The “fiscal cliff” is, at its heart, a collision between these two priorities. We can let the Bush tax cuts and the payroll tax cut expire, and we can let the automatic spending cuts hit, and the deficit problem is pretty much solved. Unfortunately, we will likely have thrown the economy back into recession.
Conversely, if we just kick everything down the road, that’s better for the recovery, but it means we’ve made no progress on the debt, and if you believe in the confidence fairy, she’s not coming because we haven’t given anyone any reason to be confident in our political system or the future shape of their tax burden.
EPI’s take on this is optimistic: The good news, they argue, is that if you look at the various components of the fiscal cliff separately, you’ll see that the parts that do the most for deficit reduction do the least for the recovery, and vice versa. This suggests an “a la carte” approach to the fiscal cliff, in which we extend the most stimulative policies and wave goodbye to the most costly policies.
The Washington Post
October 11, 2012
There were 3.1 million “green jobs” in the US as of November 2011. Green jobs are growing faster than overall job growth in the US. They pay well, and there’s an increasingly wide range of them accessible to Americans of every level of education and experience, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s “
Counting up to green” analysis of the Labor Dept. Bureau of Labor Statistic’s (BLS) groundbreaking
Green Jobs report, which was released Sept. 28.
Clean Technica (
http://s.tt/1pKqJ)
Clean Technica
October 11, 2012
At the end of 2011, white median wealth was 44.5 times higher than black median wealth, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
ColorLines
October 11, 2012
“We’re in a goddamn recession and it’s hurting people,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.
Although technically our economy is no longer in a recession and is growing slowly, Mishel says the labor market is still dealing with its lasting and permanent impact.
“The weight of unemployment depresses wage and benefit growth for everybody. That has a much greater impact on low-income households and minorities,” said Mishel.
ABC News
October 10, 2012
“The data suggest that at least we’re not shedding a lot of teacher jobs any more. That’s a really nice first step, but there’s still so much to make up,” said Heidi Shierholz, economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
Considering public schools were slashing jobs in the four years leading up to July, the recent gains are hardly enough to bridge the gap.
Over that time period, enrollment in public schools was projected to grow by about 377,000 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
To keep up, schools would have had to hire about 62,000 workers, Shierholz estimates. Instead, they laid off about 315,000.
CNNMoney
October 10, 2012
“It’s a shock to hear that anybody can think that these numbers were manipulated,” say Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, in the accompanying interview with The Daily Ticker. “Having followed these numbers for 25 years and knowing the people who put them out it’s absolutely bizarre…It’s outrageous. The data is based on surveys of tens of thousands of employers and households every month.”
CNBC
October 10, 2012
“Some of the decline in labor force participation – I would estimate about a third – since the beginning of the Great Recession would have happened anyway,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s structural.”
The Fiscal Times
October 10, 2012
This is not the first time aspersions have been cast on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington. In 1971, President Richard Nixon was angered when the BLS attributed a drop in the unemployment rate from 6.2 percent to 5.6 percent in a month to a statistical fluke, says the EPI website.
The Christian Science Monitor
October 10, 2012
Economics reporter Jeff Madrick detailed how the lingering jobs crisis is decimating the middle class and compared the two presidential candidates’ proposals to address it.
The New York Review of Books
October 5, 2012
Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson also used EPI’s research to delve into Romney’s economic plans.
Rolling Stone
October 5, 2012