In California, the average cost of child care for one infant is $21,945, which takes up 18.4% of a median family’s income, according to an analysis of federal data by the Economic Policy Institute. New parents also shell out for medical costs, diapers, clothing and feeding supplies.
LA Times
May 12, 2025
A February analysis of Trump’s tax plan by the Economic Policy Institute said: “If these tax cuts for the rich are financed by large spending cuts, this would greatly damage current incomes and future opportunities for the most vulnerable families in the U.S.”
San Francisco Chronicle
May 12, 2025
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator (which takes into account housing, food, transportation, health care, taxes, and other necessities), a household with two adults and no children living in San Diego County would spend $86,243 a year, on average.
Investopedia
May 12, 2025
Many school choice advocates, including EdChoice, claim interest in these programs has increased because more parents are dissatisfied with their child’s education, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these programs can be costly, and critics claim redirecting some per-student funding from public schools to private institutions can strain public school resources.
“For students who are in public schools who are leaving to take up these vouchers, it can have pretty severe effects on the public schools,” Dr. Hilary Wething, economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which opposes school choice, said. “Public schools rely on enrollment to determine their funding when a policy shock happens, like voucher programs, this essentially leads to a shock in potential enrollment decline. What that means essentially for the public schools is now they have fewer funds available to educate the students who remain in public school.”
Straight Arrow News
May 12, 2025
As the Trump administration has cut funding for some colleges and eliminated thousands of federal employees (including at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta), there are fewer jobs available in government and research institutions. Although young workers have experienced historically strong real wage growth since February 2020, the Economic Policy Institute found the administration’s policy actions, particularly regarding tariffs, “could be devastating for young adults trying to get a foothold in the labor market.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution
May 12, 2025
But that’s the reality for Minnesota parents who face the nation’s third most expensive infant care, at $1,800 a month, behind Massachusetts and Washington D.C., according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. Child care for a 4-year-old is slightly cheaper, but still $1,500 a month, or $18,000 per year and unaffordable for a typical family in Minnesota, where the median household income is $87,556.
Minnesota Reformer
May 12, 2025
“Many states came into this administration with a track record of trying to privatize education, and I think they see this move to dismantle and defund the Department of Ed and President Trump’s support of school privatization as a green light to be more expansive in their approach moving forward,” said Hilary Wething, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute who closely studies the impact of voucher programs on public education.
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Wething, of the EPI, said analyses have shown that between 60% and 90% of students who take advantage of universal-eligibility voucher programs across the U.S. were already enrolled in private school when they participated in the programs.
She warned of the harms she said programs like the one in Texas posed.
“As soon as you get rid of income limits or carveouts for, say, only low-income families or only students with disabilities, you basically open the gates for students who are already attending private school, or who already have enough income to attend private school, to now use state funding to subsidize their private school,” she said. “It’s kind of the next step in what we think of as this voucher evolution.”
NBC News
May 12, 2025
In a report released in January, the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, cited Starbucks as engaging in union busting, citing 771 open or settled unfair labor practice tactics before regional offices of the federal National Labor Relations Board through February 2024.
Alabama Reflector
May 12, 2025
As Krugman put it a few years ago, “The relationship between stock performance—largely driven by the oscillation between greed and fear—and real economic growth has always been somewhere between loose and nonexistent.”3 This means, as a March 2025 Economic Policy Institute report put it, “More often what is happening to stock prices gives us no insight into the wider economy.”
Investopedia
May 12, 2025
Features interview with Daniel Costa.
KQED
May 12, 2025