Despite this rhetoric fomenting xenophobic sentiments, an October 2024 report by the Economic Policy Institute on the benefits of immigration to the US cited the enabling of economic growth as the US-born workforce declines, and the payment of nearly $100bn annually in taxes, and noted mass deportations actually result in job losses for US-born workers due to reduced local demand output.
“School bus driver wages are far lower than [those of] most other workers, according to our analysis,” a November 2023 Economic Policy Institute report stated. “The typical school bus driver earned $20 an hour in 2022, which is 16.8% less than the median wage for all workers in the economy, $24.04.”
Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank whose one-time chief economist, Jared Bernstein, was an advisor to President Joe Biden, told Salon that one catch in the GOP’s scheme is that — in order to do the full $4.5 trillion in tax cuts — the resolution says that they need to actually achieve $2 trillion in mandatory spending cuts.”
“This is widely seen as a sop to the anti-spending Freedom Caucus – but it’s not obviously enforceable in any way,” Bivens said. “That still obviously leaves lots of this deficit-financed, and, it also puts on Republican paper what opponents of TCJA extension have said all along: there is a pure, unambiguous trade-off between tax cuts disproportionately going to the rich and spending programs (Medicaid and others) that go to vulnerable families. This trade-off is written into the budget resolution.”
The lawsuit was filed by Democracy Forward on behalf of the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America, and the Economic Policy Institute.
The Economic Policy Institute’s Senior Policy Analyst Margaret Poydock told Truthout that these moves are “aimed at gutting the federal workforce and politicizing the career civil service.”
According to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “extending employment insurance to strikers would cost less than 1% of total UI expenditures in each state that has considered such legislation.” The EPI report also claims that such policies “help stabilize the economy by keeping dollars flowing to communities where a strike is taking place,” and that such policies would oblige employers to “engage workers more earnestly at the bargaining table, knowing that they can’t rely on threats to starve workers out by forcing a strike.”
Less than a month into his second term, President Trump has undertaken dozens of actions that harm workers, the economy and our democracy. If it feels like déjà vu, it is. Many of these actions were introduced during his first term, when President Trump attacked unions, workers’ wages and workplace health and safety. But now, equipped with policies from the Heritage Foundation’s far-right Project 2025, Trump is going even further to prioritize the interests of corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk over working people.
As the nation marks a turbulent Black History Month, the economic state of Black America has much improved over the last few decades but is still nowhere near parity.
A court hearing today will determine whether the group — along with union affiliates and the Economic Policy Institute — can truly halt Elon Musk’s advances.