Luckily, data from the forthcoming Economic Policy Institute book “The State of Working America, 12th Edition,” which EPI generously provided to Wonkblog, does separate the groups, and the results are informative. While those with only a BA did much, much better than people with a high school degree or only some college, they still saw job stagnation during the recession. The only group that continued to gain jobs were those with advanced degrees:
The Washington Post
August 20, 2012
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds that, while raising the minimum wage to the proposed $9.80 level would have a significant impact on about 28 million low-income workers, it would especially benefit women. As the report puts it, the fact that “women comprise 54.5 percent of workers who would be affected by a potential minimum-wage increase makes it a women’s issue”:
Think Progress
August 20, 2012
A different study by the Economic Policy Institute estimated that tax code provisions relating to executive pay enabled about 8,000 U.S. public companies to lower their corporate tax bill by $30.4 billion between 2007 and 2010.
Pittsburg Post-Gazette
August 20, 2012
Those assets are worth between $300,000 and $700,000. That means the Ryans’ net worth is greater than 80 percent of Americans from their natural-resource investments alone, according to inflation-adjusted data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. Their combined assets are as high as $7.6 million, likely putting the Ryans among the top 5 percent of Americans in terms of net worth.
CNBC
August 17, 2012
The unlimited tax deductibility of executive pay loophole operates as a powerful subsidy for excessive compensation. The more corporations pay out in executive compensation, the less they owe in taxes. And average taxpayers wind up paying the bill. According to the Economic Policy Institute, this loophole cost American taxpayers as much as $9.7 billion in 2010.
August 17, 2012
About 28 million people will see their pay go up whenever Congress gets around to raising the minimum wage to $9.80. (Which is to say, not a minute before Democrats retake Congress.) But who are those people? According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Doug Hall and David Cooper:
- Women would be disproportionately affected, comprising nearly 55 percent of those who would benefit.
- Nearly 88 percent of workers who would benefit are at least 20 years old.
- Although workers of all races and ethnicities would benefit from the increase, non-Hispanic white workers comprise the largest share (about 56 percent) of those who would be affected.
Daily Kos
August 17, 2012
A particularly big problem with this set of assertions, from my perspective, is the blanket claim that higher productivity means higher wages. It’s true and important to recognize that only through higher levels of productivity is there the potential for higher wages. But that clearly has not been the case for middle- and low-wage workers for a long time, as work by the Economic Policy Institute has stressed.
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
August 15, 2012
A new report released today by the Economic Policy Institute takes a closer look at the potential impacts of The Fair Minimum Wage Act, introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) on July 26, 2012. The proposed increase would raise the federal minimum wage from the current $7.25 to $9.80 by 2014, through three incremental increases of $0.85 and raise the tipped minimum wage, currently sitting at $2.13 per hour, to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage.
The Progressive Pulse
August 15, 2012
Yet perhaps the most disturbing feature of Ryan’s budget is that, in the midst of a prolonged recession, it would cost the US economy millions of jobs. Ryan’s 2011 budget plan proposes what the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities calls “the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in US history—two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes” (Medicaid, Pell grants, food stamps and low-income housing). According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the shock to aggregate demand from near-term spending cuts would result in roughly 1.3 million jobs lost in 2013 and 2.8 million jobs lost in 2014, or 4.1 million jobs through 2014.”
The Nation
August 14, 2012
The other part of Romney’s claim — that wages and employment track productivity — is actually false. Unpublished data from BLS, generously provided to me by the Economic Policy Institute’s Larry Mishel and Nicholas Finio, shows that wages tracked productivity growth until about 1970. After that, wages stagnated even as productivity continued to grow. Here’s EPI’s graph on the matter:
The Washington Post
August 13, 2012