The economy now is “a little bit better,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “But if you lost your job, there just wasn’t that much available.”
The Washington Post
August 27, 2012
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning economic think tank in Washington, D.C., estimates that America. lost 2.7 million jobs as a result of the U.S.-China trade deficit between 2001 and 2011, 2.1 million of them in manufacturing. Wages of American workers have also suffered due to the competition with cheap Chinese labor, EPI says. A typical two-earner household loses around $2,500 per year from this dynamic.
“They have been managing their economy on the back of ours for more than a decade,” says Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at EPI and the author of the report. China imports materials from the U.S., he says, to make cheap exports that it then sells back to U.S. consumers.
US News and World Report
August 27, 2012
It’s a fantasy, of course. Not coincidentally, as union density in America has declined, so too have workers’ wages, benefits, workplace protections and negotiating power. Additionally, as the Economic Policy Institute documents, unions not only help their own members, they set industry-wide standards. So when unions lose ground, all workers lose out.
Salon
August 27, 2012
A $295 billion trade deficit with China resulted in the loss of 2.7 million U.S. jobs in the past decade, with the biggest impact in California’s Silicon Valley, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg Businesweek
August 27, 2012
“In an ideal world, you can’t cut government spending effectively until the economy is close to full employment,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, a federal budget analyst for the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “The magnitude of government spending cuts for a balanced budget amendment is beyond the realm of the tenable. We don’t have a $1 trillion waste, fraud and abuse account to tap into.”
The Fiscal Times
August 23, 2012
But not all college grads have it equally rosy. As the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews has pointed out, the Georgetown report misleadingly sandwiches together plain-old bachelor’s holders with workers who have a master’s, doctorate, or professional degree. And according to data Matthews cites from the Economic Policy Institute, between 2007 and 2011, 98.3 percent of the job gains in that combined group went to the advanced degree holders. These days, it seems we’re really in a grad school economy.
That reality plays out pretty clearly in the unemployment figures, as shown in this chart posted by EPI’s Lawrence Mishel. Bachelor’s holders, like everyone else, have suffered from much worse joblessness than normal during the recovery. Today, they’re still facing 4.1 percent unemployment, well above pre-recession levels. If there was a great shortage of college talent in the labor market, it’s reasonable to assume their situation would have improved faster.
The Atlantic
August 23, 2012
The unemployment rate for all college graduates over 25 years old is currently 4.1%, less than half of the national unemployment rate of 8.3%. But a recent Economic Policy Institute study reports that the unemployment rate is 9.4% for college grads ages 21 to 24 (not currently seeking a post graduate degree), and the underemployment rate for this group is 19.1% (this includes part-time workers who want full-time jobs). In 2011, those grads lucky enough to have a full-time job earned an average of $35,000 a year, a 5.4% inflation adjusted decrease from 2000 average income. Finally, it is estimated that nearly 4 of 10 grads are working in fields that don’t require a college degree (the college-grad barista syndrome).
Wall Street Journal
August 23, 2012
Bogira ties this back into residential segregation, an ongoing interest of his (and mine). On that note, Richard Rothstein and Mark Santow have a long piece in The American Prospect about residential segregation, and in particular its history in Detroit and George Romney’s attempts to combat it.
Chicago Magazine
August 23, 2012
When Larry Mishel and I looked at this in the context of wage inequality, we found no statistical evidence for acceleration, so we found it hard to blame technological change, something that’s literally been going on forever, as the cause of something new — increasing wage inequality.
The Huffington Post
August 23, 2012
George Bernard Shaw famously quipped that the U.S. and the U.K. are two nations divided by a common language. While the two countries are indeed worlds apart in many ways, the issue of high unemployment among recent college graduates looms large on both sides of the Atlantic.
Both countries present increasingly tough labor markets for recent graduates: in the U.S., data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank, show that the unemployment rate for young college graduates was 9.4% in 2012. In the U.K., that figure was 9% between 2010 and 2011, the latest data show, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
Wall Street Journal
August 23, 2012
What does that mean in the real world? I think it’s mostly a longwinded way of emphasizing that incomes and prices are two sides of the same coin. The political discussion normally talks about income and wages in one box, and then college affordability or health care or housing in some other boxes.
Slate
August 22, 2012
The improvement is visible in a number of statistics. The July labor force participation rate for these workers—that is, the share either with a job or looking for a job—was 60.5 percent, up from last summer’s record-low 59.5 percent. And the summer youth unemployment rate is also on the decline, from 19.1 percent (not seasonally adjusted) in July 2010 to 18.1 percent last year to 17.1 percent this year.
“It’s all good news. It’s headed in the right direction,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Prosperity Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington. However, she adds that figures on labor force participation and employment for young workers “are still really low.”
US News and World Report
August 22, 2012
The Tax Policy Center, the Congressional Budget Office, the Economic Policy Institute, Annenberg, Brookings, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, your own brain and common sense logic – they all fact checked Romney’s plan and agree that his jobs numbers don’t bear out and his plan results in a tax increase for the middle class on a revenue neutral budget.
Politico
August 22, 2012
If the legislation becomes law, it will give more than a half-million low-wage workers a pay increase and could generate 4,500 new jobs because of increased economic activity, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute:
Increasing Massachusetts’s minimum wage to $10.00 on January 1, 2013, would give a raise to more than 581,000 of the state’s lowest-paid workers.
Think Progress
August 22, 2012
“People who have been knocking on doors for two years will turn to something else when there are no payroll jobs in their field,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “The growth we’re seeing is in fields where you can create those opportunities.”
The Fiscal Times
August 21, 2012
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Ryan’s plan would mean 1.3 million fewer jobs next year than otherwise, and 2.8 million fewer the year after.
Robert Reich's blog
August 21, 2012
Setting a higher federal minimum wage, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that supports the needs of low and middle-income workers, would boost the income of 651,000 New Yorkers and generate $618 million more in consumer spending at NYC-based businesses.
Epoch Times
August 21, 2012
Luckily, data from the forthcoming Economic Policy Institute book “The State of Working America, 12th Edition,” which EPI generously provided to Wonkblog, does separate the groups, and the results are informative. While those with only a BA did much, much better than people with a high school degree or only some college, they still saw job stagnation during the recession. The only group that continued to gain jobs were those with advanced degrees:
The Washington Post
August 20, 2012
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds that, while raising the minimum wage to the proposed $9.80 level would have a significant impact on about 28 million low-income workers, it would especially benefit women. As the report puts it, the fact that “women comprise 54.5 percent of workers who would be affected by a potential minimum-wage increase makes it a women’s issue”:
Think Progress
August 20, 2012
A different study by the Economic Policy Institute estimated that tax code provisions relating to executive pay enabled about 8,000 U.S. public companies to lower their corporate tax bill by $30.4 billion between 2007 and 2010.
Pittsburg Post-Gazette
August 20, 2012
Those assets are worth between $300,000 and $700,000. That means the Ryans’ net worth is greater than 80 percent of Americans from their natural-resource investments alone, according to inflation-adjusted data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. Their combined assets are as high as $7.6 million, likely putting the Ryans among the top 5 percent of Americans in terms of net worth.
CNBC
August 17, 2012
The unlimited tax deductibility of executive pay loophole operates as a powerful subsidy for excessive compensation. The more corporations pay out in executive compensation, the less they owe in taxes. And average taxpayers wind up paying the bill. According to the Economic Policy Institute, this loophole cost American taxpayers as much as $9.7 billion in 2010.
August 17, 2012
About 28 million people will see their pay go up whenever Congress gets around to raising the minimum wage to $9.80. (Which is to say, not a minute before Democrats retake Congress.) But who are those people? According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Doug Hall and David Cooper:
- Women would be disproportionately affected, comprising nearly 55 percent of those who would benefit.
- Nearly 88 percent of workers who would benefit are at least 20 years old.
- Although workers of all races and ethnicities would benefit from the increase, non-Hispanic white workers comprise the largest share (about 56 percent) of those who would be affected.
Daily Kos
August 17, 2012
A particularly big problem with this set of assertions, from my perspective, is the blanket claim that higher productivity means higher wages. It’s true and important to recognize that only through higher levels of productivity is there the potential for higher wages. But that clearly has not been the case for middle- and low-wage workers for a long time, as work by the Economic Policy Institute has stressed.
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
August 15, 2012
A new report released today by the Economic Policy Institute takes a closer look at the potential impacts of The Fair Minimum Wage Act, introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) on July 26, 2012. The proposed increase would raise the federal minimum wage from the current $7.25 to $9.80 by 2014, through three incremental increases of $0.85 and raise the tipped minimum wage, currently sitting at $2.13 per hour, to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage.
The Progressive Pulse
August 15, 2012
Yet perhaps the most disturbing feature of Ryan’s budget is that, in the midst of a prolonged recession, it would cost the US economy millions of jobs. Ryan’s 2011 budget plan proposes what the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities calls “the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in US history—two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes” (Medicaid, Pell grants, food stamps and low-income housing). According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the shock to aggregate demand from near-term spending cuts would result in roughly 1.3 million jobs lost in 2013 and 2.8 million jobs lost in 2014, or 4.1 million jobs through 2014.”
The Nation
August 14, 2012
The other part of Romney’s claim — that wages and employment track productivity — is actually false. Unpublished data from BLS, generously provided to me by the Economic Policy Institute’s Larry Mishel and Nicholas Finio, shows that wages tracked productivity growth until about 1970. After that, wages stagnated even as productivity continued to grow. Here’s EPI’s graph on the matter:
The Washington Post
August 13, 2012
Edelman suggests that the real reasons for persistent poverty include the proliferation of low-wage jobs; a “gaping hole” that’s been ripped in the safety net in terms of vanishing cash assistance for low-income mothers and children; and “persistent issues of race and gender” that lead to higher poverty rates for minorities and families headed by single mothers. He points to research by the Economic Policy Institute showing that half the jobs in the nation pay less than $34,000 a year; and one-quarter pay less than $23,000 annually. Also, wages for jobs in the bottom half have increased just 7 percent since 1972.
The Nation
August 13, 2012
Some 2.8 million American jobs—70 percent of them in manufacturing—have been lost since 2001 because of the U.S. trade deficit with China, according to a recent Economic Policy Institute study. Indeed, consumers visiting a Walmart or Macy’s are hard pressed to find much made in America.
Epoch Times
August 13, 2012
Ryan’s budget would result in 4.1 million lost jobs in 2 years. Ryan’s budget calls for massive reductions in government spending. He has proposed cutting discretionary programs by about $120 billion over the next two years and mandatory programs by $284 billion, which, the Economic Policy Institute estimates, would suck demand out of the economy and “reduce employment by 1.3 million jobs in fiscal 2013 and 2.8 million jobs in fiscal 2014, relative to current budget policies.”
Think Progress
August 13, 2012