The Economic Policy Institute found child care costs for one infant are nearly 16% of a median family’s income in Texas. The average cost of child care for a 4-year-old Texan is $7,062 a year, or $589 every month. The average cost for an infant is $9,324, or $777 per month.
KERA
June 24, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the ratio of CEO pay to typical worker’s compensation was 351 to 1 in 2020, up from 61 to 1 in 1989 and just 21 to 1 in 1965. That’s an increase of 1,322% for CEOs from 1978 to 2020 versus a typical worker pay increase of just 18% over the same time-period. Tesla CEO Elon Musk just convinced his shareholders to pay him a whopping $56 billion bonus for one year of sales results.
Baltimore Sun
June 24, 2024
The unemployment rate among Black Americans has consistently been twice that of white Americans, according to the Economic Policy Institute, while in a 2021 Gallup poll, one in four Black and Hispanic workers in the US reported recent discrimination at work.
Financial Times
June 21, 2024
Education Week
June 21, 2024
Today, the projected date is 2035, with rising income inequality contributing to the depletion dates being pushed up, according to the Economic Policy Institute and other experts. Social Security payroll taxes are capped at $168,600 in earnings. As wage growth for high earners outpaces average wage growth, more income falls above the threshold where it is not subject to Social Security payroll taxes, the EPI says.
CNBC
June 17, 2024
The Economic Policy Institute regularly releases figures showing the genuinely outrageous amounts CEOs pull down; the last report found that at the 350 largest companies, CEOs made an average of 344 times more than the typical worker. But Musk is getting about nine hundred sixty thousand times the pay of a Tesla production associate.
American Prospect
June 17, 2024
Adam Hersh, a senior economist with Economic Policy Institute Action, likened the tariff idea “to dropping a nuclear bomb on a hurricane.” It makes no sense and it would be incredibly destructive.
As Hersh explained, to make up for the roughly $4.2 trillion in revenue generated through income taxes, the across-the-board tariffs would have to be somewhere around 120% or 130% on incoming goods. In other words, consumers would effectively have to pay an additional sales tax of up to 130% on any imported item. And that’s assuming that demand for imports remains constant. In reality, demand for imported goods would decline, meaning tariffs would need to be even higher to offset the elimination of the income tax.
Hersh also noted that the presumed elimination of the payroll tax would likely throw fundamental parts of the U.S. social safety net — Social Security and Medicare — into jeopardy.
MSNBC.com
June 17, 2024
“There are aspects of the status of unaccompanied immigrant youth that make them more vulnerable to these types of situations,” explains Nina Mast, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) Research and Analysis Network. “Because of their situation they may be forced to work in jobs that may have high wages but at the same time jeopardizing their health, safety, and education, and they don’t have a parent or guardian to ensure that what they are doing is appropriate.” Daniel Costa, EPI’s director of Immigration Law and Policy Research, explains that migrant minors face “all kinds of pressures” because of their precarious status, which leads them to accept difficult conditions.
El Pais
June 17, 2024
According to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, seven out of ten states with the highest levels of poverty are in the South, and the region has the highest level of child poverty in the country. Wages are low, and public services are woefully underfunded.
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The “economic model of the South” — which Alabama governor Kay Ivey recently described as under attack by the UAW organizing drives across the region — is one characterized by low wages. Corporations have long scrambled to take advantage of this model, draining resources from the region to line the pockets of the rich on Wall Street.
Jacobin
June 17, 2024