The 401(k) system has led to deep financial woes for a generation of American workers, leaving most people with inadequate retirement savings and dreary prospects for their latter years, according to a new research report.
The widespread adoption of 401(k) plans in the last three decades has benefited upper-income workers, providing them with a coveted tax break even as it has left them at the mercy of the volatile stock market, according to the analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
But the 401(k) system has been a dud for the vast majority of Americans, with women, young people and minorities among the broad groups whose financial well-being is at risk because they’re not saving enough.
Los Angeles Times
September 6, 2013
Thanks to David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute, my computer was soon feasting on employment data for the first half of this year. And as you see in the chart below, the data showed a positive relationship between unemployment rates and the involuntary part-timers’ share of employment.
The New York Times
September 6, 2013
Adding to the challenge is the aging of the American work force. Economists have long known that the participation rate — the share of the population that’s working or looking for work — would decline as the Baby Boom generation approached retirement. But they disagree as to how much of the recent decline is based on demographics, which makes it hard to interpret the monthly jobs data. (For more on this debate, see our friendly “feud” with Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post, which also generated some discussion among actual economists.)
Wall Street Journal
September 6, 2013
On Wednesday’s edition of “The Tavis Smiley Show,” Algernon Austin, director of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, discussed with host Tavis Smiley the hard work that remains in order to meet the March on Washington’s economic goals.
Tavis Smiley
August 29, 2013
Of the 241 CEOs studied, 134 remain active CEOs in their companies, the report said.
The executives who were fired left with an average payment of $47.7 million, the report said.
Aside from zeroing in on specific performance failures, the report criticized “a giant loophole in the federal tax code” that allows corporations to deduct unlimited amounts on their income taxes for the expense of executive stock options and other “performance-based” pay.
The Economic Policy Institute has estimated that the loophole cost the U.S. Treasury $30.4 billion between 2007 and 2010.
The Kansas City Star
August 29, 2013
Despite soaring corporate profits and nearly 25 percent gains in overall workforce productivity, 60 percent of American workers saw their wages stagnate or decline from 2000 to 2012 according to the latest study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank based in Washington D.C. The period has been termed by some economists as the “lost decade” of wage growth for most Americans.
The EPI data validates the claims of the burgeoning fast-food workers movement, uniting low-wage workers behind demands for better pay. In a $200-billion-per-year fast-food industry, paltry wages have become a central grievance of the growing protest movement that could change an industry employing roughly 4 million across the United States.
Mint News
August 29, 2013
Over at the Economic Policy Institute, however, Josh Bivens argues that this sort of tech-driven polarization isn’t enough to explain stagnant median wages over the past decade. “We would argue,” he writes, “that institutional factors like the eroding value of the minimum wage as a labor standard and eroding protections for willing workers that want to form a union are more important drivers of inequality and disappointing middle-class living standards over the past generation.”
The Washington Post Wonkblog
August 29, 2013
A new paper from the Economic Policy Institute provides both diagnosis and prescription of what is arguably the fundamental problem of the United States economy in recent years: wage stagnation. I’ll briefly describe the findings, but given that these trends have persisted for a long time, it’s more important to think about solutions, particularly ones that go beyond conventional wisdom.
The New York Times
August 29, 2013
Inequality: Jared Bernstein summarizes a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute on the hollowing out of the middle class. The debate has focused too much on how to reverse inequality and not enough on how to prevent it, Mr. Bernstein says. “This poses a serious problem.
Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics
August 29, 2013
But it is not hard to figure out the motivations behind it. The idea was to shame companies that had excessively high executive compensation to either pay their chief executives less or their workers more. The provision also comes in light of the increasing income disparity between the two. Pay for chief executives has risen to 277 times the average workers’ pay, from 20 times in 1965, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
August 29, 2013