by Tula Connell, Oct 25, 2006

Political pundits are puzzled, puzzled that what they falsely call a good U.S. economy is not translating into votes for Republican candidates.

With the Dow Jones stock index over 12,000, why aren’t voters happy? Gas prices have temporarily blipped downward. Why aren’t Republican office holders getting credit?

We’ll skip a discussion of the Dow, which last year was packed with better performing stocks and so is artificially skewed (never mind that it represents only 30 stocks anyway). And with OPEC recently voting to tighten the oil supply, it’s only a matter of time before gas prices jump again.

The real point is that the rise or fall of 30 stocks on the Dow doesn’t affect the economic well-being of working families. The Dow’s increases benefit the investor class, not the working class.

What counts for the 99 percent of working people who didn’t get a massive tax cut for the wealthy from the Bush administration—and who barely have enough money to get by, let alone invest in the stock market—are family-supporting jobs, affordable health care and secure retirement. And by that measure, the Bush administration’s policies have been a total failure.

Take jobs. Bush started his second term with exactly the same number of jobs inherited from the Clinton administration. But here’s the difference: President Clinton added 71 percent more new jobs to the economy during the first 20 months of his second term than Bush has added during his entire presidency. 
 
According to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Democratic National Committee, Clinton added 5.3 million new jobs during the first 20 months of his second term. Bush has added only 3.1 million new jobs during his entire presidency, for a difference of 2.2 million jobs. 
 
And what kind of jobs is the “slumping and squeezing” Bush economy creating? The kind of low-paying, few- or no-benefit jobs that mean working people need two or more of them to get by. Working people like Mary Gallagher, a divorced mother of two who lives paycheck to paycheck and “sometimes doesn’t quite make it.”
 
Gallagher’s second daughter is in high school and recently had her senior pictures taken. Gallagher bought the pictures, and as a result she likely will be unable to make her car payment for the month. She’s forced to start a second job to get by. Says Gallagher:

I have a college degree. I used to think I was middle class, but now I feel like I’m working poor.

And then there’s health care, or the lack of affordable health care. Nearly half (46 percent) of voters say they are “very worried” about having to pay more for their health care or insurance, putting health care costs at the top of voters’ personal worries, according to a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation. 
 
The list of data tracking the nation’s crumbling health system fills pages, so we’ll just note one of the more recent indicators, a study that shows the continued drop in the percentage of workers covered by employer-sponsored health insurance.
 
From 2001 to 2005, the share of employees with employer coverage fell from 81.2 percent in 2001 to 77.4 percent in 2005—as employers dropped coverage and workers became ineligible for coverage or declined to enroll. The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured released the study, Changes in Employees’ Health Insurance Coverage, 2001-2005, Oct. 19.
 
Fewer than two in 10 Americans are satisfied with the cost of health insurance and with costs not covered by insurance. More than half are “not too satisfied” or “not at all satisfied,” according to a health confidence survey released today by the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington, D.C.
 
Gallagher pinpoints health care as one of the issues that will determine how she casts her ballot this election:

I’m very concerned about the gap between the haves and the have-nots. If you have a great health care plan, our country has great health care available, but for those who can’t afford health care, then it doesn’t matter that it exists. 

When Gallagher and millions of other working people like her go to the polls Nov. 7, they won’t be thinking of the 30 stocks on the Dow.

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