Data for Pre-Citizen Voting Debate in City Council
May 9, 2013. Should legal immigrants who are not yet citizens be permitted to vote in New York City elections? The NYC City Council will debate this question beginning on Thursday, May 9, in connection with Intro 410, which would allow pre-citizens to vote in New York City municipal elections. It wouldn’t be the first time noncitizens could vote in New York elections. School board elections, before they were abolished, were open to all parents of children in New York City schools, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. To provide some context to the debate, the Fiscal Policy Institute prepared [...]
The Gilded City of New York
April 18, 2013. In a special issue of The Nation that includes over 20 stories about New York City under Mayor Bloomberg, a picture is painted of a two-tiered urbanism. The lead story by The Nation's editors describes the heightened income polarization in New York City and cites data from various FPI analyses, including Pulling apart: The continuing impact of income polarization in New York State. Here is New York in 2013: a city of dazzling resurrection and official neglect, remarkable wealth and even more remarkable inequality. Despite the popular narrative of a city reborn—after the fiscal crisis of the [...]
Walmart and other large, low-wage employers will benefit financially from New York’s new Minimum Wage Reimbursement Credit.
April 5, 2013. Unless disclosure requirements are clarified, we’ll probably never know exactly how much Walmart and other large, low-wage employers receive in government subsidies under New York’s new Minimum Wage Reimbursement Credit (MWRC). But based on the best data available, we estimate that Walmart is likely to receive MWRC subsidies of between $53 million and $85 million over the next five years. New York’s new MWRC will provide employers a tax credit for the hours worked by students between the ages of 16 and 19 who are paid at exactly the minimum wage. As our earlier explanation and assessment [...]
The Many Problems with New York’s Proposed Minimum Wage Reimbursement Credit
March 25, 2013. This was to have been the year New York caught up with the 19 other states and the District of Columbia with a minimum wage above the $7.25 an hour federal level. Minimum wage legislation that passed the Assembly also would have indexed the minimum wage in future years—as 10 other states do—so that inflation would not steadily erode its purchasing power. However, the agreement reached over the weekend in Albany falls far short. It increases the minimum wage to $8.00 an hour on the last day of 2013, to $8.75 a year later, and to $9.00 [...]
Revised NYS and NYC unemployment rates eliminate the mid-2012 spike and clear up what had been a confused picture
March 18, 2013. Earlier this month the NYS Department of Labor released its annual revisions to the employment and unemployment data. As noted in an earlier blog entry, New York’s private payroll employment growth was revised upward and government employment was revised to show the loss of 59,000 state and local government jobs between December 2010 and December 2012. In the revised unemployment data for 2011 and 2012 released by the Department of Labor, the unemployment trend replaces what had been a confusing spike in the unemployment rates for NYS to show a more smoothed out picture. The pre-benchmark and [...]
Good news on private sector jobs front, but recovery would have been even stronger if it were not for government austerity measures.
March 8, 2013. The New York State Department of Labor (NYSDOL), in its press release yesterday on the latest employment data, emphasized some good news—that New York State has had 17 consecutive months of private sector job growth, and that the state gained an estimated 29,600 private sector jobs in January (on a seasonally adjusted basis.) Nothing wrong with reporting good news. There was more good news in NYSDOL’s annual payroll employment revision that was also released yesterday. The annual “benchmark” revision showed that the December 2012 private employment level in New York State was 25,000 higher than had been [...]
Sequestration would cut human service spending in New York State
February 25, 2013. Last night, the White House released the following likely impacts from sequestration in New York State if Congress does not act to cut the deficit in a balanced way. Bringing in more revenue by closing tax loopholes along with smarter reductions in spending would allow the federal government to avoid the following cuts in New York State: Teachers and Schools: The loss of approximately $43 million in funding for about 120 primary and secondary schools placing almost 600 teacher and aide jobs at risk and serving 70,000 fewer students than currently. This does not include the additional [...]
Op-ed: States lead the way on immigration reform
February 24, 2013. This op-ed piece by David Dyssegaard Kallick of FPI and Tanya Broder of the National Immigration Law Council ran in the Kansas City Star, the Denver Post, the Bradenton (Florida) Herald, the Anchorage Daily News, and other local papers around the country.
With 9/11 as a guide, here are five ways to consider Hurricane Sandy’s economic impact
November 2, 2012. This piece on the economic impact of superstorm Sandy was written by James Parrott for Quartz, the new international business news site (Qz.com) published by The Atlantic Monthly. Since the October jobs report released today reflects employment conditions as of the second week of the month, it doesn’t tell us anything about the impact of Hurricane Sandy, the most devastating storm to hit the New York metro area in decades. What can we expect to see in job reports in the months ahead as a result of Sandy? How will the hurricane’s impact affect the economy and [...]
NYC’s Rising Poverty and Falling Incomes Since the Great Recession
September 27, 2012. The latest data from the Census Bureau on poverty and incomes in 2011 clearly show that New York City has a long way to go to make up for the erosion in living standards caused by the Great Recession of 2008-09. Since the start of the recession, 200,000 more city residents have fallen into poverty, bringing the total to 1.7 million out of a population of 8.1 million. For 2011, the federal poverty threshold for a 3-person family was $17,916. Poverty has increased and incomes have fallen each year since 2008. NYC’s poverty rate climbed from 18.2% [...]
New poverty and income inequality data should be a call to action
September 21, 2012. Data released by the Census Bureau yesterday casts additional light on New York’s high poverty rate and its extreme income inequality. The poverty situation is particularly dire in the Upstate cities and among children. When those two factors are looked at together, alarm bells should be going off in policymakers’ offices. More than half the children in Rochester and Syracuse lived in poverty in 2011 and Buffalo (46.8%), Schenectady (50.8%) and Albany (37%) were not far behind. See Table 1 for the overall family and individual poverty rates, and for the poverty rates for major age groups and two family types, for [...]
Failure to support the Affordable Care Act and expand Medicaid in New York State would threaten 2011 progress in health care coverage
September 20, 2012. After years of watching the number of New Yorkers without insurance climb higher and higher, we are finally seeing the trend reverse, thanks to health care reform and Medicaid. The data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau underscores the urgency for New York to implement health care reform. According to the Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey data, overall health insurance coverage in New York increased slightly from 2010 to 2011, from 88.1 percent to 88.6 percent. Private health insurance coverage continued to decline though, from 67.9 percent in 2009 to 65.1 percent in 2011. Health [...]
Health insurance coverage up in New York
September 12, 2012. One piece of good news from the Census Bureau data released today is an increase in the percentage of people with health insurance in New York State and across the country in 2011. The share of New Yorkers without health insurance dropped last year, according to preliminary state Census Bureau figures. Roughly one in eight New Yorkers did not have health insurance coverage in 2011, a decrease of three percent from 2010. A similar, though less pronounced, change was seen around the United States. In the country as a whole, the share of people without health insurance [...]
16 percent in the Empire State lived in poverty – two years running
September 12, 2012. Earlier today, the U.S. Census Bureau released its Current Population Survey (CPS) poverty estimates for 2011 for the nation and the 50 states. The release also included revised estimates for 2010. The overriding message of the poverty data released today is that the poverty rate remains much too high - demonstrating the continuing impact of the Great Recession and the tepid and tenuous economic recovery. (The poverty rate is the percentage of people living below the federal government's official poverty levels. In 2011, for example, the poverty level averaged $11,484 for single individual households and $17,916 for [...]
A federal minimum wage hike would help 1.5 million New York workers and our economy
August 14, 2012. One of the best ways to speed up economic growth is to give a lift to the wages of the lowest paid workers. Legislation awaits action now in Washington, D.C., that would boost the federal minimum wage in three 85 cent steps from $7.25 to $9.80 an hour. According to new estimates released today by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), this proposal would benefit 1.5 million New York workers, raising their pay by $2 billion over three years. Nationally, more than 28 million workers would get a raise. Contrary to the oft-cited claim that a minimum wage [...]
FPI’s immigration research cited: The White House Blog
July 12, 2012. Blogging from the White House, Jason Furman and Danielle Gray of the National Economic Council mention FPI's June 2012 report on immigrant small business owners in their post Ten Ways Immigrants Help Build and Strengthen Our Economy. America is a nation of immigrants. Our American journey and our success would simply not be possible without the generations of immigrants who have come to our shores from every corner of the globe. It is helpful to take a moment to reflect on the important contributions by the generations of immigrants who have helped us build our economy, and [...]
State Dream Laws and Obama Dream Act Portend a shift in U.S. Immigration Policy
July 7, 2012. A column by Moises Apsan, jornal.us News Service.
Report: Transit Fares High and Rising? Blame Bailed-Out Banks
June 9, 2012. Interest rate swap agreements are costing 12 transit agencies around the country over $500 million a year. That's the gist of a new report released June 7 by The Amalgamated Transit Union and a group called ReFund Transit. WNYC's Jim O'Grady reported on the release that day. On June 9, a column by Gretchen Morgenson appeared in the New York Times, "How Banks Could Return the Favor," excerpted below. James A. Parrott, deputy director and chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute in New York, criticizes these deals along with officials who don't try to get out of them. [...]
Minimum wage in the news, April-May 2012
May 29, 2012. FPI's analysis and commentary on the minimum wage issue has been highlighted in a number of recent news stories: Report: 880,000 Workers In NY Would Benefit From Higher Minimum Wage - an article by Joseph Spector, Gannett News Service, May 24, 2012. Wage Bill Would Benefit Bronx More than Other Counties, Report Says - an article by Patrick Wall, DNAinfo.com, May 24, 2012. The minimum wage, tax cuts, and the New York legislature - an article by Jeremy Moule, Rochester City Newspaper News Blog, May 22, 2011. Liberals Call for Cuomo to Champion Higher Wage - an [...]
Advocates urge Cuomo to carry through on tax reform commission
May 25, 2012. Tax reform advocacy groups from around the state gathered on May 22 to remind the Governor that he pledged to create a tax reform commission in his State of the State address earlier this year. News coverage: "Omnibus members question Cuomo's tax plans" - a post by Rick Karlin, Albany Times Union Capitol Confidential blog. "Groups Urge Tax Reform" - a post by Joseph Spector, Albany Watch blog. Includes a video of Ron Deutsch of New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness talking about the tax reform commission. "Advocates want Gov. Cuomo to create tax reform commission," - an [...]
Editorials: Raise the minimum wage
May 1, 2012. Today the New York Times mentioned FPI in their editorial in favor of increasing the minimim wage. The Albany Times-Union did the same last week. New York on $15,000 a Year - an editorial from the New York Times, May 1, 2012. At a minimum, have a debate - an editorial from the Albany Times Union, April 25, 2012. An excerpt from the Times Union: Here's how a higher minimum wage creates jobs, as economist James Parrott of the Fiscal Policy Institute explained to the Assembly Labor Committee on Monday: Industries that pay such low wages tend [...]