Did you find the President’s State of the Union speech compelling? Want to know the numbers that scared him the most? Writing for the January 28th Rolling Stone, Tim Dickerson trolled the governmental informational data base to report a number of publicly available statistics – many of which I have presented in past blogs – that truly explain how we are effectively evolving into a next generation banana republic.
As polarized as we are in social and political arenas, nothing screams polarization like deep and profound economic disparities that are not found in any other major Western country (including additional fully developed nations like Japan). Bottom line, there are no other major Western democracies with an eroding middle class and the extreme concentration of wealth in a tiny minority… like the United States of America.
The wealthy have unique access to wealth-preserving technology, tax laws that provide much higher tax rates to those who generate income from labor versus their investment activities, and a privatization of social services which introduce such massive profits into the costs of elements like healthcare that we have the most expensive per capita medical costs of any other nation on earth with fewer participants covered than any developed country in the world. But those are the gentle facts. Let’s look at the numbers (Dickerson has a lot more, so check out his piece in the Rolling Stone):
1. New income generated since 2009 that has gone to the top 1 percent: 95 percent
2. Financial wealth controlled by the bottom 60 percent of all Americans: 2.3 percent
3. Record combined wealth of the top 400 richest Americans: $2,000,000,000,000
4. Real decline in median middle-class incomes since 1999: $5,000
5. Amount that food stamps will be cut in 2014: $5 billion
6. What the minimum wage would be if it had kept pace with gains in worker productivity since 1968: $21.72
7. Number of U.S. workers laboring at or below minimum wage: 3.6 million – the near equivalent of the population of Los Angeles.
8. Official unemployment rate: 6.7 percent
9. Alternate [“unemployment”] rate including Americans who've given up looking for work, or have only been able to secure part-time employment: 13.1 percent
10. Number of jobs the United States is still down from 2008 employment peak: 1.69 million.
This is the America we have become. The Great Recession only accelerated the building of wealth for the top, the cost cutting that sent Americans to unemployment lines or marginal jobs in our new “barista economy” … but generated high profits as a result.
Dickerson also deals with our deficit, military budget, our incarceration rate, and the participation of minorities on the wrong side of our criminal justice system. The above numbers are the economic bad news. Every year, the U.S. middle class becomes a smaller percentage of the general population, and the movement is definitely not up the social ladder. And for well over a decade, an average American has lost buying power, year-after-year without any reversal. We are the least socially mobile America since we were founded, and our next generations seem destined to live at a lower standard of living than their parents… except for that tiny slice at the top of the economic pile.
The International Monetary Fund has stated that countries with the kind of economic disparity we have in the United States will suffer impaired growth as a result. Our tax and regulatory policies, our bailing out big financial institution while average Americans are suffering, have defined the new American millennium. Meanwhile, the middle class is actually growing in what once really were banana republics… they have hope for their future and the futures of their children. Do you?
I’m Peter Dekom, and no matter how powerfully folks talk about how wonderful our economic system is, there is absolutely no justification for this government-enforced level of economic disparity.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment