“I personally have Clinton fatigue,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute, noting that it was a Clinton team that has been running Obama’s economics. “A Clinton administration seems like a continuation of the same team.”
Some consider the debate an opportunity for Hillary Clinton to embrace a more populist message. Bill de Blasio, a Democrat who was her New York campaign manager in 2000, was just elected mayor of New York on an inequality agenda.
The Washington Post
December 2, 2013
For the past two years, unemployment has been higher for only one other racial or ethnic group: blacks. Unemployment for Native Americans has remained above 10 percent for five years, weighing in at 11.3 percent for the first half of this year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on the needs of low- and middle-income workers.
The Washington Post
December 2, 2013
Now, Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz and John Schmitt have released a new study that questions SBTC as an explanation for increasing wage inequality. Mishel et al. argue that “job polarization,” the premise that more jobs have been created in low-wage sectors and high-wage sectors, thus driving wage inequality, doesn’t actually explain the problem. On the one hand, high-wage occupations have not significantly expanded their share of the workforce since 2000. On the other, low-wage jobs have not increased as a total share of employment since 1979.
Salon
December 2, 2013
Market Watch
December 2, 2013
He pointed to a study by economists at the Federal Reserve in Chicago, which found that a dollar-an-hour increase would translate into a $700 increase in spending per quarter the year after enactment for each household with a minimum-wage earner. Nearly four million workers earn the minimum wage, but the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, estimates that wages for 30 million workers would be lifted if Congress approved an increase to $10.10 an hour. Mr. Krueger was co-author of a landmark study that found that a modest increase in the minimum wage did not result in hiring cutbacks.
The New York Times
December 2, 2013
So a minimum-wage increase would help low-paid workers, with few adverse side effects. And we’re talking about a lot of people. Early this year the Economic Policy Institute estimated that an increase in the national minimum wage to $10.10 from its current $7.25 would benefit 30 million workers. Most would benefit directly, because they are currently earning less than $10.10 an hour, but others would benefit indirectly, because their pay is in effect pegged to the minimum — for example, fast-food store managers who are paid slightly (but only slightly) more than the workers they manage.
The New York Times
December 2, 2013
Switzerland is hardly unique in that. For example, the ratio of earnings between CEOs and typical workers at the 350 largest U.S. corporations is now 273-1, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Everywhere you look, company bosses have been getting richer and richer. It is a global trend — and there is very little sign of it ending. If anything, the extremes keep getting worse.
MarketWatch
November 22, 2013
There are also questions about whether the test scores show what they pretend to show. A report released early this year by Martin Carnoy of the Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute raised questions about whether the average scores in the 2009 PISA were reported lower than they should have been.
The Washington Post
November 20, 2013
The national unemployment rate for Native Americans stands at 11.3 percent and has been in the double digits since 2008, according to Economic Policy Institute economist Algernon Austin.
The African-American jobless rate is now 12.7 percent and has been above ten percent since July 2008, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Phoenix Business Journal
November 20, 2013
“This fraud would have to be so widespread, to affect enough of the survey takers to affect the top-line numbers, that it seems implausible on the face of it,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist who studies unemployment at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
The 0.3-percent decline in unemployment in September 2012 was not an unusually large change, Shierholz pointed out — the unemployment rate tends to be volatile. Unemployment also fell by 0.3 percent in November 2011, less than a year earlier. September’s drop, though large, was not out of line with the overall trend in unemployment, which has continued to decline steadily, if slowly, in the year since the election.
The Huffington Post
November 20, 2013