Media clips

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• White House Budget Curbs Some Deductions for the Wealthy

  The treatment of carried interest has for years been strongly defended by elements of the financial industry, and the White House proposal was quickly attacked on Wednesday by the leading private equity industry trade group. Even supporters of the proposal conceded that it faced stiff political opposition.

  “Republicans are never going to sign off on this,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.

   

  The New York Times April 11, 2013
• The Liberal Civil War Over Social Security Cuts

   

  The president, CBPP, CAP, and a few Democrats on the Hill may back chained CPI, but many other liberal groups and leaders oppose it. On Tuesday, a group of major progressive organizations, including the National Organization for Women, the Campaign for America’s Future and MoveOn.org, joined Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) for a protest on Capitol Hill opposing the proposed cuts. More than 2 million people signed a petition presented to the White House the same day opposing the plan. “We’re not going to balance the budget on the backs of elderly, disabled vets, the sick or the children,” Sanders later told Current TV .

  “I’ve never seen such a wholehearted and rapid response,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which opposes the cuts. She calls the CBPP and CAP the “two notable dissenters” that are “much more deficit-hawkish than the mainstream of the progressive movement.”

  Mother Jones April 11, 2013
• Questions on a Study of the Cost of Federal Regulation

  But the Advocacy study has also come under scrutiny from economists and legal scholars, who have challenged the methodology, the underlying data and the authors’ reluctance to share certain details about how they did their work. And while much of the criticism comes from liberal organizations like the Center for Progressive Reform and the Economic Policy Institute (which weighed in twice), here, too, the outrage is not strictly partisan: theCongressional Research Service has also cast doubt on the study’s findings.

  The New York Times April 11, 2013
• Senators to add high-tech visas, dispute details

  Daniel Costa, immigration policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, said the top 10 companies with the most H-1B visas last year were all firms that bring workers here to work at lower cost than Americans would, then send them back home. Many are technology companies based in India.

  “There need to be some major reforms before expansion happens,” Costa said.

  Associated Press April 11, 2013
• Why do people hate deficits?

  Shiller, John Irons and Josh Bivens, and Mike Konczal have also noted that’s it’s much more likely that causality runs in the other direction. That is, countries have high debt-to-GDP ratios because they have slow growth, rather than the other way around. This makes sense. Slow growth means lower tax revenue, greater social service payouts, and a whole lot of other factors that contribute to increased deficits and debt.

  Washington Post-Wonkblog April 11, 2013
• Obama may trade one flawed Social Security formula for another

  What angers advocates for the elderly and disabled and surprises economists is that there’s so little recognition that both the existing and proposed cost-of-living adjustments largely overlook the real prices for seniors and the disabled.

  “It’s a backdoor benefit cut. It’s not a more accurate measure of the costs facing seniors,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “If anything, the current (cost-of-living adjustment) underestimates inflation (faced by seniors).”

  McClatchy April 11, 2013
• Five myths about the minimum wage

  Think only teenagers earn the minimum wage? Analysis of minimum-wage workersshows that, at most, 20 percent are teenagers, about 50 percent are full-time employees and about 60 percent are women. The vast majority have household earnings below the median, which was$50,054 in 2011.

  The Washington Post April 11, 2013
• College graduates see pay drop 7.6% in last six years, report says

  More grim news for university grads: The starting salaries of those who have recently earned college diplomas have stagnated — and even dropped — over recent years, a report says.

  Between 2000 and 2012, the wages of fresh college grads dropped 8.5%, a roughly $3,200 decline for full-time workers. In the last six years alone, their pay fell 7.6%, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.

  Los Angeles Times April 11, 2013
• Class of 2013 faces grim job prospects

  Unemployment remains high for young college grads. For those who will find jobs, many will probably have to settle for low-level positions, the Economic Policy Institute said Wednesday.

   

  CNNMoney April 11, 2013
• Class of 2013 likely to face tough start in tight job market

  High school and college graduates are still being hobbled by years of weak economic growth and an extremely tight job market, and that difficult start in the job market could impact the class of 2013 for years to come, a new analysis finds.

  “Graduating in a bad economy has long-lasting economic consequences,” said Heidi Shierholz, economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which prepared the report on young workers released Wednesday.

  The liberal-leaning think tank looked at high school graduates between ages 17 and 20 who aren’t enrolled in further schooling, as well as college graduates between ages 21 and 24 who have a bachelor’s degree and aren’t seeking further education.

  NBCNews.com April 11, 2013
• US Companies are posting more jobs but filling few

  Other economists doubt that a skills mismatch is playing a significant role. Elise Gould, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, says there are more unemployed people than jobs in nearly every industry. That suggests that a broad slowdown in the economy is to blame for still-high unemployment, rather than a shortage of qualified workers in certain industries.

   

  Associated Press April 11, 2013
• What’s in the Business-Labor Deal on Immigration?
  Slate April 5, 2013
• INTERACTIVE: All the budget plans in one chart
  The Washington Post April 5, 2013
• Visa Demand Jumps
  Wall Street Journal April 5, 2013
• H-1B visas will run out in five days
  The Washington Post April 5, 2013
• No Trickle
  The New York Times April 5, 2013
• Are Democrats ready to play ball on the budget?

  The NOW panel discusses the late night voting in the Senate on their first budget plan in four years and the wee hour amendments that got added in.

  Now with Alex Wagner March 29, 2013
• Trade could cost people with no college diploma $1,800 a year

  In 1995, Princeton economist Paul Krugman developed a simple model to estimate how globalization was affecting the wages of low-skilled workers in the United States. He found there wasn’t much effect at all. Eighteen years later, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute has re-run the numbers with updated data and has come to a strikingly different conclusion.

  The Washington Post March 26, 2013
• Income Inequality May Be The New Normal, Study Finds

  Income inequality in the U.S. has skyrocketed over the past few decades, and this study suggests that this recent increase is not going away soon. The incomes of the top 1 percent of households by income spiked 241 percent between 1979 and 2007, while the incomes of the middle fifth grew just 19 percent, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The U.S. has more income inequality than most advanced countries.

  The Huffington Post March 26, 2013
• Restaurant, hotel workers neglected in minimum wage fix

  The fate of workers who earn tips in New York could have national implications as the conversation around the minimum wage continues at the federal level.

  ROC United has campaigned for a higher minimum wage for tipped workers on the federal level. Such an increase would affect millions of American workers. As of 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that some 2.3 million Americans were employed as waiters and waitresses alone–and about 73% of tipped workers are women, according to a 2011 report [PDF] by the Economic Policy Institute.

  As the Economic Policy Institute points out, “Many tipped workers are unaware that their tips and hourly wages must add up to at least the minimum wage. At the same time, employers are unlikely to ensure that their workers are paid appropriately—it is up to the employees to know and understand this law.”

  MSNBC March 26, 2013
• Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World

  It is sadly all too easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. A September study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington noted that the median annual earnings of a full-time, male worker in the U.S. in 2011, at $48,202, were smaller than in 1973. Between 1983 and 2010, 74% of the gains in wealth in the U.S. went to the richest 5%, while the bottom 60% suffered a decline, the EPI calculated.

  Time Magazine March 26, 2013
• Seib & Wessel: What We’re Reading Friday

  Larry Mishel, of the Economic Policy Institute, makes the case from the left against using the chain-weighted CPI to adjust Social Security benefits for inflation, as President Obama proposes in his latest deficit-reduction plan. It’s simply a way to cut benefits, he says. If the goal is a better inflation measure, then develop one tailored to the elderly’s spending patterns. [EPI]

  Wall Street Journal March 26, 2013
• As Obama signs sequestration cuts, his economic goals are at risk

  Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said Obama shoulders part of the blame. Since 2010, he said, Obama has spent too much time focused on the debt, including agreeing to significantly shrink domestic spending as part of his own budget proposals.

  “I think they brought it on themselves to the extent that they validated the deficit issue,” Mishel said. “It was always the case that the actual budget policy being pursued contradicted the rhetoric in the campaign. Now it’s even worse.”

  The Washington Post March 26, 2013
• Apple’s $137 billion burns a hole in someone else’s pockets

  The first paragraph of the commentary posted Wednesday on the website of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank founded by, among others, Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich, lays out the thrust of the argument pretty succinctly:

  “For more than a year, there has been a high-profile debate over what Apple should do with its enormous cash reserve, now amounting to $137 billion. The proposals have been curiously one-dimensional, with a nearly exclusive focus on how the reserves should be used to reward its shareholders. Almost entirely absent from the discussion has been whether those reserves should also be used to provide fairer compensation to the workers making its products abroad or selling its products here. This imbalance is part and parcel of a larger trend: the share of economic rewards going to workers is diminishing.”

  Fortune March 22, 2013
• Sequester threatens pile up of discrimination cases

  A larger backlog of EEOC cases could increase the number of workplace discrimination cases which go directly to court. If a workplace discrimination charge goes unheard by the agency for more than 180 days, complainants can request that a “Notice of Right-to-Sue” be issued automatically. However, those cases could still go unheard thanks to a rash of vacancies in the federal courts.

  Some of the cases unheard by the EEOC might not even be submitted to the courts in the first place, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute and a former OSHA commissioner.

  “They’re hard cases to bring, hard cases to prove,” he said. Plus, “most people can’t afford attorneys to do it.” Instead, they rely on government agencies to “help them assert their rights.”

  For complaints about health and safety standards, employees don’t even have the option of going to the courts on their own. Instead, all those complaints must go through OSHA. While that agency hopes to avoid serious reductions in its workload capacity due to the sequester, Eisenbrey said that the status quo at the department is already “completely insufficient.”

  “The chance of having an OSHA inspection, if you’re an employer, in any given year is close to zero,” he said. He estimated that there were only about 1,000 inspectors in the agency, compared to seven million employers nationwide.

  MSNBC March 22, 2013
• Do we need more skilled foreign workers?

  The critics argue, moreover, that companies have exploited the H1-B program to fuel outsourcing, bringing in foreign employees into the U.S. to train them and then sending them back their native countries to run their offshore operations: They point out that the top 10 companies that petitioned for H1-B visas in FY 2012 were all outsourcing giants.

  Their preferred course of action is anti-fraud and anti-abuse legislation just introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), which would require companies to do more to hire native-born workers, raise wages for foreign-born workers, and make it more difficult to use the program to fuel outsourcing. The underlying message is, “don’t think about expanding the H1-B before examining the problems,” explains Ross Eisenbery, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute and a vocal critic of the visa program.

  The Washington Post March 22, 2013
• Paul Krugman: Conservatives Hate The Idea Of Policy That Helps The Economy

  Many economists say that Republican plans to slash spending would hurt the economy. Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) proposed budget would destroy 2 million jobs in 2014 alone if it were implemented, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

  The Huffington Post March 22, 2013
• It’s not the left that’s changed, it’s the economy

  Not surprisingly, liberal economists have jumped on Brooks’s arguments. Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute argues that the economy is still performing so under par — $985 billion below its potential output if all our factories were going full tilt — that it needs a major boost from government-financed economic activity to increase production, employment and consumption. Coincidentally, the day after Brooks’s column was published, Gallup released a poll showing that 72 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, would support a major federally financed infrastructure repair program and a federal program creating 1 million jobs. Nearly 80 years after Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, it seems the American people would like the government to re-create it.

  The Washington Post March 22, 2013
• Comprehensive Immigration Reform Would Improve Sluggish U.S. Economy, New Report Shows

  Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the country’s labor market is in crisis, and it’s projected the unemployment rate will not drop below 6 percent for another four years.

  “This is precisely the time that we should provide legal status and a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, because it will actually make things better,” she said. “It will actually improve the economy and generate some jobs, so this is a very good time to do it given the economic context.”

  Progress Illinois March 21, 2013
• Fiscal Woes Inflame Tensions Between Dems, Unions

  Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C., said Nutter appears to be taking a hard line stance similar to that of Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, whose tussle with his city’s teacher’s union resulted in a strike last year.

  Emanuel, Eisenbray said, is among a breed of new Democratic leaders who aren’t as beholden to unions as their predecessors were; instead, they’re more beholden to wealthy contributors who are more likely to want tax cuts.

  Workers, meanwhile, are feeling increasingly marginalized. Despite the recession, the nation’s income has continued to grow, but a larger portion of it goes to the wealthy, Eisenbray said.

  “Part of what’s going on is that everyone, all blue collar workers and even white collar college-educated workers, have seen their wages stagnate or fall in the past 10 or 12 years,” Eisenbray said. “They’ve lost their retiree health benefits, their employer-covered health care, their pensions have been virtually wiped out. There has been this huge erosion across the board in the compensation of the American middle- and working-class, and the public employees have held out longest. They had a good relationship with the politicians they bargained with. But now they’re under attack.”

  NBC Philadelphia March 21, 2013