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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 -
“Those industries have lots of job openings all the time,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Where they might go unfilled in boom times, people have no options now,” she said.
LA Times July 10, 2013 -
The trouble is that young college graduates working full-time earned, on average, $34,500 last year, according to the progressive Economic Policy Institute. Adjusting for inflation over the past dozen years, this translates into a shocking loss of $3,200.
Their predicament is similar to that of older workers also coping with unemployment and declining salaries, except that this young generation must ultimately shoulder the costs of entitlement programs such as Medicare as their parents retire.
“This is an unmitigated disaster,” said EPI economist Heidi Shierholz. “At a time like this, it’s the younger workers being screwed by the lack of broad-based demand for work to be done.”
The Fiscal Times July 10, 2013 -
The reality is that the economy isn’t employing nearly as large a share of the potential workforce as it once did. Heidi Shierholz of theEconomic Policy Institute offered an analysis Friday that compared the percentage of the working-age population employed today with the levels before the recession. In early 2007, 63.3 percent of working-age Americans had a job. The latest report pegs that percentage at just 58.7 percent.
Shierholz also looked at the ratio for those of prime working age, a somewhat fairer measure of conditions then and now. The percentage of people ages 25 to 54 who were employed in early 2007 was 80 percent. It dropped to 74.8 percent in late 2009. Although it has risen since then, it is still just 75.9 percent.
The Washington Post July 10, 2013 -
Friday’s employment report wasn’t bad. But given how depressed our economy remains, we really should be adding more than 300,000 jobs a month, not fewer than 200,000. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, we would need more than five years of job growth at this rate to get back to the level of unemployment that prevailed before the Great Recession. Full recovery still looks a very long way off. And I’m beginning to worry that it may never happen.
The New York Times July 10, 2013 -
And yet, Baucus and Camp face significant obstacles, from President Barack Obama’s limited interest in tax changes, to the partisan divide in Congress, to their reluctance to repeat the 1986 model that shifted some of the tax burden from individuals to corporations.
“People were ready for it” in 1986, said Thomas Hungerford, director of tax and budget policy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, which advocates for low- and middle-income workers. “Congress was ready for it. The administration was ready for it. And I just don’t see that now.”
Bloomberg Businesweek July 10, 2013 -
But Young said this at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, exactly fifty years ago on August 28. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute, “The Unfinished March—An Overview,” offers a compelling look at the economic vision that was laid out on that day and has since been forgotten. It also examines the continuing struggle to achieve that vision.
Most Americans associate the March with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech and celebrate the victories of the civil rights movement that followed. But report author Algernon Austin, director of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy (PREE), writes that there were “nine other speeches that day” and that the march organizers called for “decent housing, adequate and integrated education, a federal jobs program for full employment, and a national minimum wage of over $13.00 an hour in today’s dollars.”
The Nation July 5, 2013 -
Paige Gance of Reuters looked at EPI’s Family Budget Calculator and wrote, “It costs almost twice as much to live in New York City as it does in Marshall County, Mississippi, according to figures published Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. The median cost of modest living for an American family of four in the United States can be found in Newaygo County, Michigan, where $63,000 covers food, transportation, housing, child care, healthcare and taxes – but no extras such as vacations, eating out, or savings.”
Reuters July 5, 2013 -
In an op-ed for the Providence Journal, EPI Economist Monique Morrissey took on Rhode Island’s pension reform plan, which was the subject of two recent EPI papers. “Here’s something you probably don’t know about the new hybrid retirement plan for teachers and other government workers,” she wrote. “It actually increases costs for taxpayers even as it cuts benefits for most workers.”
Providence Journal July 5, 2013 -
Fast Co.Exist called EPI’s new website inequality.is a “visually-interesting riff on the theme” of income inequality, writing, “Rising income inequality is getting more difficult to ignore. Inequality.is, a fun interactive website, walks you through the problem (and helps give you ideas about the solution).”
Fast Co.Exist July 5, 2013 -
But Americans like Mr. Doernberg and the powerful labor lobby say that what the tech industry really wants is to depress wages and bring in more pliant, less costly temporary workers from overseas. If there is such a talent shortage, they ask, why are wages for most engineers not rising faster? Labor groups have pushed for a requirement to offer jobs to equally qualified Americans before hiring foreigners, a provision that the industry has fiercely resisted.
The New York Times June 28, 2013 -
Most fast-food workers make close to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, putting many of them below the official poverty line of $23,283 for a family of four. At the hearing, Elise Gould, the director of health policy and research for the Economic Policy Institute, argued that the minimum wage doesn’t come close to meeting the needs of a family living in New York City.
According to a budget calculator tool devised by EPI, a two-parent, two-child family in New York City needs a minimum of $93,502 to pay for child care, housing, food, transportation, health care, taxes, and miscellaneous necessities like clothes and household supplies.
The Huffington Post June 28, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank known for its liberal bent, said that full-time minimum wage workers in the industry earn $15,080 a year.
The 1 million people working as restaurant cooks last year made $11.20 an hour on average, earning $23,300 over the year, according to the Labor Department. California, Texas and New York are among the states with the highest concentrations of such workers.
Los Angeles Times June 28, 2013 -
It’s not really surprising to learn that full-time restaurant employees making minimum wage aren’t doing too great. What is surprising—and reasonably jaw-dropping—is just how much more money CEOs at the largest restaurant companies made in 2012 than those employees.
A new study from the Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey shows that a minimum-wage employee makes in a full year much less than an average top restaurant CEO makes in one day. The actual numbers: A full-time minimum-wage employee made $15,080 in 2012. The average top restaurant CEO earned $11,884,000. That’s 788 times as much as a minimum wage employee made.
National Journal June 28, 2013 -
Plenty of pundits have responded to Mankiw’s thesis, but none more effectively than Josh Bivens and Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, who also contributed a paper to the special issue of the JEP.
It turns out that it’s not so much what you know, as Mankiw argues, but how much power you have, especially the power to extract economic rents. Bivens and Mishel show that the increase in the incomes of the top 1% over the past 30 years owes more to successful rent-seeking than it does to efficient and competitive markets rewarding education and skills.
MarketWatch June 28, 2013 -
Studies have found that American students are disproportionately disadvantaged, compared with those of high-performing nations on international tests.
The New York Times June 27, 2013 -
Between 1979 and 2009, the top 1% of Americans saw their income grow by 240.5%, while the bottom 20% only say a 10.8% increase in gains. Reducing the inequality could significantly alter the economy, said Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist, Sunday on Weekends with Alex Witt.
Bernstein said that yes, manufacturing is highly productive and causes overall economic growth but robotics take jobs away from people. The Economic Policy Institute reminds us that “you can have all the growth you want but if it’s not equitably distributed then a lot of families end up falling behind even as the economy improves,” he says.
MSNBC.com June 27, 2013