NYC Median Family Income Up for First Time since Great Recession
October 15, 2014. After five years of decline, median family income in New York City rose by 3.5 percent between 2012 and 2013 in inflation-adjusted terms, according to recently-published Census data.[1] This compares with increases of 0.9 percent at the national level and 1.6 percent for all of New York State, including the city. While the city’s increase far surpassed the nation’s and state’s, median family income in the city was still 5.2 percent lower in 2013 than it had been in 2008 at the start of the Great Recession. The corresponding national and state declines for the 2008 to [...]
FPI proposes a tax on the most expensive NYC pied-à-terre residential units
September 22, 2014. By James Parrott, FPI Deputy Director and Chief Economist. Introduction In the context of the continued global concentration of income and wealth, a growing number of ultra-luxury residences in New York City are being bought by people who are not full-time city residents. For many such owners, a Manhattan pied-à-terre is one among several residences they own around the world for occasional use. Some owners see it as an investment, or simply as a place to park a portion of their substantial wealth. The City’s Independent Budget Office notes that in some of the newer luxury residential [...]
Hundreds of thousands of low-income families would benefit from a New York minimum wage increase
July 17, 2014. David Neumark’s piece in the July 6 Wall Street Journal (“Who Really Gets the Minimum Wage?”) argues that because some low-wage earners are in high-income families, increasing the minimum wage isn’t a very effective way to reduce poverty. In particular, he cites research to the effect that “if we were to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 nationally, 18% of the benefits of the higher wages (holding employment fixed) would go to poor families [but] 29% would go to families with incomes three times the poverty level or higher.” But what is more relevant, more than half [...]
Parrott Presentation: Confronting New York City’s Retirement Crisis
June 17, 2014. The New York City Central Labor Council and the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School sponsored a June 17 conference, Confronting New York City’s Retirement Crisis. FPI’s James Parrott made one of the opening presentations at the conference. Other speakers included State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, and New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, as well as leading labor union officials, union pension experts, and academic and finance sector experts. National retirement security expert Teresa Ghilarducci of the New School co-convened the conference together with Vinny Alvarez, President [...]
Over one-third of New York City employees are paid less than $14 an hour; workers of color are twice as likely to be low-wage
June 17, 2014. The Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI) released a new data brief today showing the sector of employment and race/ethnicity for New York City workers paid less than $14 an hour. On an annual basis, $14 an hour would put a family $1,900 below the $31,039 poverty threshold for a New York City family. Altogether, 1.2 million New York City workers are paid less than $14 an hour, 36 percent of all public and private wage and salary workers. This includes part-time as well as full-time workers. The FPI analysis showed that the largest employers of low-wage workers are [...]
Statement on New York City Budget Accounting Action
May 12, 2014. Today’s joint announcement by Mayor de Blasio and Comptroller Stringer clarifies a City budget accounting question regarding an obligation the City incurred in connection with the recent labor settlement with the United Federation of Teachers. The payments in question pertain to UFT members retiring after June 30, 2014 and cover wage increases for the first two years (2009 and 2010) of the recently settled contract. Officials of both the Mayor’s and the Comptroller’s offices have confirmed that the announcement is strictly an accounting issue, and that it has no effect on the UFT settlement, the costs of [...]
Another View on Mayor de Blasio’s FY 2015 New York City Executive Budget
May 9, 2014. Understandably, much of the commentary on Mayor de Blasio’s FY 2015 Executive Budget has dealt with the financial impact of the recent UFT contract if applied across the entire 350,000-person unionized city workforce. It is, afterall, by far the most significant labor deal in City history, potentially affecting the entire workforce for 7 years, and 150,000 of those workers for an additional two years going back to 2009 and 2010. Some observers can’t quite grasp that Bill de Blasio pulled that off, restoring a constructive labor-management dialogue based on mutual respect, and doing that without destabilizing City [...]
The Significance of the TWU and UFT Labor Contracts
May 7, 2014. This commentary by FPI’s James Parrott on the new New York City labor contracts was requested by CUNY’s Joseph S. Murphy Institute and appears on their new blog. For the first time in nearly five years, major labor agreements were recently reached covering public sector workers in New York City. On April 17, Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 concluded a new 5-year contract dating from January 2012 covering 34,000 workers at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), most of whom work for the subway and bus system in New York City. Two weeks later on May 1, [...]
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New report confirms New York’s profound income polarization
February 19, 2014. A new report from the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) that presents data on income distribution trends for all 50 states from 1917-2011, confirms an analysis of income trends in New York that the Fiscal Policy Institute initially published in 2010. The report, by economists Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price, builds on a groundbreaking study by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanual Saez in 2003 that used data from income tax returns to document rising inequality in the United States since World War I. FPI’s latest estimates of the share of income received by the top 1% [...]
Statement on Governor Cuomo’s Tax Proposals
January 6, 2014. Governor Cuomo in unveiling his tax proposals today has identified a key issue in growing the state’s economy—reducing the property tax burden on New Yorkers, and we agree. The Fiscal Policy Institute has long proposed a circuit breaker as a solution to the burden of high property taxes on moderate and lower income families and to ensure that retirees are not forced out of their homes. What the governor could have added is that creating strong, stable, middle class neighborhoods promotes a better business climate that will create new business opportunities and jobs. But even the circuit [...]
Statement on the Solomon/McCall Tax Reform and Fairness Commission Report
November 14, 2013. Statement from Ron Deutsch, Executive Director, New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness, and Frank Mauro, Executive Director, Fiscal Policy Institute. Any discussion of fair taxation in New York must acknowledge that our state has the greatest income inequality in the nation and that our tax system is partially to blame. We are experiencing record child poverty rates and levels of hunger and homelessness that are unprecedented. Too many of our residents are suffering and struggling to make ends meet and today’s report by the Governor’s Tax Reform and Fairness Commission does little to address this growing problem. The [...]
Almost 3.2 million New Yorkers to See a Cut in Food Assistance Beginning Today
November 1, 2013. Beginning today, almost 3.2 million people in New York will see their food assistance benefits cut as the federal government ends a temporary boost to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The New Yorkers affected by this cut—in what used to be known as the “food stamps” program—include more than 1.2 million children and over 1 million elderly and disabled individuals. Overall, New York residents will receive $332 million less in SNAP benefits in the 11 months from November 1, 2013 through September 30, 2014. Today’s cut hits all of the more than 47 million Americans, including [...]
The Taxpayer Costs of Low-Wage Fast Food Jobs in New York State
October 16, 2013. Fast food jobs are by far the biggest source of job growth in New York State and New York City in this recovery and over the past decade. But, with a median hourly pay of only $8.90 an hour in NYC, this growth in fast food jobs is one of the reasons that poverty has risen sharply during the recovery. NYC has a record number of working poor—one out of every 10 workers in NYC works, but can’t earn enough to lift their family earnings above the poverty line. The rapid increase in fast food employment is [...]
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, [...]