Media clips
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Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C., said Nutter appears to be taking a hard line stance similar to that of Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, whose tussle with his city’s teacher’s union resulted in a strike last year.
Emanuel, Eisenbray said, is among a breed of new Democratic leaders who aren’t as beholden to unions as their predecessors were; instead, they’re more beholden to wealthy contributors who are more likely to want tax cuts.
Workers, meanwhile, are feeling increasingly marginalized. Despite the recession, the nation’s income has continued to grow, but a larger portion of it goes to the wealthy, Eisenbray said.
“Part of what’s going on is that everyone, all blue collar workers and even white collar college-educated workers, have seen their wages stagnate or fall in the past 10 or 12 years,” Eisenbray said. “They’ve lost their retiree health benefits, their employer-covered health care, their pensions have been virtually wiped out. There has been this huge erosion across the board in the compensation of the American middle- and working-class, and the public employees have held out longest. They had a good relationship with the politicians they bargained with. But now they’re under attack.”
NBC Philadelphia March 21, 2013 -
“Lower-wage jobs are coming back first,” said labor economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-leaning think tank. “But it’s all bleak and it’s all due to lack of demand for work to be done. We’re still not getting more than just what we need to hang on,” Shierholz said. “These last few months have looked better, but we cannot yet claim robust recovery by any stretch.”
Associated Press March 21, 2013 -
The debate over what to do with Apple’s reserve money has been “one-dimensional, with a nearly exclusive focus on how the reserves should be used to reward its shareholders,” writes the Economic Policy Institute’s Isaac Shapiro. The workers who manufacture and sell Apple products, he notes, have been left entirely out of the debate. Despite the notoriously grim conditions at some factories which make Apple products, low-level employees are unlikely to see any benefit from a massive corporate surplus.
MSNBC March 21, 2013 -
Social Security
In These Times
These critically important findings are contained in the report “Strengthening Social Security: What do Americans Want?” compiled by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI). “The American people, contrary to popular belief, are overwhelmingly willing to pay more for Social Security, and that includes every age and income group, across party lines, and even Tea Partiers,” observes Monique Morrissey, an Economic Policy Institute economist specializing in retirement security issues.
“There is a lot of support for increasing benefits,” Morrissey told Working In These Times, noting that the report found 84 percent of respondents believe that benefits are not high enough, and 75 percent support higher benefits—a finding that runs directly counter to the push for lower benefits promoted by long-time austerity champion billionaire Pete Peterson and the corporate-led Fix the Debt coalition.
In These Times March 19, 2013 -
The Gantz brothers are doing their best to get Washington’s policy community involved. They screened the film at the Economic Policy Institute and had planned a screening at the Center for American Progress that was canceled by weather.
Politico March 19, 2013 -
RYAN’S BUDGET COULD COST 2 MILLION JOBS According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget would decrease gross domestic product (GDP) by 1.7 percent and cost 2. million jobs by next year. EPI also estimated that Ryan’s budget would increase the unemployment rate by between 0.6 percentage points and 0.8 percentage points.
Fiscal Times March 19, 2013 -
But one researcher said Ryan’s budget is a “very austere vision” for America.
“The insane amount of cutting that he’s calling for is absolutely undoable given our economy’s weakness right now,” said Rebecca Thiess, budget policy analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, in an interview with Progress Illinois. “The Republicans are trying to sell to the American people that cuts are necessary because we have such runaway projected debt levels, but his budget doesn’t actually target what our debt levels actually come from, which is projected health costs.”
Thiess said the Economic Policy Institute helped draft the House Progressive Caucus budget, called “Back To Work.” In stark contrast to Ryan’s budget, the Progressive Caucus budget includes a $4.2 trillion tax hike and $2.1 trillion in economic stimulus and investment from 2013 to 2015. Saying that it would create 7 million jobs in the first year, the budget is set to decrease the deficit by $4.4 trillion over 10 years. It would also increase the highest tax rate from 39.6 percent to 49 percent.
Ryan’s budget is likely to pass in the House though, according to Thiess, but it will “go nowhere” after that.
“Paul Ryan’s budget is saying ‘no budget deficit’ is what we should be pursuing right now,” she said. “It has no regard for what we need given our current economic context, which is jobs. We’ve got 4 million Americans unemployed and economic growth and what the American people need isn’t getting their safety net crushed right now.”
Progress Illinois March 19, 2013 -
However, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) recently broke down the implications of the BLS survey, and determined that greener industries actually grow faster than the overall economy: For every increase of one percentage point in the share of green jobs that made up an industry’s employment — or its “green intensity” — overall employment in that industry increases 0.034 percentage points higher.
Think Progress March 13, 2013 -
“America was much more equal when you go back to the late ’50s, and ’60s,” Nicholas Finio, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, told Campus Progress. “Deliberate policy decisions have allowed this to happen.”
The silver lining: Higher marginal tax rates and better labor protections can make America more equal. “Policy is what made it this way,” Finio said, “and policy can turn it back.”
Campus Progress March 13, 2013 -
“The fact is that we have an economy now that’s working well only for those at the very top,” said Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C. “Unless we adopt a new approach to economic policy, we’re going to continue going down this path, which means growth that does not really benefit the great majority of people in this country.”
Nationally, Mishel says the declining value of the federal minimum wage is a major factor driving inequality.
Associated Press March 13, 2013