California, Texas, Virginia, Maryland and Florida were home to the highest numbers of civilian federal workers at that time, according to estimates from Ben Zipperer, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.
Pluribus News
March 3, 2025
Consumer spending is the “beating heart” of the American economy, said Marketplace. People buying stuff accounts for 70% of the gross domestic product. But there is a distorting effect when that spending is weighted so heavily toward the rich. “Maybe we’d have fewer people working in really high-end hotels and resorts and a lot more people working in elder care and child care,” said Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. And it’s not clear that wealthy households can keep the economy going on their own. If their spending is “being driven by record stock prices, I wouldn’t count on that for sustaining long-term economic growth,” said Moody’s Mark Zandi.
The Week
March 3, 2025
Child care is one of the largest expenses for Georgia families.
The Economic Policy Institute reports the average annual cost of infant care in Georgia is $7,644, or $637 a month for a 4-year-old, it’s $6,500, or $542 a month.
PBS Georgia
March 3, 2025
These costs and competition in the delivery sector, are two of the main reasons why the Postal Service is losing money, says Monique Morrissey, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute think tank.
She anticipates the Trump administration will back away from privatizing the agency once officials realize the harm it would do to rural voters.
“Members of Congress in rural states are very aware of the fact that commerce is dependent on the Postal Service and if they [consumers] really had to pay their share of postage, it wouldn’t be cost-effective and small businesses would just move out of the state,” Morrissey said. “It would be catastrophic.”
Privatizing the agency wouldn’t necessarily make it more profitable or help it run more efficiently either, she noted.
“There’s no real good reason for privatizing the Postal Service,” Morrissey continued. “And you never are going to get rid of the need to regulate it.”
The Independent
March 3, 2025
Celine McNicholas, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, said overturning these decisions could further embolden employers like Amazon to break …[paywall].
The Nation
March 3, 2025
But the EPI’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Local Area Unemployment Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau data uncovered some surprising things: Per their report, “Black workers are twice as likely to be unemployed as white workers overall, even Black workers with a college degree are more likely to be unemployed than similarly educated white workers.” That unemployment “gap,” apparently, is “a pattern that has persisted for more than 40 years. In fact, this 2-to-1 ratio holds in practically every state in the nation where Black workers make up a significant share of the workforce.”
Fast Company
March 3, 2025
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) separately found that if the House GOP’s proposal for $880 billion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade becomes reality, it would “reduce incomes for the bottom 40% more than extending the [Trump tax cuts] would boost them—and the lowest-income households would fare the worst.”
Common Dreams
March 3, 2025
The push to eliminate taxes on tips has been criticized for failing to address the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers, and a lack of guardrails to prevent employers and the wealthy from taking advantage of a no-tax on-tips policy, such as employers expanding the number and types of jobs reliant on tips, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute
The Guardian
March 3, 2025
Since 2015, the DoL reported a 283% increase in child labor violations; and perhaps more shocking, 28 US states have introduced bills to weaken child labor laws, with 12 of those states enacting those laws since 2021, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Thomson Reuters Foundation News
March 3, 2025
But Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said a more equal distribution of incomes and consumption could reorient what jobs are created in the first place.
“Maybe we’d have fewer people working in really high end hotels and resorts and a lot more people working in elder care and child care,” he said.
Bivens said with a more even distribution of incomes, more people could afford care for their parents and children.
Marketplace
March 3, 2025