In addition, median middle-class income decreased by 5 percent in the last decade, while total wealth dropped 28 percent. According to the Economic Policy Institute, households in the wealthiest 1 percent of the U.S. population now have 288 times the amount of wealth of the average middle-class American family.
US News and World Report
October 17, 2012
Ethan Pollack, senior policy analyst, Economic Policy Institute – Obama’s biggest challenge is to reclaim the label of change. At the last debate he really came across as the status quo, while Romney came across as a change agent. Obama must do a better job of linking Romney to past failed policies (i.e., Bush) and presenting a coherent second-term agenda. The agenda doesn’t need to be ambitious, but Obama just needs to sound excited when talking about it.
Romney needs to build on his momentum by making few mistakes (i.e., no $10,000 bets) and continuing his relentless attacks on Obama while still sounding more disappointed than angry.
The Fiscal Times
October 17, 2012
The report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, attributes the widening gap between top and average incomes in Michigan to a decline over the same period in collective bargaining. It comes as Michigan weighs a ballot initiative — Proposal 2 — to protect collective bargaining rights in its constitution.
Detroit News
October 16, 2012
History has demonstrated that investment in higher education is indeed sound. The unemployment rate for young high school graduates last year was just over 31% compared to just over 9% for young college graduates, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And the U.S. Census reports that lifetime earnings of college graduates exceed those of high school graduates by more than a million dollars.
MarketWatch
October 15, 2012
“I don’t see choice as a panacea,” says Richard Rothstein of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. He says Obama has hitched his education agenda to privately run, publicly funded charter schools, despite their poor record.
“We know now that charter schools for disadvantaged children don’t perform any better on average than regular public schools … in fact, they perform slightly worse on average,” Rothstein says.
NPR
October 15, 2012
Andrew Fieldhouse, an analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, dismissed Ryan’s economic prescriptions as “supply-side snake oil.” He noted that Ryan held fast to the ticket’s repeated claim that its tax cuts and elimination of taxes wouldn’t lead to a bigger deficit, tax increases for the middle class, or tax cuts for the wealthy.
“This combination of promises is demonstrably mathematically impossible, and the onus remains on the Romney-Ryan campaign to prove their tax cuts will not blow a bigger hole in the deficit,” he said.
The Huffington Post
October 15, 2012
The recession was especially tough for low-wage earners, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Low-wage workers are “replaceable, essentially,” she said. They “need a tight labor market to negotiate for higher wages.”
Des Moines Register
October 15, 2012
As the Economic Policy Institute points out in the latest edition of The State of Working America, “Productivity grew 80.4 percent between 1973 and 2011, when, as noted, median worker pay grew just 10.7 percent.” However you feel about President Obama’s economic policies, they are unlikely to have done very much damage to the wages of workers in the 70s. Instead, wages have suffered in thanks in large part to policies which the Republican Party still vigorously supports: namely, keeping the minimum wage low and suppressing the power of unions.
MSNBC
October 12, 2012
By spurring Congress to immediately pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the president turned around that employment plunge and “kept our economy from swerving over the cliff,” according to Rebecca Thiess, a policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group.
NPR
October 12, 2012
Claims that the Bureau of Labor Statistics published phony numbers on employment last week are a bad joke, but some might want to know why the two pieces of the BLS picture didn’t appear to match. Lawrence Mishel goes through the numbers carefully, and shows why it happened.
The Washington Post
October 12, 2012