According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, only 26% of Hispanic families had savings in a retirement plan like a 401(k) or IRA, in 2013. Meanwhile, 65% of white families and 41% of black families and 58% of Asian families and those of other races had savings in such accounts. Part of the reason for this gap is that many Hispanics, particularly those that work in low wage jobs, don’t have access to retirement plans, said Monique Morrissey, an economist at the EPI who analyzed data from the Federal Reserve for the report. Immigrant Hispanic workers, for example, are often more likely to be undocumented and therefore working off the books or work in low wage jobs that don’t offer access to retirement accounts, Morrissey said. Native-born Hispanics, however, are more likely to have access to and participate in retirement accounts at rates closer to those of African-Americans, Morrissey said. “Most whites are not doing well, blacks and Hispanics are doing terrible and immigrant Hispanics are doing the worst of all when it comes to retirement savings,” Morrissey said.
CNN Money
March 3, 2016
According to a study of government layoffs published in 2012 by the progressive Economic Policy Institute, women suffered 70 percent of layoffs, while African-Americans suffered 20 percent.
Marketplace
March 3, 2016
Ohio lost 112,500 jobs in 2015 resulting from the United States’ trade deficit with countries that are part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
March 3, 2016
The racial disparity in personal retirement savings is wide and growing. In 2013, the average white household had $125,000 saved in retirement accounts, while the average black household had just $26,500, according to an analysis by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. This discrepancy has increased in recent years, since white savings recovered more quickly after the financial crisis in 2008.
Hispanic workers appear even worse off than blacks, with just $17,000 in savings. The racial disparity means that black and Hispanic workers are especially reliant on other sources of income in retirement — such as residential equity, pensions and, above all, Social Security. “What really matters is Social Security,” said the Economic Policy Institute’s Monique Morrissey, an economist.
The Washington Post
March 2, 2016
Josh Bivens, with the Economic Policy Institute, said he’s glad politicians are talking about the problems in our economy. He believes the economy still hasn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession and pointed out that, even before the recession, hourly wage growth was stagnant. “Now, if you ask me, will my son be better off than me 30 years from now, the economy is going to be a lot richer,” he said, “but yet we do such a bad job equitably delivering the fruits of that growth that I’m not sure he’ll be better off,” he said. “If he ends up in the bottom quarter of the income distribution, he may well not be.” Bivens said the U.S. is a rich nation with lots of potential; it’s good for Buffett to remind us of that, but the key is to generate growth where everyone benefits.
Marketplace
March 1, 2016
Trump says his trade plans and tax cuts will “make America great again,” triggering growth as fast as 6 percent. Most analysts question that projection, but they agree that the economy has underperformed since 2009. That’s captured in the “output gap,” a term economists use to describe the difference between actual and potential GDP. At current rates of growth, it probably won’t be closed before 2026, estimates Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Bloomberg
March 1, 2016
Key to the success of these right-wing politics—brought to us by the corporate establishment, not the Tea Party—has been four decades of outrageous union-busting, that begin in the 1970s, was given credibility by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and has accelerated ever since. More than any other factor — as reports by the Economic Policy Institute and others have documented—this has led to three decades of declining wages and living standards for the majority of Americans.
Salon
March 1, 2016
First, raise wages. No one who works full-time should live in poverty — and that starts with raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It also means passing equal-pay laws. The gender pay gap can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional wages over a lifetime of work for women doing the same jobs as their male colleagues. And finally, it means protecting workers’ right to organize. And finally, it means protecting workers’ right to organize. Unions help workers secure higher wages for their members, by as much as 20 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, but they also increase wages for all workers, union or not.
The Boston Globe
February 29, 2016
Advocates for the poor dispute that assertion. After the reductions in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, the percentage of adults ages 25 to 54 with jobs in those states grew more slowly than the national average, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based liberal think tank.
The Associated Press
February 29, 2016
Yet, as was documented in testimony by immigration experts Ron Hira of Howard University and Hal Salzman of Rutgers, most of the H-1B visas aren’t being used to hire people with specialized skills. “The vast majority of H-1Bs who are coming in have no more than ordinary IT skills,” Hira testified.
Los Angeles Times
February 29, 2016
Finally, companies can cut profit margins or top-level salaries to meet higher wage mandates. This last mechanism is one reason such policies get so much pushback from business, and it is particularly germane in an economy where income inequality stands at historically high levels. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, the real earnings of low-wage workers in Alabama are down 6 percent compared with 1979, while those of the state’s highest-paid workers are up 17 percent.
The Washington Post
February 29, 2016
Cruz’s wealth, with $1.2 million in combined income with his wife in 2014, placed them well above the $423,000 threshold of the top 1 percent of earners in Texas, according to a 2015 Economic Policy Institute report.
Reuters
February 29, 2016
Clinton also commended Wall Street for helping to create “the nation’s wealth,” when, in reality, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the “economic cycle that began in 2000 and ended late [2007] was one of the weakest on record for working families, despite strong overall economic growth.”
Salon
February 29, 2016
Here too we’ve had years of warning: Real wages for most U.S. workers have been relatively stagnant since the 1970s, while those for the top 1 percent have increased 156 percent, and those for the top 0.1 percent have increased 362 percent, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
February 29, 2016
See excerpt: Wage stagnation and wage inequality easily top the list of economic issues Americans are most concerned about—look no further than the presidential election, which has largely focused on economic issues. This concern is also evident in invigorated efforts to raise the minimum wage, expand paid leave, and strengthen the collective bargaining power of workers. These issues resonate with nearly every worker, because wages are at the heart of the American dream. Money earned from work is the main source of income for most American households. This is the money Americans use to meet basic living expenses and to save for down payment on a home, college tuition, or retirement. This is especially true for African American and Latino workers, who have less inherited wealth and rely almost exclusively on their paychecks to support themselves and their families. Concern over wage inequality is also fully justified by the data. Since 1979, wages for the vast majority of workers—regardless of gender, race or ethnicity—have been stagnant or declining.
CNBC
February 26, 2016
As I note in my new book, “Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice,” one of the dark stains on the Obama legacy is the administration’s enthusiastic embrace of corporate education reform, which is characterized by high-stakes standardized testing, charter schools, school closures, attacks on teachers unions, and others. This has been lavishly funded by Wall Street financiers, foundations and billionaires. In 2013, the Economic Policy Institute’s Broader, Bolder Approach to Education published a report concluding that market-oriented reforms “delivered few benefits” and “often harm the students they purport to help.”
Salon
February 26, 2016
When the AFL-CIO canvassed the Rust Belt cities of Cleveland and Pittsburgh, the researchers found that Republicans and some Democrats in the traditional labor strongholds were drifting toward the golden-haired Manhattan real estate icon. The key factor? Economic insecurity. “It’s the first time within the Republican field that someone has reached out with an economic message that resonates with these voters,” said Robert E. Scott of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. At times, Scott said, that means scapegoating immigrants and foreigners. “But frankly, some of those issues are related to trade and the insecurities of the working class,” Scott said. Recently published studies have found that as many as 2 million American manufacturing jobs have been lost to China since 2000. “Growing trade deficits are the single largest cause of the elimination of jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector, and the number one culprit is China,” Scott said. In the past two decades, the trade deficit with China has increased more than tenfold.
International Business Times
February 26, 2016
Most recently, Walmart heir Alice Walton donated $353,000 to the “Hillary Victory Fund,” which is backing her presidential run, a Walmart lobbyist held a Mexico fundraiser for her and the consulting firm of her campaign’s top strategist lists Walmart as a client. Before that, Clinton was a member of Walmart’s board in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As PBS Frontline documented, that was when Walmart began offshoring its supply chain to China. A recent study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimated that Walmart’s shift to China ended up eliminating more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States.
International Business Times
February 26, 2016
The figure below plots the 20th-percentile wage for blacks in recent years, using data from the Economic Policy Institute (this is a good proxy for low-wage work; 80 percent of blacks earn more while 20 percent earn less). In 2015, as the tightening job market finally gave them a smidgen of bargaining power, these workers’ wages were finally starting to trend up (low inflation helped, too).
The Washington Post
February 25, 2016
The second initiative is a re-launch of a “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” a group which first started in 2008 and has pushed for more comprehensive, “whole-child” strategies for educating students in poverty that was meant to be a counter-force to the “no-excuses” strategy, which tended to focus on reforms related to the teaching profession. Leaders of the group say there is new momentum for their policy agenda, including passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act which requires states and districts to judge schools’ success on a broader set of metrics than test scores.
Education Week
February 25, 2016
To put that into perspective, the Economic Policy Institute estimates that the typical three-person household in Longmont, Colorado should set aside $66,000 a year to cover annual necessities, including housing, food, child care, transportation, healthcare, other necessities, and taxes.
Business Insider
February 25, 2016
The last two years haven’t really fixed that: Overall between 2007 and 2015, low-wage occupations grew as a share of the labor market by 0.6 percent, middle-wage occupations shrank by 4 percent, and high-wage occupations grew by 0.3 percent. And people are still mostly making less money than they were before the recession: Median wages for low and middle-earning occupations sank 1.5 and 1.8 percent respectively, according to a breakdown by the Economic Policy Institute’s Dave Cooper. “We don’t think there’s evidence of any major shifts in the composition of jobs in recent years that’s different from the longer-term trends,” Cooper wrote in an email. “And consequently, changes in the composition of the workforce should not be used to explain the broader wage trends – there’s been poor wage growth across the board due to overall weakness in the labor market.”
The Washington Post
February 24, 2016
For a number of years, a national campaign called the Broader Bolder Approach to Education has been working to better the conditions that limit many children’s readiness to learn. A project of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, Broader Bolder has long recognized that the impact of social and economic disadvantage on many schools and students is profound and can’t be alleviated with academic “accountability” systems. Now, with a new K-12 federal education law taking effect, the campaign is relaunching with new leaders and an expanded mission. Here is a post about what 21st Century school reform should look like to really even the education playing field, as reflected in the Broader Bolder Approach’s new mission. It was written by Elaine Weiss, the program’s national coordinator.
The Washington Post
February 24, 2016
A report from the Economic Policy Institute in 2005 studied the workforce qualifications in early-childhood education and found a decline in the percentage of the field’s teachers and administrators with college degrees—from 43 percent in 1983-1985 to 30 percent in 2002-2004—because of low wages and benefits.
Education Week
February 24, 2016
“There are a significant number of young people who need opportunities to increase their education levels, gain access to the labor market,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute. “They’re important to the economy, to this country. Demographics are changing, people of color are making up a larger share of the population and labor force. We cannot afford to ignore or overlook this part of the population.”
CNBC
February 24, 2016
For African-Americans, the unemployment rate was lowest in Virginia (6.7 percent) and highest in Illinois (13.1 percent) during the fourth quarter of 2015, based on an analysis of Labor Department data by the Economic Policy Institute. That meant the lowest black state-level unemployment rate in the country was the same as the highest state jobless rate for white workers (6.7 percent in West Virginia).
CNBC
February 24, 2016
According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, the black unemployment rate was at or below its pre-recession levels in only nine states by the end of last year.
The causes are not explained by educational differences. As another EPI report showed, African-Americans have nearly twice the same unemployment rates for similarly educated whites.
Seattle Times
February 24, 2016
The lowest state jobless rate for black workers in the country matches the highest rate for white workers in a new analysis. At 6.7%, Virginia’s black unemployment rate was the lowest in the nation in the fourth quarter. That rate happens to be the same as the jobless rate for white workers in West Virginia, the worst in the country, according to a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The report, released this month, found that while unemployment rates have fallen across much of the country and the national unemployment rate is now half of its recession-era peak, only a handful of states have seen meaningful improvement in the labor market for African-American and Latino workers. And conditions vary greatly from state to state.
Wall Street Journal
February 23, 2016
The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education is re-launching today with new co-chairs, a new advisory board and an expanded mission statement. BBA wanted the refresh and a more expanded policy agenda in the wake of ESSA’s passage. The advocacy group first launched seven years ago with a policy agenda that emphasized poverty as at the root of disparities in education. That agenda was embraced by teachers unions and traditional public school advocates while earning criticism from reformers. The relaunch event starts at 8:30 a.m. ET at the Capitol Visitors Center. More details on the group’s broader policy agenda.
Politico
February 23, 2016
Of course, corporate bigwigs have always been handsomely rewarded. But in the past generation, average pay for CEOs at American’s largest companies has leaped nearly six fold, from $2.8 million a year in 1989 to $16.3 million today, according the Economic Policy Institute. Exactly why this has happened is a matter of some debate, even among experts. Arguments range from corporate self-dealing to the just rewards for talent in a free-market system.
But that doesn’t exactly mean boards have turned back the clock. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the typical CEO made about 58 times the average worker in 1989. By 2014 it had climbed to more than 300 times.
Time Magazine
February 23, 2016