But right now, what consumers are facing is more out-of-pocket exposure. As we approach 2018 — when the tax is supposed to take effect — employers have started shifting costs to their employees to avoid the tax. Elise Gould with the Economic Policy institute said as that happens people will start cutting back on all of their care, not just the wasteful stuff.
“Some of that care is going to be really problematic if they don’t get and it ends up costing the system and themselves more money in the long run,” she said.
Marketplace
December 15, 2015
These findings come after the latest report from the Pew Research Center showed that the middle class was shrinking and no longer represented the majority of the U.S. population. The 18-to-29 age range saw the biggest drop in income status among all age groups since 1971, Pew noted, dovetailing with a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute that showed inflation-adjusted hourly wages of young college graduates in 2013 were lower than they were in the late 1990s.
Fortune
December 15, 2015
Wages are down even though productivity is way up, but wages haven’t been linked to productivity since the 1970s. Between 1979 and 2013, productivity grew almost 65 percent, while wages for 80 percent of the workforce grew only 8 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Philadelphia Inquirer
December 15, 2015
At those levels, CEOs last year were paid 303 times what workers in their industries earned, compared with a ratio of 59 times in 1989, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit.
Reuters
December 11, 2015
Another report published this week by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute says the freelance economy is far smaller — and that it actually shrank over the last year, from 19.6 million independent contractors to 18.1 million.
The Huffington Post
December 11, 2015
The first is student loan debt, which continues to be a massive burden to recent college graduates. The second is wage stagnation. In analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, for example, wages for young college graduates have been dropping since the year 2000. The trend is more widespread and older than that, but this number certainly might make a new graduate pessimistic.
The Washington Post
December 11, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute in Washington said in a December report that the decline of American manufacturing over the past 15 years was due to currency manipulation and unfair trade, including China’s “huge investments in ‘leading and pillar’ industries”.
Reuters
December 11, 2015
Imports from China by Walmart have eliminated or displaced more than 400,000 jobs, according to a estimate from the Economic Policy Institute.
CBS News
December 10, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute recently published a study estimating how many jobs Walmart has effectively eliminated or displaced as a result of its contribution to the U.S. trade deficit with China. The study states that between 2001 and 2013, the inflated deficit eliminated or displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs. As the world’s largest retailer, it seems to follow that U.S.-based Walmart would be a key contributor to the climbing deficit and subsequent job losses. The EPI estimates that the retailer’s Chinese imports account for 15.3% of trade deficit growth in that time period.
Fortune
December 10, 2015
The flood of Chinese imports purchased by Walmart shoppers has cost the U.S. economy about 400,000 jobs since 2001, according to a liberal think tank. The Economic Policy Institute, which has long been a critic of U.S. trade policies with China, saysWalmart (WMT) has been a major factor in the growing trade gap with China. It estimates that Walmart sold at least $49 billion worth of Chinese-made goods between 2001 and 2013, and said that its estimate of 400,000 jobs lost is conservative.
CNN Money
December 10, 2015
Incomes for teachers vary sharply depending on where they work, and Pew’s data suggest that the profession still has more members of the upper and middle tier than the employed population as a whole. Still, belt-tightening among many in the US has left a shortage of 375,000 public school teachers, according to estimates by The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank.
Financial Times
December 10, 2015
One of the economic themes of the last few decades has been the hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector. But how has that happened, and how is the world’s largest retailer playing a part? A new study from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute takes a look at what it calls “the Walmart effect,” by which it means the giant retailer’s growing trade deficit with China. With Walmart importing more cheap goods from China than it exports to that country, the retailer’s actions may be implicated in an estimated loss of at least 400,000 U.S. jobs from 2001 to 2013, the study finds.
CBS Moneywatch
December 10, 2015
Imports from China by Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and biggest importer, eliminated or displaced over 400,000 jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research group that has long targeted Walmart’s policies. The jobs, mostly in manufacturing, represent about 13 percent of the 3.2 million jobs displaced over those same years that the study attributes to the United States’ goods trade deficit with China. Walmart’s Chinese imports amounted to at least $49 billion in 2013, according to the study, which was based on trade and labor data. Over all, the United States’ trade deficit with China hit $324 billion that year. “Walmart is one of the major forces pulling imports into the United States,” said Robert E. Scott, an economist at the institute and the study’s author. “And the jobs we’re losing are good-paying manufacturing jobs, which pay higher wages and provide better benefits.”
Walmart has long been the subject of criticism from groups like the Economic Policy Institute over its role in flooding the United States with cheap imports. Under pressure, Walmart in 2013 announced that it would increase its sourcing of American-made products by $50 billion over the next 10 years.
The New York Times
December 9, 2015
The world’s largest retailer likely accounted for 15.3 percent of the growth in the U.S. goods trade deficit with China in the same period, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) said in a report on Wednesday. United States goods trade deficit with China increased almost fourfold to $324.2 billion in the 12 years till 2013, with Wal-Mart accounting for $48.1 billion of the total, the EPI said. “Wal-Mart has aided China’s abuse of labor rights and its violations of internationally recognized norms of fair trade by providing a vast and ever-expanding conduit for the distribution of artificially cheap and subsidized Chinese exports to the United States,” the EPI said.
Reuters
December 9, 2015
Government benefits, specifically medical benefits, do more than just help people pay their bills, according to Josh Bivens, the research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The government, by providing a benefit like Medicare, serves as a “countervailing power in the provider market,” Bivens says, which can help keep costs down (at least a little bit) across the health care market. There’s also a concern about how to identify those who need the most help in the absence of government benefits, also known as transfers. “There are a lot of problems with transfers, but they are pretty well-targeted,” Bivens said. That is, the majority of them go to the poor. With a very flat UBI scheme, there is very little targeting, which means people with good jobs may get more than they need, while the unemployed, elderly, disabled and single parents could end up with too little.
The Huffington Post
December 9, 2015
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s import of goods from China displaced over 400,000 jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a U.S.-based nonprofit think tank. According to the study, cited by the New York Times, Wal-Mart’s Chinese imports amounted to at least $49 billion in 2013.
International Business Times
December 9, 2015
The tax is a new idea that could add even more disincentive to companies contemplating an inversion, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute. “The Obama administration proposals are good on tamping down on inversions. I think the exit tax is an extra little benefit that will reduce the incentive even further,” he said. “I tend to be pretty skeptical of tax-based solutions to lots of problems, but these are actually useful tax-based solutions.”
Think Progress
December 9, 2015
Saying affirmative action is constitutional because diversity is good, wrote the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein in a piece about the Fisher case on SCOTUS blog, “dodges the nation’s racial legacy and avoids our constitutional and moral obligation to remedy the effects of centuries of slavery and legally sanctioned segregation. Without acknowledging we were doing so, we have engaged in a legal sleight of hand, substituting enriching the educational experience for remedying past injustice in designing affirmative action policy.”
MSNBC
December 9, 2015
Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., told 24/7 Wall Street that it’s “hard to find a state where outcomes for African-Americans are very good.” Not one state has better socioeconomic outcomes for blacks than for whites, according to the report.
International Business Times
December 9, 2015
The seeds were first sown by the Great Recession, when millions lost their jobs and many ended up in work paying closer to the minimum wage. “We had a lot of folks having to take jobs that were much lower paying than any they had previously had, a lot of jobs in retail and the service sector, because those were the first ones to come back coming out of the recession,” said David Cooper, economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. Workers who used to be middle class wound up in these low paying jobs and “recognized that pay in these jobs was just unlivablely low.”
Think Progress
December 9, 2015
Already, those who are plugged into this debate have separated into camps. There are those, found mostly among the labor union-oriented left, who believe that most of these workers are being misclassified as independent contractors and ought to receive all the benefits and protections of employeehood — workers compensation, tax withholding, contributions to social security, unemployment insurance, overtime, minimum wage, etc. To even talk about creating a new category for the on-demand economy is at best a distraction from the real problems most workers face.
The Washington Post
December 9, 2015
Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute said the most problematic group is prime-age workers. “They’re 25 to 54 years old — so you get rid of any demographic shifts that are happening with baby boomers retiring, or young people sheltering in school,” Gould said. “There are still 1.17 million missing (prime-age) workers who have left the labor force, who have stopped actively looking or haven’t started actively looking.”
Marketplace
December 9, 2015
Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, agrees that overall computerization creates and changes more jobs than it destroys, but he says Bessen is “too bold” to say that it leads to an increase in demand for skilled labor in all occupations. “If there was a shortage of advanced jobs you would not see recent college grads working for free as interns,” Mishel says. ” You would not see wages of college grads stagnant for the last 13 years.”
U.S. News & World Report
December 9, 2015
Our friend and former colleague Jared Bernstein has mounted a small but strategic retreat in the campaign to have the Fed continue focusing on full employment. He has written that Friday’s jobs report, though not stellar, was good enough to make a December increase in interest rates a near-certainty. He then argues that this might not be the worst thing in the world: “Even while I do not see much rationale for an increase, especially given elevated underemployment and the stark lack of inflationary pressures, given their recent messaging, a non-liftoff in December would suggest the economy is a lot worse than they thought in some secret way they’ve been keeping from us. Such a negative surprise would be ill-advised. “Presuming that they won’t want to go there, it’s now all about the ‘path to normalization:’ how fast they raise. … [I]f I’m Chair Yellen, my message to the hawks is: ‘OK, you got your rate liftoff even though the data weren’t really there for it. Now back…off and let’s go back to being data-driven about future increases.’”
Jared is right that the larger economic question is not just about a 25-basis-point increase this month but about how rapidly interest rates climb over the next year or so. But we’re still really uncomfortable with starting lift-off before the data support it. Once you start indulging faith-based arguments about monetary policy, you’ve lowered the bar for data-driven analysis, making smart policy choices harder and harder to sustain.
Wall Street Journal
December 7, 2015
[Some] analysts and many liberal Democrats believe the Fed may still be moving too early while wage gains remain soft and economic growth is still struggling to stay above 2 percent. They fear tighter monetary policy will choke off real progress on wage gains — the lack of which has left the electorate sour and dissatisfied “‘They should wait. It is still too soon to declare victory,’ said Elise Gould, senior economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
December 7, 2015
While financial markets have been clamoring for a rate hike to ease uncertainty, not everyone is thrilled with the prospect of an immediate hike. “It’s all about wages,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “We have a lot of room before we have an overheating economy that’s generating inflation,” Bivens said, arguing that the Fed should wait until wage increases ramp up before hiking rates. The Fed is charged with maximizing employment and keeping inflation in check. Thirteen million jobs have returned since the depths of the recession. But with inflation largely nonexistent and wage gains yet to break out, Bivens said, the Fed shouldn’t rush to lift rates. In the latest jobs report, wages picked up 2.3 percent overall and 2 percent for nonsupervisory workers. But wage gains of at least 3.5 percent are necessary to push up inflation, Bivens said, as companies counter the higher cost of compensation by increasing prices of goods and services.
International Business Times
December 7, 2015
But the federal funds rate flatlines at zero whenever the Fed tries to chase the real natural rate of interest below the zero lower bound. The Fed isn’t just prevented from helping the economy — it’s effectively forced to hold it back from recovering. This, according to Josh Bivens, research director of the Economic Policy Institute, is why fiscal policy is the best option for boosting the economy out of recessions: It’s direct spending, and faces no zero lower bound problem.
The Week
December 7, 2015
As the unemployment rate has gone down, employers have had to offer better pay to attract better job applicants. While economists like Faucher have declared this a “very good” report, not everyone agrees. “While many people are saying this morning’s report clears the way for liftoff, it still is too soon to declare victory in the economy. We won’t be at full employment until we see durable acceleration of wage growth, and only once we have achieved full employment will all workers be able to get the jobs they need and the hours they want, and be better positioned to negotiate for higher pay,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Yes, interest rates have been low for a long time, but the Fed should not raise rates simply to scratch a seven year itch.”
The Guardian
December 7, 2015
Yet, fiscal doves continue to argue that it’s too soon to raise rates. On Twitter, Elise Gould of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute cautioned against scratching the itch — that is, moving on interest rates — too soon. “I don’t think the matter of time should determine it, the data should determine it,” Gould told the PBS NewsHour. She points to wages as one place that still needs improving. Average hourly earnings rose a mere 4 cents to $25.25 in November, following a 9 cent gain in October, and have risen by only 2.3 percent over the year.
PBS News Hour
December 7, 2015