Social Security remains most boomers’ hope for retirement income. On average, U.S. workers are beginning to take their Social Security benefits at age 63.8. That average fell by more than five years between 1945 and 1970. After that, though, the average has stayed fairly stable, noted Monique Morrissey, an economist who wrote “The Myth of Early Retirement” last year.
But Morrissey cautions against measuring “retirement” by Social Security take-up rates alone. Forty-five percent of eligible Social Security households continue to earn money from a job or jobs.
It’s a fact of life, though, that about one in three people becomes disabled before retirement.
McClatchy
August 28, 2012
The economy now is “a little bit better,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “But if you lost your job, there just wasn’t that much available.”
The Washington Post
August 27, 2012
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning economic think tank in Washington, D.C., estimates that America. lost 2.7 million jobs as a result of the U.S.-China trade deficit between 2001 and 2011, 2.1 million of them in manufacturing. Wages of American workers have also suffered due to the competition with cheap Chinese labor, EPI says. A typical two-earner household loses around $2,500 per year from this dynamic.
“They have been managing their economy on the back of ours for more than a decade,” says Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at EPI and the author of the report. China imports materials from the U.S., he says, to make cheap exports that it then sells back to U.S. consumers.
US News and World Report
August 27, 2012
It’s a fantasy, of course. Not coincidentally, as union density in America has declined, so too have workers’ wages, benefits, workplace protections and negotiating power. Additionally, as the Economic Policy Institute documents, unions not only help their own members, they set industry-wide standards. So when unions lose ground, all workers lose out.
Salon
August 27, 2012
A $295 billion trade deficit with China resulted in the loss of 2.7 million U.S. jobs in the past decade, with the biggest impact in California’s Silicon Valley, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg Businesweek
August 27, 2012
“In an ideal world, you can’t cut government spending effectively until the economy is close to full employment,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, a federal budget analyst for the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “The magnitude of government spending cuts for a balanced budget amendment is beyond the realm of the tenable. We don’t have a $1 trillion waste, fraud and abuse account to tap into.”
The Fiscal Times
August 23, 2012
But not all college grads have it equally rosy. As the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews has pointed out, the Georgetown report misleadingly sandwiches together plain-old bachelor’s holders with workers who have a master’s, doctorate, or professional degree. And according to data Matthews cites from the Economic Policy Institute, between 2007 and 2011, 98.3 percent of the job gains in that combined group went to the advanced degree holders. These days, it seems we’re really in a grad school economy.
That reality plays out pretty clearly in the unemployment figures, as shown in this chart posted by EPI’s Lawrence Mishel. Bachelor’s holders, like everyone else, have suffered from much worse joblessness than normal during the recovery. Today, they’re still facing 4.1 percent unemployment, well above pre-recession levels. If there was a great shortage of college talent in the labor market, it’s reasonable to assume their situation would have improved faster.
The Atlantic
August 23, 2012
The unemployment rate for all college graduates over 25 years old is currently 4.1%, less than half of the national unemployment rate of 8.3%. But a recent Economic Policy Institute study reports that the unemployment rate is 9.4% for college grads ages 21 to 24 (not currently seeking a post graduate degree), and the underemployment rate for this group is 19.1% (this includes part-time workers who want full-time jobs). In 2011, those grads lucky enough to have a full-time job earned an average of $35,000 a year, a 5.4% inflation adjusted decrease from 2000 average income. Finally, it is estimated that nearly 4 of 10 grads are working in fields that don’t require a college degree (the college-grad barista syndrome).
Wall Street Journal
August 23, 2012
Bogira ties this back into residential segregation, an ongoing interest of his (and mine). On that note, Richard Rothstein and Mark Santow have a long piece in The American Prospect about residential segregation, and in particular its history in Detroit and George Romney’s attempts to combat it.
Chicago Magazine
August 23, 2012
When Larry Mishel and I looked at this in the context of wage inequality, we found no statistical evidence for acceleration, so we found it hard to blame technological change, something that’s literally been going on forever, as the cause of something new — increasing wage inequality.
The Huffington Post
August 23, 2012