Only 88,000 new jobs were produced last month, and the only reason the unemployment rate ticked down to a still-alarming 7.6 percent is because so many people left the work force altogether, which sent the labor force participation rate down to 63.3 percent, the lowest point since 1979. If we were to include in the calculations those who have given up looking for work, the unemployment rate would actually be 9.8 percent.
The Huffington Post
April 17, 2013
Before I am deluged with angry comments, let me recognize that in recent years the one-for-one relationship between productivity and wages, especially median wages, has broken down. But that’s a subject for another day. (For those interested, Lawrence Mishel, of the Economic Policy Institute, has an informative survey article about it.)
The New Yorker
April 17, 2013
Challenges to success stories: Chicago, New York, Washington – all three have been described as showing success under hard-charging leaders demanding better results. But leaders of an organization called a Broader, Bolder Approach to Education released test data and other information last week that challenged that story line, saying the rhetoric didn’t match the reality and that, in some ways, all three had accomplished little, or even done worse, than other cities. The group, associated with the union-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said places showing more success, including Cincinnati and Charlotte, N.C., emphasize “holistic” approaches to children and their needs, and not test-oriented approaches.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
April 15, 2013
“People have no idea how important federal spending is,” said Rebecca Thiess of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank. “Education, the elderly, service to the disabled, firefighters. … It’s vastly important.”
Kansas City Star
April 15, 2013
Andrew Fieldhouse at The Fiscal Times put the nation’s upper economic echelons on notice last week by letting them know they’re not paying anything close to what economists feel is their fair share.
Amid stifled economic output, stagnant job growth, sequestration cuts, the expired payroll tax cuts, the stonewalling of the American Jobs Act and the gradual replacement of stimulus with European-style austerity, Fieldhouse says a dollar of government spending cuts will do four to seven times as much economic damage than an additional dollar of revenue collected from upper-income taxpayers.
MSN Money
April 15, 2013
A separate analysis of government data, released by the Economic Policy Institute earlier this week, also found that unemployment rates for young college grads are much lower than for young high school graduates who are furthering their education. Still, both groups are facing higher rates of joblessness than before the economy soured in late 2007.
LifeInc/Today
April 15, 2013
For the fifth year in a row, high unemployment rates and depressed wages await college grads, who are leaving campus, on average, with $26,000 in student loan debt, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Many students go to college with the idea that “they will be able to get a high quality job to pay off their student debt, but that idea is broken at a time like this,” EPI economist and co-author of the report, Heidi Shierholz said.
Currently, the unemployment rate among young college grads is 8.8 percent. That’s down from 10.4 percent in 2010, but still much higher than the pre-recession level of 5.7 percent in 2007. To make matters worse, many of the college grads that do score full-time jobs are earning less than they would in a healthy job market. According to the EPI, college grads are earning about $3,200 less a year than they were in 2000. Their pay fell by 7.6 percent in the last six years alone.
The Fiscal Times
April 15, 2013
Since 2007, there’s been a huge exodus of people from the labor force. In March, the number was 496,000. Perhaps two-thirds of the dropouts leave because they’re discouraged that they’ll ever find work, estimates Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. (The remaining third reflects lifestyle choices and aging, including the retirement of baby boomers.) Counting many discouraged workers as jobless would raise the unemployment rate close to 10 percent instead of the reported 7.6 percent, she says.
The Washington Post
April 15, 2013
The treatment of carried interest has for years been strongly defended by elements of the financial industry, and the White House proposal was quickly attacked on Wednesday by the leading private equity industry trade group. Even supporters of the proposal conceded that it faced stiff political opposition.
“Republicans are never going to sign off on this,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
April 11, 2013
The president, CBPP, CAP, and a few Democrats on the Hill may back chained CPI, but many other liberal groups and leaders oppose it. On Tuesday, a group of major progressive organizations, including the National Organization for Women, the Campaign for America’s Future and MoveOn.org, joined Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) for a protest on Capitol Hill opposing the proposed cuts. More than 2 million people signed a petition presented to the White House the same day opposing the plan. “We’re not going to balance the budget on the backs of elderly, disabled vets, the sick or the children,” Sanders later told Current TV .
“I’ve never seen such a wholehearted and rapid response,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which opposes the cuts. She calls the CBPP and CAP the “two notable dissenters” that are “much more deficit-hawkish than the mainstream of the progressive movement.”
Mother Jones
April 11, 2013