Radical and rising economic inequality is no secret — and now, thanks to new research from the Economic Policy Institute, neither is its price tag nor its cause. There’s never been a study quite like this — one which places specific, real dollar amounts on every trickle-down policy American politicians have embraced. The study’s authors, Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens, explain how their work  reveals that the massive upward redistribution of income our nation has suffered these past four decades can largely be attributed to policies intentionally designed to suppress the wages of American workers. 

Lawrence Mishel is a distinguished fellow at EPI after serving as president from 2002-2017. In the more than three decades he has been with EPI, Mishel has helped build it into the nation’s premier research organization focused on U.S. living standards and labor markets. 

Twitter: @LarryMishel

Josh Bivens is the director of research at EPI. His areas of research include macroeconomics, fiscal and monetary policy, the economics of globalization, social insurance, and public investment. 

Twitter: @joshbivens_DC

Middle-class pay lost pace. Is Washington to blame? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/business/economy/middle-class-pay.html 

Identifying the policy levers generating wage suppression and wage inequality: https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/wage-suppression-inequality/ 

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