Free Republic

The New York Times hates American capitalism, and nothing makes that clearer than its Sunday print newspaper.

According to a new study, the 401(k) savings account isn't adequately providing for people's retirement and is adding to the nation's growing wealth inequality. The report from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning public policy think-tank, illustrates how the shift from pensions to individual savings accounts has affected retirees. The authors find that it is the wealthiest workers who are benefiting the most because they can actually contribute enough to make 401(k) plans work for retirement. "401(k)s were never designed to replace pensions for most workers. They serve primarily as a tax shelter for high earners," said economist Monique Morrissey,...

A group of prominent economists today urged President Obama and congressional leaders to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for three years. In a letter to the president and lawmakers they wrote: A higher minimum wage at this juncture will not only provide raises for low-wage workers but would provide some help on the jobs front as well. The group, including Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University; former Labor Secretary Robert Reich; and Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), advocate a three-step raise of 85 cents a...

2 acceleration methods make scanning more than 7 times fasterAn international team of physicists and neuroscientists has reported a breakthrough in magnetic resonance imaging that allows brain scans more than seven times faster than currently possible. In a paper that appeared Dec. 20 in the journal PLoS ONE, a University of California, Berkeley, physicist and colleagues from the University of Minnesota and Oxford University in the United Kingdom describe two improvements that allow full three-dimensional brain scans in less than half a second, instead of the typical 2 to 3 seconds. "When we made the first images, it was unbelievable...

One of the nation's largest labor unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is promoting a plan that will centralize all retirement plans for American workers, including private 401(k) plans, under one new "retirement system" for the United States. In effect, government pensions for everyone, not unlike the European system and regardless of personal choice. The SEIU, which was integral to the election of Barack Obama as president, is working with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, on SEIU's plan, called "the Retirement USA Initiative." Claiming that the retirement system...

The Answer is Federal Funding Malcolm A. Kline, March 24, 2010 What is the question? “As Spring 2010 college graduates prepare to search for jobs, many from low-income families will start at a competitive disadvantage because they have had to work rather than take crucial, but often unpaid, professional internships that provide key skills for entering the workforce,” the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) claims. “A new legislative proposal from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and Demos seeks to remedy this inequity by providing funding for low-income students to take high-quality public service internships.” Of course they do. This is the...

"With grim economic news coming from many directions, it's easy to get discouraged about our ability to repair the damage of years of failed economic policies. And yet, there are pragmatic solutions to our biggest challenges, including ways to restore health care and retirement security, to create family-supporting jobs, and to reestablish a leadership role in the global economy. Collaborating with some of the nation's top progressive thinkers, EPI researchers have been exploring and refining solutions for the better part of two years. Now, just in time for national debates on economic direction, EPI has compiled the best of these...

by Mark Finkelstein August 31, 2006 - 09:27 If the Today show were ever to air the opinions of a think tank founded, say, by a former Reagan administration official and free-market economist Milton Friedman, and funded by large corporations, it's inconceivable that the show would have failed to identify the organization's conservative leanings. Yet Today didn't feel the need to do the obverse when relying extensively on a liberal think tank founded by a former Clinton official and far-left economists and largely funded by Big Labor. From a New York Times editorial to a Boston Globe political cartoon, the...