Still
Not Getting By In
Bush's America
By Joel Wendland
21 August, 2004
Countercurrents.org
According
to recent statistics provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the gap between
the rich and poor since 1967 has grown by 75 percent. While the average
total household income for families in the bottom 20 percent has grown
by $2,500 since 1967, the top 20 percent have seen their incomes
soar by about $62,000. According to the same report, the share of national
income held by the bottom 20 percent fell to only 3.5 percent. In other
words, approximately 26 million households combined to earn only 3.5
percent of the total income earned by people in the US. While income
has sunk for the poor, the middle strata have seen their wages stagnate
over the same period. Meanwhile healthcare costs, housing, education,
gas and oil, and food have soared.
This growing disparity
is of special concern as the jobs picture has looked bleak in the last
three years. In the first two years of the Bush presidency, 2.6 million
jobs were lost, nearly doubling the unemployment rate. While the Bush
administration points to recent jobs creation to build a case for its
reelection bid, over 1.5 million jobs remain unaccounted for. The jobs
that have been created, says economist Art Perlo, may not even cover
the number of people who entered the work force for the first time in
the same period. This is certainly the case in recent months with only
112,000 jobs in June and 32,000 new jobs in July. At least 140,000 new
jobs need to be added "each month just to absorb new
workers," Perlo says.
Further, according
to economists, 60 percent of the jobs that have been created pay less
than the national average in wages, the vast majority are in the low-paying
service sector, few provide benefits such as health care coverage, and
as many as 1/5 are temp jobs. Currently, the national average of weekly
wages is at its lowest point since the official end of the Bush recession
in late 2001.
Many observers attribute
this economic picture to job losses generated by outsourcing of work
offshore. This is partially true, argues economist Doug Henwood of Left
Business Observer in an interview with Political Affairs, but outsourcing,
while a major problem for working people, accounts for only a relative
handful of job losses in the last three years. The number of jobs that
have been outsourced is in "the low six figures" in this period,
but a normal economy in recovery should have
created about 8 million jobs, says Henwood. The Bush economy has failed
to do so.
In the wake of the
long term trend of economic polarization, recent unemployment, and what
the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as underutilization (underemployment
or having more than one job to earn a living wage), the Bush administration
has followed a narrow, ideologically driven economic stimulus policy
of tax cuts on top of tax cuts. In addition to the obvious problem of
eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars from the treasury in the
face of needed resources for the Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures
and the transformation of large budget surpluses into enormous deficits,
Bush tax policies have compounded economic problems for workers, suggests
the findings of a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report.
The budget crisis
has first allowed the Bush administration to adopt its ideological imperative
to cut government services. Among those have been important programs
like veterans benefits, funding for public education, environmental
protection and cleanup, child poverty programs, agricultural subsidy
programs, medical research funding, and so on. In addition to this,
Bush has eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars from worker training
and relocation assistance funding for unemployed and displaced workers.
If that isn't enough,
the direct result of the tax policies has been to intensify the polarization
of wealth and poverty. According to the CBO, the top one percent of
income earners, who average about $1.2 million each year, received 1/3
of the benefits from the tax cuts Bush pushed through Congress since
2001. Households in this income bracket received an average of $78,000
annually from the tax cut. The top 20 percent, averaging over $200,000,
took in 2/3 of the total windfall from the tax cuts. The bottom 20 percent
of wage earners averaged only about $250 in returns in the last three
years. The tax benefit to the top 1 percent - the very richest of Americans
- alone equals what it would cost for two wars in Iraq or what experts
believe it would cost for two years to provide every American with health
care coverage.
While Republicans
claim that these statistics prove that the tax cuts benefited everyone,
it is clear that Bush's tax policies have shifted the burden of financing
federal spending to the working class. It is we who will have to pay
for these tax policies: we will pay disproportionately to make up for
the growing deficit with higher interest rates, higher tax rates, and
more cuts in social services we all rely on.
JoelWendland is
managing editor of Political Affairs
<http://www.politicalaffairs.net>, blogs at ClassWarNotes
<http://www.classwarnotes.blogspot.com>, and can be reached at
[email protected].