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On October 6, 2021 Wendy Edelberg testified before the Joint Economic Committee on the subject of "Building Back Better:  Raising Revenue to Invest in Shared Prosperity."

On September 30, 2021, Wendy Edelberg testified before the The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure on the subject of “Assessing the Federal Government’s COVID-19 Relief and Response Efforts and Its Impact”.

"SNAP benefits offer a demonstration. They are calculated using the Thrifty Food Plan, a formula set decades ago, when few women worked outside the home. The plan presumes both the most economical food choices (such as buying grains or beans in bulk, as opposed to smaller, more prepared quantities) and the least costly prep methods, which might involve hours of work. “We think about food preparation differently now,” says Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “We expected people had an infinite amount of time to soak their beans. But [today,] people purchase canned beans.”

"What we know is that we were not doing a great job of supporting women and mothers with kids before the pandemic," said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and the mother of a 9-year-old son. "The loss of child care didn't actually affect most of the people with the youngest kids because it was already keeping people out of the labor market because it was unaffordable."

“The average increase will be $36.24 more per person, per month, or about $1.19 more per day, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the average benefit was about $121 per person on a monthly basis. “It’s pretty important for low-income families with kids,” said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and associated with The Hamilton Project.”

“Wendy Edelberg, a senior economics fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she is director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative, said: ‘People who receive SNAP benefits are generally living paycheck to paycheck. It increases their spending on nutritious food, and it helps them to be more financially secure broadly, so that's why we see that it boosts consumer spending.’”

“‘Biden proposed to make the most critical part for child poverty permanent,’ Robert Greenstein, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Yahoo Money. ‘There is a real distinct possibility that that is indeed what Congress could do and that would be transformational.’”

“Over the weekend, I spoke with Bob Greenstein, a veteran budget expert and advocate for the poor, who is now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, about the broader spending measure, which could total roughly $3.5 trillion. “As a single bill, this is probably the most far-reaching in the area of social provision, in improving the lives of tens of millions of people, of any since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the nineteen-sixties.”

The Agriculture Department’s announcement that it is revising the food package on which benefit levels in the SNAP program are based to reflect changes in food consumption patterns, research on diet and health, and nutrition guidance is a welcome development. Bob Greenstein recognizes how this action will benefit millions of Americans and should lead to a healthier, more productive citizenry and workforce.

“‘It’s the acknowledgement that actually [child care] was basically a full-time job,’ said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and one of the authors of the report.”

“‘Wow — these are stunning findings,’ said Bob Greenstein, a longtime proponent of safety net programs who is now at the [Hamilton Project at the] Brookings Institution. ‘The policy response since the start of the pandemic goes beyond anything we’ve ever done, and the antipoverty effect dwarfs what most of us thought was possible.’”

“‘Are firms replenishing what’s on the shelves? That is a place where people trying to forecast the first estimates of GDP often have really big misses,’ said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project and former chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office. ‘What’s particularly important right now about that is that inventories have been crazy low.’”

“An analysis of the survey data by the [Hamilton Project at the] Brookings Institution found that mothers of children 12 and under at home spent, on average, more than eight hours on child care. The Brookings analysis also found that working mothers provided 7.4 hours of child care on weekdays in 2020, spending more time than employed fathers, unemployed fathers and fathers not in the labor force. ‘Child care is now a full-time job for mothers,’ said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at Brookings. “They’re spending more than eight hours a day doing child care, and their work hours have suffered. Even if they’re juggling both child care responsibilities and working, they’re now working less than they would before.”

“In the spring of 2020, as shutdowns swept the country, more than 3 million businesses stopped operating. A widely cited study from The Hamilton Project, a branch of the Brookings Institution, found last year that 400,000 businesses had permanently closed by June 2020.”

“‘As part of the Hamilton Project, one of your reports was “Race and Jobs at Risk of Being Automated in the Age of COVID-19.” So, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that’….. ‘So, the top five there are cashiers, retail salesperson, secretaries and administrative assistants, laborers, and freight and stock material movers. And then the next one is construction laborers. Those jobs have automation risk scores of 97, 92, 96, 85, and 88, so all very, very high, which means that some type of machine or computer could do that job. The last part is that Black people are overrepresented in 11 of the jobs at high risk of being automated. Hispanic workers are overrepresented in all of those, plus two additional ones.’”

"For sure short-term inflation expectations have come up, it would be absurd if they haven’t, given the inflationary pressures that we’ve seen. But what’s key is whether that translates to longer-term expectations…and there we have seen that market participants are seeing through these temporary changes in prices. Inflation expectations, let’s say 5 years from now, look to be just about where they were over past decade before the pandemic.”

“At a time of deep partisan divisions and ongoing economic uncertainty, such policy discussions may seem academic to some Americans, but a new report from the Brookings Institution and The Hamilton Project (THP) says that the pandemic’s end and the ongoing debate on big new social spending initiatives should prompt a re-examination the nation’s approach to these programs. The report, entitled “The social insurance system in the U.S.: Policies to protect workers and their families,” takes a deep look at the wide range of social insurance programs in the U.S., including education and workforce development, health, income support, nutrition, and housing.”

“‘Indicators so far are “pointing to a softening of inflation between 2021 and 2022,’ said Wendy Edelberg, senior fellow in economic studies at Washington’s Brookings Institution… But economists are being cautious about the outlook. ‘We’re going to have another year or year and a half of demand being larger than supply and putting pressure on prices,’ Jason Furman, chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the inflation forum.”

“Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution and former chief economist at the CBO, said excessive was in the eye of the beholder. ‘If the goal was to get the economy back on its previous path? Yes. We have done more than we needed to do for that for sure,’ Edelberg said. But doing more can have benefits. In particular, it could draw into the labor force people from disadvantaged groups who would otherwise have been left behind.” 

“Working mothers were the hardest hit. One in 10 mothers of children under 12 left the workforce in the past year — and many remain unable to return, says Lauren Bauer of the Brookings Institution, citing statistics from The Hamilton Project, a Brookings initiative with which she is associated. ‘The ones that aren't coming back yet are the parents of kids under 5 and single moms, because they can't. There's nowhere to put their kids.’”

“Jason Furman of Harvard University agreed that the U.S. government’s substantial fiscal response was the reason U.S. GDP is expected to be above that forecasted prior to the pandemic, ‘the only G7 country where that is true,’ but he said it is also only the U.S. that is seeing ‘an incredibly rapid pace of inflation’… ‘Every signal that we have in the economy… is pointing to a softening in inflation between 2021 and 2022, and if that’s the case, we can feel confident that economic mechanisms are working,’ said Wendy Edelberg of the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project. ‘If not, that’s a far more complicated world and a far more worrying world.’” 

“Right now the economy is running cool relative to its sustainable potential, and my guess is very quickly we’re going to get to a point where the economy is running hot…if it’s the speed of the rebound [driving inflation], then I think we need to talk less about slack and more about speed…we are recovering crazy fast and that’s having big effects”- Wendy Edelberg

“There’s been a group of economists, including folks like Dube and [Wendy] Edelberg, who recently put out this interesting analysis of April’s jobs data. And the background to this is that we’ve been adding a good number of jobs, but not as many as people expected….but what they found was that the main reason the overall jobs number was so much lower than folks thought it maybe wasn’t really a lack of people entering employment…it was an increase in the number of people leaving their existing jobs."