The Economic Policy Institute determined that: “the expanded Child Tax Credit—a key element of the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP) — lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty. The ARP Child Tax Credit is the leading reason child poverty fell so precipitously from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, the lowest rate on record.”
Teresa Ghilarducci is the Schwartz Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. She’s the co-author of “Rescuing Retirement” and a member of the board of directors of the Economic Policy Institute.
The analysis of Social Security Administration data was done by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which also compared wage trends over the past four decades. Between 1979 and 2021, the top 1 percent has seen its wages rise by over 200 percent, while the 0.1 percent’s wages rose by over 460 percent, the report found. The bottom 90 percent, meanwhile, saw its wages rise by a mere 29 percent, or just about a 0.7 percent raise yearly on average, compared to the 11.1 percent yearly raise on average for the top 0.1 percent.
The state minimum wage increases around New Year’s Day will affect 3.4 million workers currently earning base pay and another 5.4 million who make somewhat more but will benefit from ripple effects within a business, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The figures don’t include city and county minimum wage increases.
Inequality in the U.S. deepened in 2021, with the country’s top 0.1% experiencing a 18.5% jump in earnings from the previous year, according to a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The bottom 90% of earners, meanwhile, swallowed an overall loss of 0.2% in inflation-adjusted earnings in the same period.
The employer-provided pension—monthly income from a company for which you no longer work—is a hoary part of the American past that never really existed for most of us. In 1970, at pensions’ peak, just under one in two American workers worked for an employer with the traditional retirement plan. (“A Timeline of the Evolution of Retirement in the United States,” Workplace Flexibility 2010, Georgetown University Law Center, 2010, scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/legal/50.) Today, the number stands at one in five in the private sector. (Monique Morrissey, “Private-Sector Pension Coverage Fell by Half over Two Decades,” Working Economic Blog, Economic Policy Institute, January 11, 2013, https://www.epi.org/blog/private-sector-pension-coverage-decline/.)
“Inflation can normalize without taking a hammer to the head of the economy,” Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, said Tuesday. But Powell—who has openly targeted workers’ wages as CEO pay runs rampant—brushed aside such arguments during his press conference Wednesday, claiming there is no “painless way to restore price stability.”
Jennifer Sherer, a senior state policy coordinator for the Economic Policy Institute — a think tank focusing on progressive economic policy — said that the position of fast food work was not immutable because workers’ wages and their standing in the economy are determined by political factors. “There’s this outmoded idea that somehow there’s a natural market that’s going to set the right wage,” Sherer said. “Employers intentionally find ways to boost their profits by suppressing wages, and policy choices have enabled and sort of abetted that wage suppression.”
Since Jan. 2014, 28 states and D.C. have changed their laws around minimum wage, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which has been tracking these changes nationwide.