However, others define a livable wage differently. The Economic Policy Institute’s “Family Budget Calculator” says the income needed for a “modest yet adequate standard of living” is $45,517 a year, or nearly $22 per hour. With Boulder defining a living wage as “an amount intended to help people meet basic living needs and maintain or achieve self-sufficiency,” its 2020 budget increases the minimum living wage for its employees to $17.42 per hour.
Daily Camera
March 18, 2022
“It is about making sure that you have kind of a captive workforce,” said Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute. “Your workforce can’t go anywhere else, and then you actually have to pay them less to keep them because they don’t have outside options.”
The Denver Channel
March 18, 2022
At the same time, the gap has remained relatively unchanged over the past three decades. From 1979 to 1994, it fell from 37.7% to about 23%, the Economic Policy Institute found. But it has not improved much since, even as women have made great gains in educational attainment – going from less likely having a college or advanced degree compared to men – to surpassing men in education. Women with advanced degrees are paid less on average than men with bachelor’s degrees, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
CBS News
March 18, 2022
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s updated Family Budget Calculator, a full-time worker with no children would need to make roughly $14.50 an hour to sustain themselves in the US county with the lowest cost of living: Orangeburg County, South Carolina.
Business Insider
March 18, 2022
Elsewhere, Mike Konczal and Emily DiVito at the Roosevelt Institute, Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, and staff at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have all highlighted the important ways in which the American Rescue Plan significantly improved the lives of working families and achieved an historic economic recovery. And yet, each of these analyses also remind us that we cannot stop here.
Washington Center for Equitable Growth
March 18, 2022
Studies show that every unit of reduction in equality leads to a similar reduction in GDP. Economic Policy Institute research found income inequality slows U.S. economic growth by reducing demand by 2 percent to 4 percent. The Calvert Institute determined that a 1 percent increase in inequality leads to a 1.1 percent per capita GDP loss. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco researchers calculated that gender and racial gaps created $2.9 trillion in losses to U.S. GDP in 2019. And, Citi research concluded that eliminating racial disparity would add $5 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next five years.
Proxy Preview
March 18, 2022
The failure to adjust the minimum wage for inflation has eroded its value over time. Indeed, the Economic Policy Institute reports that as of 2021, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, was 21 percent lower than in 2009 and 34 precent lower than it was at its peak value in 1968. The minimum wage section of the American Rescue Plan Act was dropped before passage, but the proposal renewed the economic and policy debate about the situation of low-wage workers and the projected effects of increasing the minimum wage.
Nonprofit Quarterly
March 18, 2022
Given our current economic trajectory, you may find yourself wondering if your household is even in the middle class. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonprofit think tank that focuses on middle-income earners, has two tools that can help answer the question for you.
Fast Company
March 18, 2022
The updated document from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that teachers and school staff, bus drivers, firefighters, police and other local government workers – many of whom are women and/or people of color – benefit from having strong unions that represent them and their interests on the job. In other states that curtail public sector collective bargaining, however, larger wage gaps persist.
Teamsters
March 18, 2022