Katrina vanden Heuvel: Taking On Poverty and Inequality

[marmar]

from The Nation:




Taking On Poverty and Inequality
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 08/27/2008 @ 12:23pm




The theme at the Democratic Convention in Denver yesterday was "Renewing America's Promise"--the Democrats' plan to grow the economy and restore fairness so that it works for all of us. The 2007 Census data on poverty, income and health insurance was also released yesterday and it showed just how tall an order Senator Obama and the Democrats face in reversing eight years of failed Bush economic policies - policies we will continue to pay a price for in 2008 and beyond.

While the 2007 numbers don't even include the devastation wrought by the housing and credit crisis, and high energy costs, they nevertheless paint a bleak picture with poverty on the rise and working people's pay stagnating despite increased productivity.

Robert Greenstein, Executive Director of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities said, "Though 2007 was the sixth (and likely the final) year of an economic expansion, 4.4 million more Americans were poor, the median income of non-elderly households was $1,100 lower, and nearly six million more Americans were uninsured than in 2001 - even though the economy was in recession that year.... Never before on record has poverty been higher and median income for working-age households lower at the end of a multi-year economic expansion than at the beginning. The new data add to the mounting evidence that the gains from the 2001-2007 expansion were concentrated among high-income Americans."

"We have the biggest gap between the rich and everybody else since the Great Depression," said Independent Senator Bernie Sanders on Vermont Public Radio.

Jared Bernstein, Director of the Living Standards program at the Economic Policy Institute, agreed with Sanders. He suggested that we have the greatest concentration of wealth in the richest 1 percent of the country than we've had since 1928. Bernstein noted that the economic expansion failed to lift working people's incomes despite that fact that "output per hour, or productivity, rose 2.5 percent per year during the 2000 to 2007 cycle, compared to 2 percent in the 1990s, when family incomes fared much better.... The economy... expanded in the 2000s, but that growth clearly failed to reach most households, a dynamic that implicates growing income inequality.... The fact that these disappointing income, poverty, and earnings trends occurred in the context of strong productivity growth is a reminder that in today's economy, productivity growth creates only the potential for higher living standards. As long as most workers lack the bargaining power to claim their share of the growth they have helped to generate, that potential will not be realized." ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/349350