The minimum wage is going up in 17 states and localities July 1, but Nevada isn’t one of them.
With one or two exceptions, this summer’s minimum wage increases across the country are the result of statutes or ordinances by which the wage is adjusted each year for inflation, according to tracking by the Economic Policy Institute.
Nevada Current
July 13, 2026
So what’s driven the decline in work among teens?
“This is a decision of labor supply,” said economist Hilary Wething at the Economic Policy Institute. “Fewer teens are looking to participate in the workforce. For 18- and 19-year-olds, the share enrolled in high school or college grew from about 45% in 1984 to 63% in 2025. That’s a pretty big jump. They just have more competing priorities than previous generations: extracurriculars, college prep, academic programs, internships.”
Marketplace
July 13, 2026
A stronger, bolder federal minimum wage would restore a national wage floor that more effectively puts workers within reach of a living wage and eliminates unfair competition based on subpar wages. This means setting the federal minimum wage to two-thirds of the national median wage, which new research from the Economic Policy Institute and the Roosevelt Institute projects would reach about $20 an hour by 2030, raising pay for 40 million workers and their families.
The Hill
July 13, 2026
As his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sought to reduce the federal workforce, analysts such as Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute saw a rapid rise in the unemployment rate for Black workers, an increase only the pandemic and the Great Recession could surpass.
The exact number of Black employees who were among the 280,000 federal jobs lost was not immediately clear. It was hard to tell because agencies had stopped collecting employment data about race to comply with Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
But digging into the available statistics, Wilson noted that the large number of college-educated Black women losing their jobs would certainly be connected to government cuts. Nearly one-fifth of the federal workforce was Black, despite them being 13 percent of the population. And after President Harry S. Truman integrated the federal workforce in the 1940s, government jobs became a dependable pathway to the middle class for those who were Black and ambitious.
The Washington Post
July 13, 2026
It won’t help all children equally, though, says Ismael Cid-Martinez, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s a good idea for families that are already positioned to save,” he said. “But I’m deeply concerned about families who can’t afford to save, which represents the bulk of U.S. adults.”
Those families won’t be able to contribute to their children’s investment accounts, he said, and even if their babies are eligible for the Trump account seed funding, that won’t provide enough of a cushion to make a meaningful difference. The result, he fears, will widen economic disparities.
“If the government really wanted to do something to help families in need,” Mr. Cid-Martinez said, “it could bring back some of the programs that were introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, like the expansion of SNAP benefits and the Child Tax Credit, which cut child poverty in the U.S. nearly by half,” Mr. Cid-Martinez said. Child poverty rebounded quickly after the programs expired; SNAP benefits have since been slashed further by the law that established Trump accounts.
The New York Times
July 13, 2026
Arkansas Democrat Gazette
July 13, 2026
Nationally, wage theft is a multibillion-dollar problem. Between 2017 and 2020, more than $3 billion in stolen wages was recovered on behalf of workers by the U.S. Department of Labor, state labor departments and attorneys general, and through class and collective action litigation, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Chicago Sun Times
July 13, 2026
It was the neoliberal corporate Democrats who got it wrong. They abandoned working families beginning in the 1970s, paving the road to Trump. Their critics got it right, including my own work and the work of The American Prospect, and another institution that I co-founded, the Economic Policy Institute.
American Prospect
July 13, 2026
A 2019 Maine Center for Economic Policy analysis, citing an Economic Policy Institute report based on NCES survey data, estimated Maine public school teachers spent an average of $356 annually on supplies for students.
Portland Press Herald
July 13, 2026
Following Trump’s federal layoffs last year, in which 277,000 federal employees were permanently laid off, a report from Economic Policy Institute economist Valerie Wilson drew the connection between the layoffs and the decline in Black female unemployment.
The City Reporter (NYC)
July 13, 2026