostering equality are waning. “There are really few public-policy resources to address the problem head-on,” said Algernon Austin, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute. “Support for affirmative action has gone from tepid to very weak.”
Austin and other researchers said a federal direct-jobs program could address the disparity, but support for such large-scale initiatives is hard to find in the current political environment.
The Washington Post
December 20, 2012
She may still be in for a tough slog. Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the basic issue plaguing involuntary part-time workers like Gray is the same one plaguing the overall labor market: There’s just not enough demand to compel employers to add to their labor costs substantially.
Shierholz said she expects involuntary part-time workers to gradually see improvements but “it is a going to take a long time.”
“I think by far the dominant reason that we aren’t seeing employment in both dimensions — full (time) people or ramping up hours for workers that already are there — is just a demand problem,” she said.
CNBC
December 14, 2012
“There is a huge amount of focus on progressive taxes in our policy world but progressive taxes are not much of a solution to this,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “We need to get unemployment down rapidly. We need to greatly change our labor standards. We need to raise the minimum wage.”
He’s right: The middle class crisis — and its resulting income inequality — is the most important economic story of our time. There are a million ways to tell it, and here’s another: an annotated slide show, culled from the amazing 2012 edition of the State of Working America from EPI.
The Atlantic
December 14, 2012
The mounting concentration of wealth is even more dramatic. A recent Economic Policy Institute study found that between 1983 and 2010 about three-quarters of all new wealth accrued to the wealthiest 5 percent of households. Over the same period, the bottom 60 percent actually became poorer.
The New York Times
December 14, 2012
More than two million workers toil in food preparation jobs at limited-service restaurants like McDonald’s, according to government statistics. They are the lowest-paid workers in the country, government figures show, typically earning $8.69 an hour. A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization, concluded that almost three-quarters of them live in poverty. And they are unlikely to have ever contemplated joining a union.
The New York Times
December 7, 2012
“This is something that has been happening and building for years and is now really rooted in the economy, and it’s vicious,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington. “There’s a remarkable disconnect. The problem isn’t a lack of the economy producing sufficient income to make everybody’s living standards improve—it’s that the economy is structured so that the majority don’t benefit.” Or, to state the point more cautiously, the majority doesn’t benefit from productivity gains very much—certainly, less than our parents and grandparents did.
National Journal
December 7, 2012
At the end of the year, we would still go over the fiscal cliff. Remember that the Bush tax cuts are one of the least stimulative policies in the negotiations. According to the Economic Policy Institute, extending the middle-class tax cuts would wipe out about 11 percent of the fiscal cliff’s economic impact.
The Washington Post
December 7, 2012
In 2011, 58.3 percent of the nation’s workers under 65 had job-based health insurance, according to a report released Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute.
That marks a decline of 0.3 percentage points from the previous year, after precipitous declines starting in 2008, when companies were laying off workers, shuttering plants or going out of business in the wake of the global financial crisis.
“What is so clear is that workers have lost bargaining power,” said Elise Gould, author of the study and director of health policy research at the Washington-based think tank. “There are so many workers for every job out there, and workers don’t have any way to get higher wages or better benefits. That’s why that trend is not going to improve.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
December 7, 2012