As EPI budget analyst Ethan Pollack pointed out to me the other day (and as CBPP has stressed in tax reform trap discussions) the only time for democrats to safely engage in tax reform discussions is when ample revenue flows are already locked into place, as they would be under Gale’s plan. Otherwise, lower-the-rates-broaden-the-base risks being reduced to just lower-the-rates.
The Huffington Post
July 24, 2012
Democrats in Congress also are weighing in. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., soon will introduce legislation to raise the federal minimum wage by 85 cents an hour for three straight years – taking it from $7.25 to $9.80 per hour – and then index it annually for inflation thereafter. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., already have introduced similar bills. The proposals would provide raises for about 28 million people, according to estimates by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.
McClatchy
July 24, 2012
We then checked with the Oregon Center for Public Policy, another local think tank, but on the other side of the issue. Executive director Chuck Sheketoff suggested we try the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, which, unlike the Employment Policies Institute, supports raising the minimum wage.
Economic analyst David Cooper shared his unemployment rates for the same age group, also using Current Population Survey figures. And you know what we found? The unemployment figures were different — lower, generally, all around — but the rates of increase were about the same.
Politifact
July 20, 2012
I see from some of the comments that there’s a widespread belief that the wage stagnation we’ve experienced under “modern capitalism” is some kind of illusion, that it would go away if we took benefits into account.
Nope:
The New York Times
July 19, 2012
“The general public thinks there’s much more mobility than there actually is,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, who was not involved in the research.
Mishel also noted that many households have more income than their parents did at the same age because more women are working than in the previous generation.
MSNBC.com
July 19, 2012
Still, many question why CEO severance and bonus packages have become so outsized in the first place, particularly in light of the 2008 financial crisis. In 2011, average CEO compensation (including salary and stock options) was 209 times greater than the average employee’s pay, according to a 2012 study by the Economic Policy Institute. In 1965, the ratio was just 18 to 1.
Wharton Journal
July 19, 2012
The Waltons’ value — $89.5 billion in 2010 – is equal to the worth of the 41.5% of families at the lower end of the income ladder, according to an analysis by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. That comes out to 48.8 million households.
Los Angeles Times
July 19, 2012
The six heirs to the Walmart fortune are worth as much as nearly half of all American households.
The Walton family was worth $89.5 billion in 2010, the same as the bottom 41.5 percent of U.S. families combined, according to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. That’s 48.8 million American households in total.
The Huffington Post
July 18, 2012
New Federal Reserve data analyzed by both Allegretto and Josn Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute shows that the Waltons now hold as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined:
Concretely, between 2007 and 2010, while median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent, the wealth of the Walton family members rose from $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion…
Think Progress
July 18, 2012
Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute says if personal re-employment accounts are to work, the government has to be realistic about the cost. He says $3,000 simply isn’t enough to retrain most laid-off workers.
“If people are unemployed because their skills are outmoded and they’re not going to find the kind of skills they’ve done in the past, then they need new skills,” Eisenbrey says. “That can’t be done on the cheap.”
NPR
July 17, 2012
While unemployment in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Virginia all fall below the national average, and Florida’s rate is the best it’s been since 2008, there’s more to an economic turnaround than job numbers alone alone. To find out how these states are really doing, I called Doug Hall at the Economic Policy Institute. Hall oversees the Economic Analysis and Research Network, which connects state-level economic think tanks. He took a look at a few of the key states—Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and Virginia—to evaluate claims of economic recovery.
His answer: It’s complicated. “It’s very tempting to grab one indicator and sort of focus on that—with the most popular one being employment growth,” he said. “You’ve got to make sure you’re looking at two or three pictures together.”
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The American Prospect
July 17, 2012
As a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute showed, these job cuts ripple through the economy, also harming private sector job creation. In fact, EPI estimates that public sector job cuts have likely cost the private sector 750,000 jobs:
The economic “multiplier” of state and local spending (not including transfer payments) is large – around 1.24. This means that for every dollar cut in salary and supplies of public-sector workers, another $0.24 is lost in purchasing power throughout the rest of the economy. Teachers and firefighters stop going to restaurants and buying cars if they’re laid off, which reduces demand for waitstaff and autoworkers and so on. Add these two influences together (supplier jobs and jobs supported by this multiplier impact) and roughly 0.67 private sector jobs are lost for every public sector job cut. This means that the public sector being down 1.1 million jobs has likely cost the private sector 751,000 jobs.
Think Progress
July 17, 2012
As some states emerge from the depths of the recession, should they cut taxes or restore services and jobs? Tad DeHaven, The Cato Institute and David Cooper, Economic Policy Institute, weigh in.
CNBC
July 17, 2012
The states that decide to slash spending will inevitably put the pain on public workers like teachers (and cops and firefighters). But that’s almost literally shooting ourselves in the economic foot. Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz crunched the numbers and found that public sector job cuts have led to 2.3 million jobs “missing” from the economy. That hurts everyone—Republican-controlled states like South Carolina included.
The Nation
July 13, 2012
A recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the loss of public-sector jobs, largely because of state budget cuts, has been the biggest hit to job growth over the past three years.
The New York Times
July 13, 2012
Meanwhile, observers like Robert Scott, an economist at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, say Obama hasn’t done enough to crack down on outsourcing.
“There’s no question that there’s concerns about candidate Romney, that he has outsourced in the past and indicated that he continues to favor tax policies that would subsidize companies that would outsource,” said Scott. “On the other hand, Obama has had four years to undertake major steps to reduce our trade deficit. He’s done the small things.”
CNN
July 12, 2012
Ethan Pollack, senior policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, said that despite the president’s call, it’s doubtful that congressional action will happen anytime soon. “Extending the tax cuts for the middle class and not for high-income people would basically be Congress acceding to President Obama’s proposal,” Pollack told The Root.
The Root
July 10, 2012
Government figures show the textile and apparel industries in particular lost more than a million manufacturing jobs in the last decade. More than a quarter-million positions went to China alone, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Women's Wear Daily
July 10, 2012
In the Chicago area, 22.6 percent of African Americans were unemployed in 2011, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute, a bipartisan think tank.
Chicago Sun Times
July 10, 2012
This trend is not a new one, as the black unemployment rate has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972. But Algernon Austin, director of the the Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, attributes the rise in the rate to more black Americans entering the workforce, not to job losses or more people out of work. The percentage of eligible African-Americans holding or seeking a job rose in June to 62% from 61.3% in May. It was the second straight month that the percentage has increased.
The Root
July 10, 2012
As I’ve emphasized many times in the past, austerity at the state and local level forced by balanced budget requirements, falling tax revenues, and increasing demand for public services due to the recession had a large, negative effect on the economy. The failure of the federal government to backfill state and local budgets and stop this from happening was a big policy mistake:
Three years into recovery, just how much has state and local austerity hurt job growth?, by Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz: …the public sector has seen massive job loss in the current recovery—largely due to budget cuts at the state and local level — which represents a serious drag that was not weighing on earlier recoveries. …
Economist's View
July 9, 2012
A must-read for jobs day: The new big-picture analysis from the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz that assesses just how much of the gap between where we are and full employment is attributable to cuts in government jobs.
The answer? Over 20%, or about 2.3 million jobs. Half of those jobs would be in the private sector.
The Washington Post
July 9, 2012
In 2008, President Obama campaigned on a promise to raise the minimum wage. He hasn’t. Mitt Romney has said he supports pegging minimum wage to inflation, but recently backtracked, and he now opposes an increase.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, if Harkin has his way and the minimum wage was actually raised to $9.88 an hour, it would increase wages for 30 million Americans — 10 percent of the country.
NPR
July 9, 2012
“This pace of job growth means two things,” writes Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, who says the U.S. economy has a deficit of 10 million jobs: “We are not in — nor are we slipping into — another recession, but neither are we getting the kind of job growth that will bring down the unemployment rate. In other words, the labor market is treading water. This would be perfectly fine if we were at full employment, but with the unemployment rate now above 8 percent for 41 months straight, this is an ongoing, severe crisis for the American workforce.”
NPR
July 9, 2012
For a closer look at the new jobs report, which showed the black unemployment rate up to 14.4 percent, theGrio reached out to Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program at the liberal-leaning Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.
Thegrio.com
July 9, 2012
The liberal Economic Policy Institute called the sustained high rates of unemployment an “ongoing, severe crisis for the American workforce.”
Associated Press
July 9, 2012
“The labor market is treading water,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She called it an “ongoing, severe crisis for the American work force.”
Associated Press
July 9, 2012
If you assume Romney intends to implement the Ryan budget—which he has said on multiple occasions—his plan would cost the economy 1.3 million jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The American Prospect
July 9, 2012
“We’ve been consistently adding jobs,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “But we’ve been adding what we need to roughly tread water. It’s not what we need to dig out. It’s just what we need to hang on.”
Philadelphia Tribune
July 9, 2012
From the Economic Policy Institute comes a report today on public-sector job loss, which as you know is a favored topic of mine. The number of public-sector workers has decreased in this recession from 7.3 workers per 100 adults, an average the United States has maintained since the late 1980s, to something well under that. If we had stayed at the 7.3 figure, and given that population has grown by nearly 7 million since June 2009, that would have meant 1.1 million more public-sector workers on payrolls.
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
July 9, 2012