After the Supreme Court ruled against explicitly racist zoning in 1917, cities sought other ways of keeping Black families out of middle-class neighborhoods or suburbs. Realizing that limiting the housing supply could keep neighborhoods too expensive for Black families, many cities passed rules against building apartments or putting homes too close together, according to Economic Policy Institute distinguished fellow Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law.
MLK 50
December 2, 2022
Saint Hilarie acknowledged that child care has become expensive for many families. The Economic Policy Institute estimates the average cost of infant care in Arizona is nearly $11,000 per year — more per year than in-state tuition at a public college. (In Tucson, the cost for care is closer to $10,000 annually.) That means the typical Arizona family can end up spending close to 20% of its income on child care for just one infant. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers anything more than 7% of a family’s income unaffordable.
Inside Tucson Business
December 2, 2022
Nearly 80 percent of private construction in New York is done by non-union workers. The decline in non-union construction labor began over the past decade as the city began to recover from the damage of the 2008 recession. For contractors looking to save money, open-shop work sites, which are jobs that employ mostly non-union workers but hire some union workers as well, are up to 30 percent cheaper than union sites. Part of the reason it’s cheaper is that contractors are not required to pay union wages or benefits, nor are they obligated to adhere to union rules. A 2021 report by the Economic Policy Institute found that union construction workers earned on average 40 percent more than their non-union workers.
Documented
December 2, 2022
There will also be data from the Labor Department, starting with the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, also known as JOLTS.
Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, is interested in the “turnover” part.
“The kind of churn that we’ve been seeing in the labor market as people have quit their jobs in search of better ones.” She’ll also be checking whether layoffs are extending beyond the tech sector.
Marketplace
December 2, 2022
Stephanie Kelton: Daniel Costa is an attorney and the Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington DC.
Daniel Costa: An employer can seek out a worker from abroad using permanent residence, so essentially apply for a worker who would come in with lawful permanent residence status, most commonly referred to as a Green Card. Workers arrive almost with all the same rights as a US citizen and are on their way to becoming a US citizen.
MarketWatch
December 2, 2022
Under these circumstances of COVID-lockdown and war-related supply shortages, corporations in turn seized the opportunity to mark up their prices and pad their profits margins. Focusing on the U.S. economy, the Financial Times reported on November 28 that, “Margins of retailers and wholesalers have exploded in the past two years. The basic story here is that a combination of broken supply chains, rising input costs, and high demand created pricing power for producers, who raised mark-ups. Those mark-ups … are fueling inflation.” The economist Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute has confirmed this pattern for the U.S., calculating that 54 percent of the price increases for corporations has been due to rising profit margins.
Truthout
December 2, 2022
Joelle Gamble is the current chief economist at the US Department of Labor; Heidi Shierholz (now the president of the Economic Policy Institute) was its chief economist between 2014 and 2017.
Together, they talk with Felicia and Michael about how the shifts in economic policy thinking over the last decade helped produce today’s record-breaking recovery.
Roosevelt Institute
December 2, 2022
The fact that this figure hasn’t changed since 2009 (in spite of record-high inflation) caused wages to reach their lowest real value (when accounting for inflation) in 66 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute. But, per the investigation, Krispy Kreme failed to meet this less-than-$11 compensation for 516 employees working overtime. (Yikes.)
Tasting Table
November 23, 2022
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “many voices in this debate have implicitly or explicitly argued that recession and inflation cause equivalent damage, or that inflation actually causes worse damage than recession. This view is clearly wrong — the economic damage wrought by recessions is far greater than that by single-digit inflation rates. Inflation, on the other hand, is pure redistribution in the short run, but does not directly reduce incomes in the aggregate.”
Monroe News
November 23, 2022