“We were still in a pretty depressed economy and in recovery from the great recession when those cuts were instituted. They just made the recovery last far longer than it should have,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a leftwing thinktank. “Over the next six or seven years, really valuable public goods and services were not delivered because they were cut so sharply.”
Government spending tends to rise after recessions but per-capita federal spending fell after the debt crisis. Bivens argues that if government spending had continued at its normal levels, the unemployment rate would have returned to its pre-recession level five or six years before 2017, when the job market finally recovered its losses.
The Guardian
May 5, 2023
Lawmakers across eight states — including Minnesota and Missouri — have bills in progress that weaken youth labor laws, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis.
CBS News
May 5, 2023
The lottery-based H-1B program issues 85,000 new visas each year. Intended for workers with specialized skills, the H-1B is commonly used to acquire talented foreign technologists, but data show it has also been widely used to hire cheaper labor, which is not the stated intent of the program. A 2020 report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute concluded that 60% of H-1B jobs certified by the U.S. Department of Labor were assigned wage levels well below local median pay for the occupation.
“It’s incredibly profitable to hire an H-1B worker instead of an American because they’re cheaper,” said Ron Hira, a Howard University professor who co-authored the institute’s report.
The Mercury News
May 5, 2023
Persistently high turnover rates also come with a significant financial cost for school districts. According to a report published in 2017 by the Economic Policy Institute, large urban districts spend approximately $20,000 on every new hire.
EdSurge
May 5, 2023
If it were so, then we wouldn’t see the rollback being pushed by lobbyists for home builders, supermarkets, restaurants and bars, or by Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-affiliated group. All those outfits have been behind the campaign for more child labor, the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute has shown.
LA Times
May 5, 2023
Home care workers are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, Asian American Pacific Islander and immigrants, according to a June 2022 report by the Economic Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank.
The Keene Sentinel
May 5, 2023
Low-wage workers experienced wage growth of 9% between 2019 and 2022. That’s a historically fast real wage growth over the three-year span, especially in a period of economic inflation, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.
McKnight’s Senior Living
May 5, 2023
A minimum wage paycheck lost 27 percent of its purchasing power since 2009 and is now worth less in real wages than at any point in time since 1956, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Truthout
May 5, 2023
Plans to merge two of the biggest U.S. supermarket chains could blunt grocery-store workers’ bargaining power and lower their wages, according to a new analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
MarketWatch
May 5, 2023