The American nest egg is facing financial extinction. Aging workers who thought they could relax in retirement face unprecedented economic stressors, according to new analysis of retirement wealth. Data from Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reveals retirement wealth is turning into retirement poverty for a growing portion of working households. The labor-focused think tank finds that “retirement wealth has not grown fast enough to keep pace with an aging population and other changes.” While retirement wealth has risen in absolute terms since the 1990s, EPI observes that the growth trend has lagged behind changes in the aging population’s size and needs.
The Nation
March 8, 2016
It was no doubt a poor choice of words from the Vermont senator, but not without some basis in reality as The Washington Post points to the Economic Policy Institute, which said, “Nearly half (45%) of poor black children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, but only a little more than a tenth (12%) of poor white children live in similar neighborhoods.”
Teen Vogue
March 8, 2016
And according to the Economic Policy Institute, 42 percent of Hispanic workers and 36 percent of black workers make poverty-level wages, compared with 23 percent of white workers.
The Nation
March 8, 2016
The debate has political implications, too. Loud voices on both the left and the right argue the unemployment rate tells a too-optimistic story about the recovery because the Labor Department’s definition of an unemployed worker doesn’t include someone who gave up on a job search and took early retirement, applied for disability benefits, enrolled in school or otherwise left the workforce. The liberal Economic Policy Institute says February’s 4.9% jobless rate would be 6.3% if “missing workers” were included. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump cites low participation to say the jobless rate is really in double digits.
Wall Street Journal
March 7, 2016
Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said February’s jobs numbers suggested the Federal Reserve should refrain from further interest rate hikes. “Continued months of strong job growth should eventually translate into durable accelerations in wage growth,” he said, “but it hasn’t happened yet.”
Politico
March 7, 2016
So if free trade policies like NAFTA didn’t drive Detroit’s decline, that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect the city’s (or the state of Michigan’s) economy. Sanders’ 43,000 figure comes from a 2011 report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning policy think tank that has produced several reports about the potential detrimental effects of trade pacts like NAFTA and TPP.
NPR
March 7, 2016
But a series of new—and slightly depressing—charts from the Economic Policy Institute point out more of the ways that the retirement accounts are falling short. Instead of leveling the playing field in retirement, 401(k) plans have the effect of magnifying income inequality, says Monique Morrissey, an economist for EPI who focuses on retirement. And differences in income alone don’t explain the difference, she said, citing that tax law and differences in risk tolerance also could be deepening the gap between what low income and high income workers are able to set aside for retirement. Take a look at some of EPI’s most compelling charts, which analyze data from the Census and the Federal Reserve…
The Washington Post
March 7, 2016
There are no comprehensive numbers on what proportion of named executive officers’ compensation is tax-deductible. Steven Balsam, a professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, took a swing at the subject four years ago. In an oft-cited paper, “Taxes and Executive Compensation,” written for the Economic Policy Institute, he analyzed compensation paid by 7,248 companies in 2010.
The Washington Post
March 7, 2016
Here, from the Economic Policy Institute, is something very easy to understand. Black Americans suffer from significantly higher levels of unemployment even when they have the same level of education as white people. It takes some impressive acrobatics of rhetoric to exclude past and present racism from the reasons behind a situation like this, when black people suffer nearly double (or more than double) the unemployment as white people do at all educational levels.
Gawker
March 7, 2016
This year’s occasion for despair comes courtesy of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which released a report Thursday titled “The State of American Retirement: How 401(ks) Have failed Most American Workers.” According to EPI’s analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances between 2000 and 2013, slightly less than one-half of prime working-age families (that’s families headed up by someone between the ages of 32 and 61) have a grand total of bubkes in their retirement accounts. (I use the Yiddish only because no other language can quite transmit the absurd awfulness of this fact.)
Slate
March 7, 2016
Josh Bivens of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said that the drop in wages in February “is a real stumble in getting wage inflation higher.” But, he added, we may be seeing slack in the market because more people are hopeful that job prospects exist and are jumping back into the labor market for them. The only problem? Not all of them have found jobs yet.
PBS News Hour
March 7, 2016
For millions of Americans, the prospects for a comfortable retirement continue to erode. That’s the latest finding of an updated report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank in Washington that has been cataloging the trend for many years.
Time
March 7, 2016
Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the progressive Economic Policy Institute, is less pessimistic than Alpert about the economy’s trajectory. But he argues that people are especially disappointed with the sluggish wage growth, because their expectations have risen after years of consistent job growth. “People are going to be unhappy about the economy until it starts delivering reliable wage increases,” Bivens said. “In 2011 and 2012, we had jobs again, and wages were not up, but people were willing to be patient. Now, seven years into the official recovery, people are justifiably less patient.”
The Huffington Post
March 7, 2016
In 2001, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute tallied up the job losses from the North American Free Trade Agreement (better known as NAFTA) passed in 1993. Only California lost more jobs from NAFTA than Michigan, EPI estimated. Michigan shed more than 46,000 jobs, 40,000 of them in manufacturing alone—mostly in the automotive sector.
The Washington Post
March 7, 2016
That uptick on the far right is significant. As the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens explained to The Week, there’s a debate among economists over how much of that fall is “cyclical” or “structural.” “Cyclical” basically means, “due to the recession.” If there aren’t enough jobs, people will get discouraged and leave the labor force. Which suggests that if government boosts aggregate demand with the right fiscal and monetary policies, it can create new jobs and bring them back in. “Structural” means some deep and foundational change in the economy. The aging of the population is one example: If a larger portion of our population is retiring, that will lower the natural ceiling on how high the labor force participation rate can go. “Roughly half of the decline since 2007 is unambiguously demographic,” said Bivens. “It’s that remaining half that people mostly argue over.”
The Week
March 7, 2016
A researcher with the Economic Policy Institute says the federal government needs to recognize that it played a deliberate role in creating racially segregated neighborhoods in cities like St. Louis. At a Missouri History Museum Symposium Saturday, the think tank’s Richard Rothstein drew a direct line between today’s segregated schools and neighborhoods and two federal housing programs from the 1930s, 40s and 50s: public housing and subsidized construction. “We have a national myth that the reason our metropolitan areas are segregated is for informal reasons—private prejudice, differences in income, demographic trends, racial steering by real estate agents and so forth,” Rothstein said. “The reality is that the segregation that we see today was established by the federal government with help from state and local governments. It’s an officially established system.”
St. Louis Public Radio
March 7, 2016
Sanders appears to be citing an estimate from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning group which has opposed free-trade agreements, which estimated a job loss of nearly 700,000. (Another group, Public Citizen, pegs the jobs loss at 1 million.) But these are not universally accepted estimates, with many economists say that the job losses in manufacturing cannot be easily blamed just on NAFTA.
He is citing research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The 51 percent figure refers to high school graduates between 17 and 20 years old who are not enrolled in additional schooling. This report is different from the official unemployment rate published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which does not break out data for 17- to 20-year-olds.
The Washington Post
March 7, 2016
The February jobs report is the last significant batch of economic data before Federal Reserve policymakers meet this month to determine whether to enact another small hike in a key interest rate. The mixed data on job gains and wages in the wake of recent financial market turmoil could lead central bank officials to hold off on a rate increase. “Continued months of strong job growth should eventually translate into durable accelerations in wage growth, but it hasn’t happened yet,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute think tank. “Given this, job creation and economic expansion should continue to be encouraged, not tamped down with another interest rate hike from the Federal Reserve at their next meeting.”
Los Angeles Times
March 4, 2016
In 2001, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute tallied up the job losses from the North American Free Trade Agreement (better known as NAFTA) passed in 1993. Only California lost more jobs from NAFTA than Michigan, EPI estimated. Michigan shed more than 46,000 jobs, 40,000 of them in manufacturing alone—mostly in the automotive sector.
The Washington Post
March 4, 2016
Mr. Johnson, who came to the T.V.A. in 2013 after working his way up the ranks to become chief executive of the investor-owned utility Progress Energy (now a part of Duke Energy), has generally won favorable reviews. That includes a 2015 report by the liberal Economic Policy Institute saying the agency appeared to be “on a more sustainable financial path” under his leadership.
The New York Times
March 4, 2016
Economist Monique Morrissey of the progressive Economic Policy Institute on Thursday delivered some hard evidence of the problems facing the average American retiree with release of her updated Economic Inequality Chartbook: 32 interactive graphs that show how the shift from defined benefit pensions to 401(k)’s “has failed the majority of workers.” This shift, which relieves much of the burden and risk of saving for retirement from employers and places it on employees’ shoulders, has increased wealth inequality for older workers and left them on average with meager resources, even as their periods of retirement grow longer.
Los Angeles Times
March 4, 2016
You have a better chance of retiring in dignity in the United States if you are white. African-American and Latino workers are far less likely than their white peers to have any savings in a 401(k) plan or other retirement account, according to “The State of American Retirement,” a report released by the Economic Policy Institute on Thursday. The report finds that among households headed by someone aged 32 to 61, just 41 percent of black families and 26 percent of Latino families had any retirement account savings at all, compared with 65 percent of non-Latino white families.
Monique Morrissey, the EPI retirement policy expert who authored the report, told reporters on Thursday that the data on African-American families is particularly disconcerting, because when pensions were more common, participation in employer-based retirement plans was a rare area of relative equality with whites.
The Huffington Post
March 4, 2016
According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, “retirement disparities have grown with the shift from traditional pensions to retirement savings accounts.” People who are rich, white, college-educated, and married are far more likely to participate in a 401(k) plan than others. More than two-thirds of people in the top fifth of the income distribution are enrolled in 401(k)s, compared to just 4 percent of the poorest fifth; about half of white workers are enrolled, versus 32 percent of black workers and 20 percent of Hispanics. While there are also disparities in pension use, it’s far starker among defined-benefit plans.
Think Progress
March 4, 2016
The privatization of retirement plans has helped make retirement inequality even greater than income inequality. Over the past couple decades, the shift from pensions to 401(k)s has driven retirement inequality to an all-time high, making it harder for the majority of Americans to retire comfortably—or at all, as new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows. “We used to have a fairly egalitarian retirement system. We don’t anymore,” EPI economist Monique Morrissey said during a press call Thursday. Morrissey says that’s largely due to the rise of 401(k)s as primary retirement plans, which she says was never supposed to happen. Initially, 401(k)s were created to be a supplement to pensions.
The American Prospect
March 4, 2016
The retirement savings gap is growing, according to a chartbook from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute released today. The gap comes as more people are enrolled in defined-contribution plans instead of defined-benefit plans. According to EPI economist Monique Morrissey, “participation in retirement savings plans is highly unequal across income groups. In 2013, nearly nine in 10 families in the top income fifth had retirement account savings, compared with fewer than one in 10 families in the bottom income fifth.” Read the chartbook here: http://bit.ly/1Y2YutD
Politico
March 4, 2016
The Economic Policy Institute makes a basic argument in a new paper it released this morning: The U.S. trade relationship with TPP members is already unbalanced, and the Asia-Pacific pact will just make it worse without enforceable restrictions on currency manipulation. The report, authored by Robert Scott and Elizabeth Glass, says the United States’ $177.9 billion deficit in goods traded with the other TPP countries cost two million jobs last year, including nearly 419,000 direct jobs in commodity and manufacturing industries “that competed with unfairly traded goods from TPP member countries.” This pre-existing trade deficit means the trade deal could be more damaging than the North American Free Trade Agreement, the report says, because the U.S. and Mexico had a balanced trade relationship before NAFTA took effect. Click here to read the full paper: http://bit.ly/1RHQLyC.
Politico
March 4, 2016
Though some members of the Iowa Legislature have yet to figure it out, they are supposed to be working on behalf of Iowans. Raising the minimum wage would do that. A 2012 study from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that increasing the wage to $9.80 per hour would affect 332,000 Iowans, 81 percent of them 20 years old or older.
Des Moines Register
March 4, 2016
Economist Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute makes this case with 32 charts that present a sobering picture for our nation’s retirees. She first analyzed data from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances for all families with heads of household between the ages of 32 and 61, covering the thirty years before Social Security’s early retirement kicks in at age 62. And she found major disparities caused by the shift from pensions to 401(k) plans.
Fiscal Times
March 4, 2016
Second, even the lowest rate would be the highest state minimum in the country. Vermont’s was the previous leader. That state is on pace to have a $10.50 an hour minimum in 2018, and automatic cost-of-living increases would bring the rate to $11.54 in 2022, according to Economic Policy Institute. The left-leaning think tank tracks wage issues.
Wall Street Journal
March 3, 2016
I wrote about the chart last year in a column about that growing inequality. It’s from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, which issued a report that put wage stagnation for hourly workers up against the growth in productivity. The numbers are stunning.
Detroit Free Press
March 3, 2016