Ed Schultz explains how trade deficits hurt American jobs and the economy, making the TPP one of the most dangerous deals for middle class families.
The Ed Show
February 6, 2015
In a paper released Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute, economist Robert E. Scott quantified these concerns, estimating that the U.S. economy has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to countries like Mexico and South Korea because free trade agreements with those nations did not include provisions that prevented currency manipulation. Of the nations participating in the TPP negotiations, Japan is by far America’s biggest trading partner. And according to Scott’s analysis, the U.S. trade deficit with Japan has cost America $125.3 billion in GDP and “displaced 896,600 U.S. jobs” in 2013 alone.
Fortune
February 6, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, has come up with an unemployment rate based on missing workers, those who are unemployed and not looking for a job because of poor job opportunities. If those jobless workers were looking and were part of the calculation, the unemployment rate would have been 9.1 percent in December, senior economist Elise Gould said. She said that while the official unemployment number is useful, “it is only one piece of the story.” “There is no one [unemployment] measure. We need to look at all of them in context together,” Ms. Gould said.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
February 6, 2015
Relatively few workers earn the minimum wage. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that about 2.5 million workers received raises at the start of the year, when including New York, which set a higher wage on Dec. 31, 2014. RBS economists say the number could be closer to three million, but that still accounts for just 3% of all private-sector employees.”
Wall Street Journal
February 5, 2015
Tokyo’s currency manipulation was the biggest cause in the U.S.-Japan goods trade deficit of $78.3 billion in 2013, according to the report by Robert Scott, the Economic Policy Institute’s director of trade and manufacturing policy research. Scott argues that because of the growing deficit, the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) should include measures to address currency manipulation by Japan and other nations.
The Hill
February 5, 2015
The controversy over President Obama’s proposal to end the federal tax subsidy for 529 college plans raised two reasonable questions: Who receives the tax benefits from 529 plans and should college costs be subsidized through a tax break or by a spending program? Tax subsidies for saving largely go to higher income taxpayers who can afford to save and who would generally save if there were no tax subsidies. Spending programs for higher education, such as Pell grants, can be much better targeted to qualified individuals who would not go to college without such assistance. Unfortunately, most tax expenditures — exemptions, credits and deductions for specific activities — have the same kind of upside-down benefit. But there are over 200 different tax expenditures, so dealing with each one individually is rather inefficient.
The New York Times
February 4, 2015
The superintendent churn gets less attention than turnover among teachers and principals, but it presents a real challenge, according to education observers and policy wonks. “Communities that are trying seriously to turn around their schools see this as a 10- to 20-year iterative process, where they have bumps on the way, they make changes on the way … that’s what big, long-term sustainable change looks like,” said Elaine Weiss, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute and Montgomery County parent who is supportive of Starr. “If you’re out in three and a half years, you have barely made a dent.”
The Washington Post
February 4, 2015
Critics of the TPP say the process is too secretive and favors big businesses. Supporters argue the deal would even the playing field for American manufacturers by eliminating most tariffs. Diane and guests discuss debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership and what it could mean for the U.S. economy and American workers.
Diane Rehm Show
February 4, 2015
Two analysts, Martin Carnoy of Stanford and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, examined a sample of U.S. students in PISA and found it deficient on several factors, including an over-estimate of the number of low-income urban students and an under-estimate of the number of low-income rural students.
The Washington Post
February 4, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute has taken economist Emmanuel Saez’s research on U.S. income tax returns and produced an account of just how America-altering that transfer of income has been. Between 1935 and 1980—that is, between the year in which both Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act were enacted and the year Ronald Reagan was elected as president—of all the income growth (excluding government benefits and transfer payments) that Americans reported on their taxes, fully 70 percent was income accrued by the bottom 90 percent of American households.
The American Prospect
February 4, 2015
The White House released its annual budget on Monday for fiscal year 2016. On the one hand, this may seem like a low-value exercise, given the dim prospects for its major initiatives passing a Republican-controlled Congress. But on the other hand, the raft of stories written about it prove the president continues to have unrivaled power in setting the terms of policy debate. And the terms set by the 2016 budget are really useful. Most of the big-ticket items were previewed: significant increases on tax rates for the highest-income households on income they receive simply from wealth-holdings, higher taxes on large transfers of wealth, tax cuts for low- and middle-income taxpayers, and substantial spending increases on community colleges, early childhood care, and infrastructure.
One item that wasn’t telegraphed by the White House included corporate tax reforms that would impose a minimum 19% tax on foreign earnings of U.S. firms with no opportunity for deferral. This is a very big step in the right direction, if still a little shy of perfect since deferral should be ended and U.S. firms should be taxed at the going corporate income tax rate regardless of where income is earned. But 19% is a lot better than today’s implicit 0% on income held abroad. Further, a large chunk of the budget’s infrastructure proposals is financed by a one-time tax of 14% on accumulated earnings of U.S. corporations held abroad. Again, this is much better than the frequently floated alternative of allowing U.S. firms to repatriate their foreign-held earnings at a preferential rate.
Wall Street Journal
February 3, 2015
The field generates one in five jobs in the U.S., including 12 million in manufacturing, and another 17 million in areas supported by manufacturing, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute. The industry is also particularly good at creating more lucrative jobs for less-educated Americans. The average manufacturing worker without a college degree earns $1.78 more each hour than in other sectors, according to the report, which looked at American Community Survey data.
Bloomberg
February 3, 2015
Nationally, the pay gap between college graduates and people lacking degrees recently reached a record high, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more per hour on average in 2013 than people without diplomas, up from 89 percent five years earlier and 85 percent a decade earlier.
The Washington Post
February 2, 2015
A new report (PDF) from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, shows the state of the union as far as income inequality goes, and, well, it’s pretty harsh. See below for a state-by-state ranking, from top to bottom ratio.
Daily Beast
February 2, 2015
The plunge in oil prices is great for Americans who drive with the average household expected to save about $750 on gas this year. But the rapid price drop is causing lots of layoffs for oil workers. Those losses could begin to spill over into other parts of the economy, especially in once fast growing parts of the country like Texas. “I don’t want to call this strong growth until it actually starts pushing up wages and prices,” says Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
CNN Money
February 2, 2015
Linda Dempsey and Robert Scott talked about the Obama administration’s calls for more presidential authority in crafting international trade deals, as well as negotiations over the Trans Pacific Partnership.
C-SPAN
January 30, 2015
The graph comes from the Economic Policy Institute, and it outlines one of the stranger facets of the recovery. Unemployment has fallen to normal levels — 5.6 percent unemployment was routine in, say, 1995, a year that few remember as some sort of labor market hellscape. But the fall in unemployment isn’t just driven by people getting jobs. It’s also driven by workers disappearing from the labor market.
VOX
January 30, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, examined federal tax data, state-by-state, and found the national trend of lopsided growth persists. The center’s report is titled The Increasingly Unequal States Of America. The research was led by Estelle Sommeiller, a socio-economist at the Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales in France, and Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg, Penn. Price told NPR that since 1979, “in almost every state, there’s been more growth in income for the top one percent, than for the bottom 99 percent [of Americans].”
NPR
January 30, 2015
Average income for the very highest-income workers in the District is 32.3 times higher than the average income for everyone else, according to a separate report by the Economic Policy Institute. If DC were compared to the states on that metric, it would rank eighth.
A family budget calculator from the Economic Policy Institute suggests that a two-parent, two-child household in the Washington area needs to earn $89,643 per year to cover the costs of housing, food, transportation, education, taxes, and other living expenses. This, too, reinforces how much more difficult it’s become to get by in DC. Full-time employment at $12.62 per hour translates into annual pay of just $26,250.
Washingtonian Magazine
January 29, 2015
The new report by the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, convened by the Center for American Progress, is frank in its acknowledgment of the inequality crisis. “Today, the ability of free-market democracies to deliver widely shared increases in prosperity is in question as never before,” the report declares. It calls for several measures of the sort that the labor movement, the Economic Policy Institute, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and others on the left edge of Democratic politics have been urging for years. What’s surprising is not what’s being said but who’s saying it.
The American Prospect
January 29, 2015
Move to Arkansas. The bar is much lower there. It only takes $228,298 to get into the upper echelon in Arkansas, according to a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. But in Connecticut, which has the highest threshold, it takes $677,608 to make it into that elite group. Researchers looked at IRS data for 2012 tax returns by state.
CNN Money
January 28, 2015
This week, the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, released a very cool analysis of how the top 1 percent of earners in each U.S. state has grown its share of income since 1979. The overarching point is that the story of American inequality isn’t just about Wall Street financiers from New York or Connecticut gobbling up an ever-growing share of the country’s economy. Rather, the affluent are pulling away from their neighbors all over the country, from Portland to Palm Beach.
Slate
January 28, 2015
For more than three decades, that upper echelon of earners has gobbled up disproportionate shares of income growth in each state, pushing income inequality to levels not seen since the 1920′s, according to a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. And while the financial sector has received much of the blame for the ever-growing gap in incomes, the trend is more widespread, the report’s authors argue: The rise in inequality experienced in the United States in the past three-and-a-half decades is not just a story of those in the financial sector in the greater New York City metropolitan area reaping outsized rewards from speculation in financial markets. While many of the highest-income taxpayers do live in states like New York and Connecticut, IRS data make clear that rising inequality and increases in top 1 percent incomes affect every state.
The Washington Post
January 27, 2015
The study was written by Estelle Sommeiller, a socioeconomist at the Institute for Research in Economic and Social Sciences in France, and Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, a think tank primarily devoted to studying the economy of Pennsylvania. Their research was published by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.
Wall Street Journal
January 27, 2015
The top 1 percent of earners are amassing a disproportionate share of the income growth in each state, driving inequality to levels not seen in decades, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. Between 1979 and 2007, more than half of all of the income growth in the nation went to the top 1 percent, the report found. For the bottom 99 percent of taxpayers, income grew by less than 20 percent. “The benefits of economic growth have been going increasingly to this tiny share of households,” said Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center and one of the authors of the report.
The Washington Post
January 27, 2015
The breakdown comes from the left-of-center Washington think tank the Economic Policy Institute, which looked at Internal Revenue Service tax data. It found that the incomes of the one percent grew faster than the incomes of the 99 percent in 49 states between 2009 and 2012. In 39 states, the majority of the income gains went to the one percent. And in 17 states, the one percent captured all of the income growth since the recession.
New York Magazine
January 27, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., published a new report Monday that looked at the trends in inequality over the past 95 years. The authors, Estelle Sommelier and Mark Price, also broke down income statistics geographically, looking at how much money a person must make in each state to enter into the top 1 percent. In Connecticut, for instance, a person must make nearly $700,000 to be in the top 1 percent. In Arkansas, it’s just $228,000.
The New Republic
January 27, 2015
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute demonstrates as much. In the vast majority of US states, the top 1 percent of earners captured at least half of the income gains during the first three years of the economic recovery. In seventeen states, the 1 percent raked in all of the income growth.
The Nation
January 27, 2015
On Monday, the Economic Policy Institute issues a report, “The Increasingly Unequal States of America,” that offers a new look at income inequality in states and regions of the U.S. According to the report, the average income among the top 1 percent of earners is $1.3 million a year. (Note: income includes pre-tax wages, salary, bonuses, employee compensation via asset transfer [e.g., 401k contributions or stock option grants], and investment income such as dividends, interest and capital gains; most recent income data in the report is for 2012.)
Marketplace
January 26, 2015
Huffington Post
January 26, 2015