Extending the TCJA raises serious concerns about deepening racial and economic inequities. The Economic Policy Institute warns that extending high-income tax cuts could further enrich affluent households and profitable corporations, thereby widening the economic chasm between the wealthy and marginalized communities.
The Washington Informer
April 21, 2025
“I think that level of uncertainty is basically just poison for businesses and households,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
He said everyone is trying to figure out how to spend their money over the next year.
“If you’re going to build a new factory or expand your business, you really need to know what the various tariff levels are like in different countries,” he said. “And so until you have clarity on that, you’re not going to do a lot of investment.”
Marketplace
April 21, 2025
When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made a similar claim about lost factories later in March, the White House told the Washington Post that the figure came from a nearly 5-year-old analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
In that August 2020 report, which was about how Trump hadn’t been successful at reshoring manufacturing jobs during his first presidential term, the EPI said that “the U.S. has suffered a net loss of more than 91,000 manufacturing plants” between 1997 and 2018, the year that the U.S., Canada and Mexico agreed on a new trade deal, known as the USMCA, which officially replaced their NAFTA deal in 2020. The EPI report’s primary source was Business Dynamics Statistics data published by the Census Bureau.
But that figure appears to be out of date. When we tried to confirm that tally using the BDS online tool, we got a smaller decrease — a drop of about 65,000 establishments between 1997 and 2018. Census defines an establishment as “a single physical location at which business is conducted or services or industrial operations are performed.”
FactCheck.org
April 21, 2025
“This is a major and unprecedented action that risks the sensitive personal and location data of immigrant tax filers, which ICE could potentially use to target them for enforcement actions,” the Economic Policy Institute wrote in the days after the agreement was signed.
Raleigh News and Observer
April 21, 2025
Economist Monique Morrissey with the Economic Policy Institute calls the planned cuts a form of sabotage, and says Social Security is already very efficient.
“Less than 1% of what they are paying out goes to administrative costs. That’s including not just the staffing, but the office space and everything else,” she said. “So, almost all the money that’s going out of Social Security is going directly into beneficiaries’ pockets.”
Public News Service
April 21, 2025
“The 10% baseline tariffs are not as bad, but still will drag on growth on top of the other tariffs and other factors,” Adam Hersh, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an email to Restaurant Dive. “[The White House] only announced a 90 day pause. Maybe the tariffs will return, maybe not. But in the meantime it will leave a pall of uncertainty over investors and consumers.”
Restaurant Dive
April 21, 2025
In Maryland, lawmakers raised taxes by about $1.6 billion and cut spending by $2.3 billion to close a deficit that widened as the session progressed and federal layoffs shook the state economy. About 7% of Marylanders worked for the federal government in January, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Pluribus News
April 17, 2025
Making matters worse, the gap between productivity and a typical worker’s compensation has been widening for nearly a half century, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with productivity growing nearly three times as much as hourly pay.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
April 17, 2025
“Bringing back a manufacturing job is far from a panacea for job quality in the US,” said Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a …[paywall].
Business Insider
April 17, 2025