Media clips
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Andrew Fieldhouse at The Fiscal Times put the nation’s upper economic echelons on notice last week by letting them know they’re not paying anything close to what economists feel is their fair share.
Amid stifled economic output, stagnant job growth, sequestration cuts, the expired payroll tax cuts, the stonewalling of the American Jobs Act and the gradual replacement of stimulus with European-style austerity, Fieldhouse says a dollar of government spending cuts will do four to seven times as much economic damage than an additional dollar of revenue collected from upper-income taxpayers.
MSN Money April 15, 2013 -
A separate analysis of government data, released by the Economic Policy Institute earlier this week, also found that unemployment rates for young college grads are much lower than for young high school graduates who are furthering their education. Still, both groups are facing higher rates of joblessness than before the economy soured in late 2007.
LifeInc/Today April 15, 2013 -
For the fifth year in a row, high unemployment rates and depressed wages await college grads, who are leaving campus, on average, with $26,000 in student loan debt, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Many students go to college with the idea that “they will be able to get a high quality job to pay off their student debt, but that idea is broken at a time like this,” EPI economist and co-author of the report, Heidi Shierholz said.
Currently, the unemployment rate among young college grads is 8.8 percent. That’s down from 10.4 percent in 2010, but still much higher than the pre-recession level of 5.7 percent in 2007. To make matters worse, many of the college grads that do score full-time jobs are earning less than they would in a healthy job market. According to the EPI, college grads are earning about $3,200 less a year than they were in 2000. Their pay fell by 7.6 percent in the last six years alone.
The Fiscal Times April 15, 2013 -
Since 2007, there’s been a huge exodus of people from the labor force. In March, the number was 496,000. Perhaps two-thirds of the dropouts leave because they’re discouraged that they’ll ever find work, estimates Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. (The remaining third reflects lifestyle choices and aging, including the retirement of baby boomers.) Counting many discouraged workers as jobless would raise the unemployment rate close to 10 percent instead of the reported 7.6 percent, she says.
The Washington Post April 15, 2013 -
The treatment of carried interest has for years been strongly defended by elements of the financial industry, and the White House proposal was quickly attacked on Wednesday by the leading private equity industry trade group. Even supporters of the proposal conceded that it faced stiff political opposition.
“Republicans are never going to sign off on this,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times April 11, 2013 -
The president, CBPP, CAP, and a few Democrats on the Hill may back chained CPI, but many other liberal groups and leaders oppose it. On Tuesday, a group of major progressive organizations, including the National Organization for Women, the Campaign for America’s Future and MoveOn.org, joined Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) for a protest on Capitol Hill opposing the proposed cuts. More than 2 million people signed a petition presented to the White House the same day opposing the plan. “We’re not going to balance the budget on the backs of elderly, disabled vets, the sick or the children,” Sanders later told Current TV .
“I’ve never seen such a wholehearted and rapid response,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which opposes the cuts. She calls the CBPP and CAP the “two notable dissenters” that are “much more deficit-hawkish than the mainstream of the progressive movement.”
Mother Jones April 11, 2013 -
But the Advocacy study has also come under scrutiny from economists and legal scholars, who have challenged the methodology, the underlying data and the authors’ reluctance to share certain details about how they did their work. And while much of the criticism comes from liberal organizations like the Center for Progressive Reform and the Economic Policy Institute (which weighed in twice), here, too, the outrage is not strictly partisan: theCongressional Research Service has also cast doubt on the study’s findings.
The New York Times April 11, 2013 -
Daniel Costa, immigration policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, said the top 10 companies with the most H-1B visas last year were all firms that bring workers here to work at lower cost than Americans would, then send them back home. Many are technology companies based in India.
“There need to be some major reforms before expansion happens,” Costa said.
Associated Press April 11, 2013 -
Shiller, John Irons and Josh Bivens, and Mike Konczal have also noted that’s it’s much more likely that causality runs in the other direction. That is, countries have high debt-to-GDP ratios because they have slow growth, rather than the other way around. This makes sense. Slow growth means lower tax revenue, greater social service payouts, and a whole lot of other factors that contribute to increased deficits and debt.
Washington Post-Wonkblog April 11, 2013 -
What angers advocates for the elderly and disabled and surprises economists is that there’s so little recognition that both the existing and proposed cost-of-living adjustments largely overlook the real prices for seniors and the disabled.
“It’s a backdoor benefit cut. It’s not a more accurate measure of the costs facing seniors,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “If anything, the current (cost-of-living adjustment) underestimates inflation (faced by seniors).”
McClatchy April 11, 2013