Media clips
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Indeed, McDonald’s may have inadvertently triggered more support for a movement that has so far only had weak political momentum — to raise the minimum wage.
“[The budget] shows that what they’re paying is something you can’t live on — that people have to have two jobs, and much higher wages in order to support themselves,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a labor-market economist. “They demonstrated, inadvertently, that they don’t pay a living wage.”
He says that the minimum wage should be at least 50% of the average wage. Right now, at $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage is just about 37% of the average wage, which Mishel said was $19.76 in 2012. (Some states set their own minimum wages, which can be seen in this chart.)
If the minimum wage were bumped to 50% of the average wage, it would be $9.88, which works out to $20,550 a year before taxes.
Forbes July 22, 2013 -
So AOL Jobs decided to write up a second budget for a McDonald’s employee who is a single parent with one child living in Newaygo County, Michigan, which has the average cost of living for the country. The income numbers are the same, but the expenses are based on the “budget calculator” from the liberal think tank the Economic Policy Institute, excluding tax, but with the original budget’s ambitious $100 of monthly savings.
As you can see below, our McDonald’s employee with a second job and one child will go into $1,548 of debt each month, or $51.60 a day.
AOL Jobs July 22, 2013 -
The high number of part-time workers is “primarily an issue of labor demand: we have a weak economy,” said Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, which receives about a quarter of its funding from labor unions.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek July 22, 2013 -
If you’re like most of us, you don’t have profit money from large corporations flowing into your bank account like a fire hose. But some do — they make up a tiny percentage of our country, but they have most of the power. There are, however, ways to fix that.
I know — nothing new there, right? What is new is a fantastic interactive website where you can start to figure out what happened, why it happened, and how we can fix it. Check it out: Inequality.Is.
Upworthy July 19, 2013 -
So AOL Jobs decided to write up a second budget for a McDonald’s employee who is a single parent with one child living in Newaygo County, Mich., which has the average cost of living for the country. The income numbers are the same, but the expenses are based on the “budget calculator” from the liberal think tank the Economic Policy Institute, excluding tax, but with the original budget’s ambitious $100 of monthly savings.
As you can see below, our McDonald’s employee with a second job and one child will go into $1,548 of debt each month, or $51.60 a day.
AOL Jobs July 19, 2013 -
Senate passage of immigration reform legislation, S 744, begs the question: Is it better than current law? Probably, but the answer could change.
Parts of the bill do improve both the immigration system and the labor market. New rules limit abuses of internationally recruited workers, make union organizing easier and protect immigrants from employer retaliation. S 744 also prioritizes permanent immigrants with skills over family connections and creates a Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research that would make the system more data-driven. And regularizing unauthorized migrants would bring exploitable workers and their families out of the shadows, allowing them to assert their rights and bargain collectively. Both immigrants and Americans would benefit as wages rise, and law-abiding employers would no longer have to compete in a race to the bottom.
Roll Call July 19, 2013 -
On average, Wal-Mart pays its workers $12.67 an hour — which means that a huge number of its 1.4 million U.S. employees make a good deal less than that. By paying so little, the Bentonville behemoth compels thousands of its employees to use food stamps to feed their families and Medicaid to pay their doctor bills. It compels taxpayers to pick up a tab that wouldn’t even exist if the company paid its workers enough to get them out of poverty.
The Washington Post July 19, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute posted a blog this week comparing the federal minimum wage to productivity rates. According to the blog, which also contained a chart based on figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth since 1968, the wage would be $18.67 per hour. And if median wages had tracked productivity increases, it would be $28.42 instead of closer to $16 today
Sacramento Business Journal July 16, 2013 -
“I’m most worried about this in places like government, where it’s important to have people representing different income brackets,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
“But the only people who have the experience to get a job on Capital Hill are the people who can afford it — the people whose parents were able to support them through their unpaid internships. That’s very bad for our democracy.”
Pittsburgh Post Gazette July 16, 2013 -
The basic premise is that Americans don’t need things like food stamps or the minimum wage to help them, because they’re already so much better off than poor people in the world around them. The Economic Policy Institute can’t help but disagree. Its Family Budget Calculator notes that a family of three would require an income of $45,000 a year to cover basic needs in Simpson County, Miss., the U.S. region with the lowest cost of living for a family of that size.
MSN Money July 16, 2013 -
It takes $88,615 per year. That’s how much money a new report by the Economic Policy Institute suggests a family of four (two parents and two kids) would need to live comfortably in this area.
EPI looked at a number of factors, including housing, food, transportation, child care, health care, other necessities and taxes. When you add all that up, the District (including the surrounding suburbs in Maryland and Virginia) ranks second in the nation, just behind New York City ($93,502). Boston, Philadelphia and Milwaukee round out the top five, respectively. The cheapest place for a family of four: Marshall County, Miss., where the cost is almost half that at $48,144.
NBC News July 16, 2013 -
There is no doubt that the gaps are huge. Using government data on worker pay, the Economic Policy Institute has calculated that the ratio of C.E.O. pay to employee pay was 273 to 1 in 2012, or 202 to 1, depending on how stock options were accounted for. Either way, that is far higher than it has been for most of the past 50 years.
The New York Times July 16, 2013 -
There was a time Americans could count on Congress to see the fall in the value of the minimum wage and act to reduce the number of working poor people. If Congress acts on the proposal of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, the Economic Policy Institute estimates about 30 million workers would see a rise in pay.
Los Angeles Sentinel July 12, 2013 -
If that was the Bush administration’s view, it may have had a point. According to research by economist Thomas L. Hungerford of the Economic Policy Institute, there is no evidence in the data since 1947 that the corporate tax rate affects economic growth. This conclusion is disputed by conservative tax analysts, but as I have pointed out previously, there is no evidence that cutting the tax on dividends had any impact whatsoever on economic growth.
The Fiscal Times July 12, 2013 -
Poverty – or, more generally speaking, deprivation – is a notoriously difficult thing to define. Whether or not you experience it has to do with how many mouths you have to feed, where your family lives, whether you pay for child care, what your daily transportation options look like, even how society philosophically defines a family’s minimum needs to get by. The federal poverty line, on the other hand, doesn’t take into account most of these nuances. It is, by definition, a stark line, not a geographically sophisticated matrix.
And for a family of four, right now, it’s $23,550.
In an effort to address the concerns of advocates and researchers, the federal government came out two years ago with a Supplemental Poverty Measure (although it isn’t used to determine any federal benefits). But even that effort misses dramatic regional variation in costs like child care (the monthly cost for a one-child household in rural Mississippi is $334; in Washington, D.C., it’s $1,318).
How, then, do you calculate what it really costs for a family to have some minimum level of security? The Economic Policy Institute offers a more comprehensive calculator, one that was recently updated for 2013 and that now includes 600 communities across the country and six family types. The EPI Family Budget Calculator includes geographically adjusted costs for housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, other necessities, and taxes, in search of what it takes to achieve a “secure yet modest living standard.”
The Atlantic Cities July 12, 2013 -
We Need Some Money: Living modestly in the D.C. area requires $88,615 for the average family of four, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. That makes this the second-most expensive region in the country, behind only New York (finally, a category where every Washingtonian is happy to cede the top spot to Gotham). The median household income for the region is slightly less than that figure, and the median income for the District is more than $25,000 less.
Washington City Paper July 12, 2013 -
Hearing that Washington is an expensive place to live is nothing new, but the price of residing in the nation’s increasingly pricy town can be put into clearer context thanks to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute. A two-parent, two-child family, for instance, needs $88,615 to get by comfortably, if not lavishly, in the D.C. region.
The Economic Policy Institute takes into account the monthly cost of housing, food, child care, transportation, education, and other various expenditures in a family budget calculator. Figures are available for metropolitan areas across the United States, but only one—New York City—appears to be more costly than the D.C. metropolitan area.
EPI looked into 615 metropolitan and rural areas around the country. The cost of living in the D.C. region, which includes the District and several counties in Maryland and Virginia, is 40 percent higher than the national median of about $63,000.
DCist July 12, 2013 -
Of course, earning $34,000 in the U.S. won’t get you very far in most parts of the country. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that a family of three needs an income of at least $44,617 a year to cover basic living expenses in the cheapest parts of the country. In Wichita, Kansas, where the commercial is currently being aired, according to Think Progress, a family of three would need to make $53,721 to get by. That’s far more than $30,000 a year that two parents earning minimum wage would make.
The Huffington Post July 12, 2013 -
Policy experts at the protest emphasized that wage increases were necessary for workers toiling at or near the minimum wage in the city. The low-wage workers who were demonstrating — many of whom work restaurant and retail jobs inside federal buildings — were joined by representatives from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, and the D.C. Fiscal Policy Center, a nonprofit tax research group.
The Huffington Post July 12, 2013 -
A family of four needs to earn $88,615 a year to enjoy a modest existence in the greater Washington D.C. area.
That data comes from the family budget calculator recently updated by the Economic Policy Institute. It takes into account local costs in vital areas such as housing, food, child care, transportation, health care and other necessities.
The costs for the area, which includes D.C. and nearby communities in both Maryland and Virginia, are 40 percent higher than the national median of $63,000. New York City was the only metropolitan area with higher median annual outlays for a family of four at $93,502.
According to the EPI, this data underscores the inadequacy of existing measures of poverty, which use the cost of living on a national level and do not take into account regional variations.
WAMU July 12, 2013 -
The median household income for a two-parent family of four in the Cleveland area is about 80 percent of what they need to have a modest standard of living, according to data released Wednesday.
While median family income in the Cleveland area is $49,715, a family of four needs to make $62,050 in order to be moderately middle class, said Amanda Woodrum, a researcher for Policy Matters Ohio, a nonprofit research institute.
The Cleveland data complemented a July 3 brief, “What Families Need to Get By,” published by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC. The median household income data come from the federal government. Income then was compared with basic family budgets that Policy Matters and EPI constructed, primarily using government data to support a variety of things included in most monthly household budgets, including housing, food and “decent” childcare. For example, childcare for two children in the Cleveland area costs nearly $1,000 a month, according to Policy Matters.
Cleveland Plain Dealer July 11, 2013 -
Last month, the City Council held a hearing on working conditions in the fast-food industry. What it revealed is troubling — fast-food restaurants are flourishing in New York City, but wages in the industry have remained pitifully low and stagnant.
Despite the fact that fast-food jobs grew at over 10 times the rate of other jobs in this city in the last decade, most workers are still making somewhere around minimum wage, which in New York State is $7.25 an hour.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that’s too little to survive in one of the world’s most expensive cities. In fact, a brand-new release of the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator shows that New York City’s cost of living is the nation’s highest.
The annual budget for a two-parent, two-child New York City family is $93,502 — about 40% higher than that of a similar Detroit family. That’s because child care here is more expensive than anywhere else. Housing costs are high, as are taxes and health care.
New York Daily News July 11, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute has just updated their cost-of-living budgets to reflect how much a family needs to earn to get by in 2013.
Looking at over 600 locations and estimating community-specific costs, EPI found that families need more than twice the amount of the federal poverty line to have a secure yet modest living standard.
“Our family budget calculations show that the real costs for families to live modest — not even middle class — lives are much higher than conventional estimates show and virtually impossible for families living on minimum-wage jobs,” said Elise Gould, the Economic Policy Institute director of health policy research.
The Huffington Post July 11, 2013 -
“At this pace, it will be more than five years until we get back to the prerecession unemployment rate,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote on Friday. “The numbers show that we have made surprisingly little progress over the last four years undoing the damage caused by the Great Recession.”
Shierholz’s entire post is worth your time, but we’ll highlight two tidbits for you: Shierholz pointed out that the employment-to-population ratio, coming in at 58.7% with Friday’s report, is still well below the 63.3% figure from December 2007, the month the recession started. Excluding young people and people near retirement age, so as to get a better take on the prime-age working population, she says the ratio for people 24-54 stood at 75.9%, up from a low of 74.8% at the end of 2009, but below the more than 80% rate of early 2007. “In other words, we are four years into the recovery, and we have climbed only about one-fifth of the way out of the hole left by the Great Recession.”
Wall Street Journal July 11, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit group, has released the 2013 version of a budget calculator on its website – www.epi.org/resources/budget/ — that factors in the “real costs for families.” It lists families with one and two parents for up to three children in each case.
Winston-Salem Journal July 10, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI):
The real costs for families to live modest, economically secure lives are much higher than conventional estimates show for all cities across the country. For minimum-wage workers, it is nearly impossible to meet basic family needs.
Put another way, the number of people truly living “in poverty” may be much larger than the government’s figure of 16%.
The EPI adds:
Like most of the old Southern states from Louisiana to Alabama and north into Kentucky, poverty remains high, and income and education much lower than the national average.
Elise Gould, EPI director of health policy research said when commenting on the new “What Families Need to Get By: The 2013 Update of EPI’s Family Budget Calculator” that:
“The fact that hardworking families are struggling to afford their basic needs makes clear how critical government policies are to ensure that our families can afford such basic necessities like food, child care, housing, transportation, and health care.”
Wall St. 24/7 July 10, 2013 -
So it took a think tank study to determine that New York City is the most expensive place to live in America?
I could have saved the money spent on the Economic Policy Institute report by dragging along one accountant with a calculator from my home in Queens as I emptied my wallet and sizzled my credit card on a single weekend in New York.
New York Daily News July 10, 2013 -
I’m biased, but it seems liberals have the better story on the growth of inequality. The Economic Policy Institute has a fantastic Web page, inequality.is, where they walk through a more sophisticated story about how inequality was created by tax, globalization, macroeconomic and regulatory decisions and policies, and it can be fixed through the same mechanisms.
The Washington Post July 10, 2013 -
An Economic Policy Institute study shows that for every unemployment dollar invested, it returns an estimated $1.64 to the economy.
New Jersey Star-Ledger July 10, 2013 -
So how are we doing? Labor economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute says the country has made “surprisingly little progress” since the Great Recession battered the U.S. beginning in December 2007
AARP July 10, 2013