I see from some of the comments that there’s a widespread belief that the wage stagnation we’ve experienced under “modern capitalism” is some kind of illusion, that it would go away if we took benefits into account.
Nope:
The New York Times
July 19, 2012
“The general public thinks there’s much more mobility than there actually is,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, who was not involved in the research.
Mishel also noted that many households have more income than their parents did at the same age because more women are working than in the previous generation.
MSNBC.com
July 19, 2012
Still, many question why CEO severance and bonus packages have become so outsized in the first place, particularly in light of the 2008 financial crisis. In 2011, average CEO compensation (including salary and stock options) was 209 times greater than the average employee’s pay, according to a 2012 study by the Economic Policy Institute. In 1965, the ratio was just 18 to 1.
Wharton Journal
July 19, 2012
The Waltons’ value — $89.5 billion in 2010 – is equal to the worth of the 41.5% of families at the lower end of the income ladder, according to an analysis by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. That comes out to 48.8 million households.
Los Angeles Times
July 19, 2012
The six heirs to the Walmart fortune are worth as much as nearly half of all American households.
The Walton family was worth $89.5 billion in 2010, the same as the bottom 41.5 percent of U.S. families combined, according to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. That’s 48.8 million American households in total.
The Huffington Post
July 18, 2012
New Federal Reserve data analyzed by both Allegretto and Josn Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute shows that the Waltons now hold as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined:
Concretely, between 2007 and 2010, while median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent, the wealth of the Walton family members rose from $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion…
Think Progress
July 18, 2012
Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute says if personal re-employment accounts are to work, the government has to be realistic about the cost. He says $3,000 simply isn’t enough to retrain most laid-off workers.
“If people are unemployed because their skills are outmoded and they’re not going to find the kind of skills they’ve done in the past, then they need new skills,” Eisenbrey says. “That can’t be done on the cheap.”
NPR
July 17, 2012
While unemployment in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Virginia all fall below the national average, and Florida’s rate is the best it’s been since 2008, there’s more to an economic turnaround than job numbers alone alone. To find out how these states are really doing, I called Doug Hall at the Economic Policy Institute. Hall oversees the Economic Analysis and Research Network, which connects state-level economic think tanks. He took a look at a few of the key states—Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and Virginia—to evaluate claims of economic recovery.
His answer: It’s complicated. “It’s very tempting to grab one indicator and sort of focus on that—with the most popular one being employment growth,” he said. “You’ve got to make sure you’re looking at two or three pictures together.”
“
The American Prospect
July 17, 2012
As a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute showed, these job cuts ripple through the economy, also harming private sector job creation. In fact, EPI estimates that public sector job cuts have likely cost the private sector 750,000 jobs:
The economic “multiplier” of state and local spending (not including transfer payments) is large – around 1.24. This means that for every dollar cut in salary and supplies of public-sector workers, another $0.24 is lost in purchasing power throughout the rest of the economy. Teachers and firefighters stop going to restaurants and buying cars if they’re laid off, which reduces demand for waitstaff and autoworkers and so on. Add these two influences together (supplier jobs and jobs supported by this multiplier impact) and roughly 0.67 private sector jobs are lost for every public sector job cut. This means that the public sector being down 1.1 million jobs has likely cost the private sector 751,000 jobs.
Think Progress
July 17, 2012
As some states emerge from the depths of the recession, should they cut taxes or restore services and jobs? Tad DeHaven, The Cato Institute and David Cooper, Economic Policy Institute, weigh in.
CNBC
July 17, 2012