Media coverage of FPI’s research on inequality during the NYC mayoral campaign
October 9, 2013. Income inequality has emerged as a major issue in the 2013 New York City mayoral campaign, and media coverage has frequently included mention of FPI’s research on income polarization. FPI’s work featured prominently in a special issue of The Nation devoted to The Gilded City in April, with several graphics based on FPI’s research. The lead article in The Nation’s special issue featured FPI’s latest estimates of the share of income in New York State and City going to the wealthiest 1% and compared that to the national trend estimated by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. [...]
While Some Improvement Crept in during 2012, NYC’s Family Incomes and Poverty Status are Still Much Worse than before the Recession
September 20, 2014. The latest data from the Census Bureau for 2012 show that while NYC median family incomes and poverty stabilized last year, we are still a very long way from undoing the deterioration caused by the 2008-09 recession. Most NYC families have been battered by the recession and the historically weak recovery. Adjusted for inflation, median family incomes dipped slightly in 2012 (but not significantly) and are $3,800 or 6.5% below the 2008 level. Nationally, inflation-adjusted median family incomes dropped by $5,000 or 7.5% from 2008 to 2012. This income erosion among NYC residents results partly from a [...]
Children in upstate cities are the losers as poverty remains high in New York
September 19, 2013. Poverty remained high at 16 percent and incomes stagnant in New York last year, showing the continuing pain of the recession and underscoring the need for New York to do more to help struggling people and give them the tools to lift themselves out of poverty. Over 3 million people in New York lived under the federal poverty level in 2012 when no statistically significant change in the overall poverty rate occurred from 2011, according to new Census Bureau data released today. This represents more than one in six people in poverty across the state. Poverty levels [...]
Family Poverty in New York State
September 19, 2013. The statewide family poverty rate (i.e., the percentage of families with incomes below the poverty level) in New York State was virtually the same in 2012 (12.2%) as in 2011 (12.3%). These poverty rates were greater, to a statistically significant degree, than New York State’s family poverty rate of 10.3% in 2007, the year before the onset of the Great Recession in December 2007 nationally and in New York State in the Spring of 2008. The statewide family poverty rate of 12.2%, however, masks tremendous differences geographically and between homeowners and renters. Only five counties,[1] for example, [...]
New York is Second to Massachusetts in Reducing its Uninsurance Rate Over the Past Decade
September 19, 2013. The percentage of New Yorkers without health insurance dropped for the second year in a row from 12.2 percent in 2011 to 11.3 percent in 2012 (+/- .5 percent) according to estimates released by the Census Bureau two days ago. Overall, the number of people without health care coverage across the state dropped to approximately 2.2 million people in 2012. Moreover, New York was one of only four states that had a statistically significant reduction in the share of people not covered by private or public health insurance over the past decade.[1] Most observers would not be [...]
New Report Models Immigration Reform’s Effect on State and Local Taxes
July 10, 2013. This morning, the Institute on Economic and Tax Policy (ITEP) released a report that estimates that unauthorized immigrants currently pay $744 million in state and local taxes in New York State, a number that would increase to $968 million if these same immigrants were granted legal status. The share of family income paid in state and local taxes would increase from 7.1 percent to 8.4 percent. In this new report, ITEP takes an analysis it first did for the Fiscal Policy Institute’s recent report, Three Ways Immigration Reform Would Make the Economy More Productive, and extends it [...]
Search for a new FPI executive director
July 1, 2013. The Fiscal Policy Institute seeks an Executive Director to build on an exceptional twenty-two year record of providing high quality research, analysis, and coalition building in support of progressive fiscal and economic policies that benefit all New Yorkers. The Executive Director, based in Albany, New York, will be responsible for overall leadership of the organization, as well as leading, coordinating, and implementing its tax, budget and policy analysis work. The ED will oversee a staff currently consisting of 6-8 people, be a major spokesperson for the organization, lead fund development efforts, communicate with the Board of Directors, [...]
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 [...]