EPI in the news

• Three big moves to improve American lives ASAP

  Index of per enrollee costs for comparable health-care benefits*

  Source: Economic Policy Institute

  Bloomberg | December 14, 2020
• Job openings report shows slow recovery

  The JOLTS report was “a clear and confirming sign that the recovery is not charging ahead,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, who noted in a commentary that the figures don’t even capture November’s slowdown in job growth. “With hiring and job openings at these levels, the economy is facing a long slow recovery, unless Congress acts,” she wrote.

  The Balance | December 14, 2020
• Economists: Initial jobless claims are sobering sign

  The U.S. could be headed for a “double-dip recession”—a second recession that begins before recovery from the first is complete—if Congress does not provide some sort of relief before the end of the year, said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

  “The response to the virus has been so poor, and it’s becoming clear in the labor market,” Shierholz said.

  The Balance | December 14, 2020
• Durham fast-food workers demand living wage, COVID protections

  According to a University of California at Berkeley analysis, raising the minimum wage in the 1960s directly led to a 20% drop in income inequality for Black Americans. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour would increase wages for 38.1% of all Black workers. It is perhaps the most powerful single measure to lift wages and opportunity for the poorest workers and a major step toward shrinking America’s chiasmic racial and gender wage gap.

  The Triangle Tribune | December 14, 2020
• Warren joins chorus urging Biden to raise minimum wage to $15 an hour for federal contract workers on day one

  But as Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) wrote for The American Prospect last month, “there is plenty that President Biden can do to support working people that doesn’t require Congress.”

  “One key area is the federal contracting system. While the president cannot—without Congress—increase the federal minimum wage, the president can, through executive power, increase the minimum wage of workers on federal contracts,” Shierholz noted. “The impact would be substantial.”

  Common Dreams | December 14, 2020
• The ghosts of Christmas present: GOP kick the most vulnerable amid pandemic

  In late October as the coronavirus pandemic raged, the Economic Policy Institute released a study showing that it isn’t just morally right but an economic necessity to deal with poverty in this country and fast. “If America does not address what’s happening with visionary social and economic policy,” as that study put it, “the health and well-being of the nation are at stake. What we need is long-term economic policy that establishes justice, promotes the general welfare, rejects decades of austerity, and builds strong social programs that lift society from below.”

  Common Dreams | December 14, 2020
• Austerity kills. PAYGO must go.

  This is not simply an esoteric parliamentary debate that has no impact on people’s lives. PAYGO rules, and austerity politics in general, have caused real pain. In a paper entitled “The bad economics of PAYGO,” the Economic Policy Institute noted that, “The recovery from the Great Recession was the slowest in post-World War II history, and the degree of fiscal austerity can entirely explain its slowness.”

  This “slowness” meant increased unemployment, increased hunger, decreases in access to health care, and an overall increase in mortality. Yes, austerity politics kill.

  Jacobin | December 14, 2020

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