According to the Economic Policy Institute, the cuts demanded by the GOP in exchange for raising the debt limit will cost the economy 1.8 million jobs this year. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner already pushed back on Boehner’s remarks, saying, “this commitment to meet the obligations of the nation, this commitment to protect the creditworthiness of the country, is a fundamental commitment that you can never call into question or violate.”
Think Progress
May 16, 2012
“We’re adding jobs, but just enough to keep up with growth in the normal working-age population, not enough to start really putting the backlog of unemployed workers back to work,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which focuses its research on low- and middle-income workers.
MSNBC
May 15, 2012
About half of the nation’s internships are unpaid, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president for the Economic Policy Institute, aWashington, D.C., think tank. Internships should provide training similar to what students are offered at a school, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
The Labor Department has received few complaints about this, a spokeswoman said.
But Eisenbrey said that’s because most interns are afraid to complain when they’re just starting out. The institute discussed these questionable internships at a recent forum with a Labor Department regulator, who said the agency is too understaffed to adequately monitor this.
Baltimore Sun
May 15, 2012
Indeed, between 1979 and 2009 worker wages increased by just 10.1 percent compared to an 80 percent increase in worker productivity, according to a 2011 report by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Huffington Post
May 14, 2012
There are still more than three job seekers for every available opening, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and more than 30 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for a year or more. Considering those numbers, it makes no sense to cut people off from unemployment benefits, which have ensured that millions of Americans don’t slip below the poverty line. According to the Government Accountability Office, 20 percent of those cut off from unemployment benefits by early 2010 fell into poverty.
Think Progress
May 14, 2012
It pays to be rich. Literally.
Since Bill Clinton’s first term, taxes have fallen the most for the wealthiest Americans. Federal tax rates plunged 9.4 percent between 1995 and 2007 for the top 0.01 percent of households, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Huffington Post
May 14, 2012
“I don’t think that kind of job creation is likely to happen anytime soon, but I’m all for setting ambitious benchmarks to get the unemployment rate down,” said Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington group that says it focuses on the economic condition of low- and middle-class Americans.
“To me, the bigger issue is who has policies that are more likely to do that, and I don’t think Romney has identified any,” Bivens said. “Nobody is putting policies on the table right now that would lead us to a rapid recovery.”
Bloomberg
May 11, 2012
How does offshoring relate to America’s growing trade deficit? Both stifle job-creation, which in turn is affected by U.S. trade policy. Since 2001, for example, the U.S. trade gap with China has resulted in a loss of 2.8 million jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank. More broadly, a widening deficit can act as a drag on the economy by muting the job-creating effects of consumer spending. Why? Because when people hit their local mall or big-box retailer, what they buy is mostly made abroad.
CBS News
May 11, 2012
In a new paper the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank, calculates that chief executives at America’s 350 biggest companies were paid 231 times as much as the average private-sector worker in 2011
The Economist
May 9, 2012
The voluntary quits rate is an indicator of how willing and able workers are to leave one job for another. During an economic downturn, far fewer people quit because finding another position is tougher. In March, quits rose slightly. The number of quits was 2.1 million in March 2012, up from 1.8 million at the end of the recession in June 2009.
Quits increased in March by 75,000. They are up about 8.5 percent over March 2011 and registering the highest level since 2008. But voluntary quits are still 25.6 percent below their 2007 average.
As Heidi Shiefholz at the Economic Policy Institute points outs, however, the odds are still stacked against workers:
[T]he “job seekers ratio”—the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings—declined moderately to 3.4-to-1.
Daily Kos
May 9, 2012