The economy: A lost decade

It’s been a brutal few years for the American dream, said Conor Dougherty in The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Census Bureau last week released its annual report on the nation’s living standards, providing “sharp evidence of how much the falling economy has touched Americans across incomes and races.” Median income fell

3.6 percent in 2008 alone—the steepest one-year drop in four decades. And the poverty rate climbed to 13.2 percent. But it’s not just during the recent recession that most Americans have lost ground, said Marc Ambinder in TheAtlantic.com. Over the course of George W. Bush’s two terms in office, median income declined 4.2 percent, wiping out much of the economic gains of Bill Clinton’s presidency, when incomes rose 14 percent. Bush’s “wretched” record, unmatched in modern times, should “compel Republicans to answer a straightforward question: If tax cuts are truly the best means to stimulate broadly shared prosperity, why did the Bush years yield such disastrous results?”

The results were hardly disastrous for all Americans, said Robert Rector in National Review Online, and as for the poor, the Census Bureau’s statistics are misleading. For “nearly three decades, in good economic times and bad, Census has reported more than 30 million Americans living in poverty.” Why? Because official reports “underestimate government spending on the poor.” We spent $714 billion on “cash, food, housing, medical care,” and social services for the poor last year, more than enough to “eliminate” poverty outright. That’s why 40 percent of “poor” Americans own their homes, while the majority of them enjoy amenities ranging from air conditioning to cable TV. The real cause of poverty is out-of-wedlock births and family dysfunction, not government economic or tax policy.

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In our ruthless new economy, it’s not just the poor and the unemployed whom I worry about, said Ellen Goodman in The Boston Globe. It’s the 90 percent of Americans who’ve managed to hold on to their jobs. Even as they work without raises, and take cuts in benefits, employees at severely downsized companies have raised their productivity by an impressive 6.6 percent. In other words, “more work is being done in the same time,” but workers aren’t being rewarded for the gains—corporations and owners are. Rather than gripe about this rip-off, workers just work harder, and “gratefully” cling to their jobs. So there’s your choice: Join the legions of the unemployed, or work like a dog, in a perpetual state of fear.