Public Employee Press

The World of Work
No boom for working people

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Many economists believe a recession looms as the housing crisis causes cutbacks and layoffs while it dampens consumer spending and business investment.

As ordinary Americans brace for the downturn, they also know that the last five years of economic growth have seen sharp and growing contrasts along class lines: Working families have hardly improved their living standards while the wealthy have reaped most of the fruits of economic expansion.

“Economic growth of the past few years has been very uneven, with the gains concentrated among the highest-income Americans,” said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Lower and middle-income families are not sharing in the gains.”

Greenstein made his sobering remarks after the most recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that more people live in poverty and fewer have health insurance than in 2001, when Bush took office.

The Bush administration touted the slight short-term dip in poverty, from 2.6 percent in 2005 to 2.3 percent in 2006, but the August census report still found more people living in poverty than in 2001. In 2006, the poverty line for a family of four was $20,614.The administration also boasted of a minor uptick in earnings. Real household income (adjusted for the higher cost of living) increased 1.3 percent from 2005 to 2006, when it topped $48,000.

Unfair share
Compare that 1.3 percent with the report from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that the real income of the richest 0.1 percent of Americans jumped 51 percent from 2003 and 2005, and corporate profits soared by 72 percent from 2003 to 2007. Working families obviously didn’t get their fair share.

Is it not fundamentally dishonest of the Bush administration to gloat about a miniscule income increase while working Americans struggle with stagnant and falling wages and the rich enjoy their windfall gains from Bush’s tax cuts?

Taking rising prices into account, the wages of nonsupervisory workers are no higher in July 2007 than they were in July 2003, Krugman said.
Particularly alarming, the new census information showed the nation’s health-care crisis deepening again. An astounding 2.2 million more Americans lost their health insurance from 2005 to 2006, pushing up the ranks of the uninsured to 47 million as employers cut benefits and raised premiums on those with insurance.

The Census Bureau reported that the latest victims of Bushonomics included 600,000 more children who were left without health coverage. As the tally of uninsured children hit 8.7 million, new Bush administration rules made it tougher for states to extend the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to more children. Bush also says he will veto federal bills that would cut the number of uninsured children by 3 to 5 million.
Since 1998, 320,000 public service workers have joined AFSCME.

The U.S. economy was never very friendly to the needs of working people, but George W. Bush has made it worse.