by Tula Connell, Nov 30, 2006

Seven dollars a day. That’s not the income of impoverished residents of a lesser-developed nation. That’s the average income of the poorest 60 million of Americans.

That shocking statistic was buried deep inside a New York Times article Tuesday that detailed our nosediving national incomes.

Seven dollars a day. Why isn’t that stunning revelation screaming from newspaper headlines, the top story on the national network and cable TV and in the e-mail of every news outlet’s breaking alerts? 

The United States spends $2.5 million a day on the war in Iraq while 48 million adults and some 12 million dependent children each live on $7 a day, according to an analysis by the Times. It’s not just that Bush has the worst job growth record of any president in the past 40 years. (Just today the U.S. Department of Labor reported 357,000 newly laid-off workers filed jobless claims, a rise of 34,000 from the previous week.) It’s also that the jobs being created do not pay family-supporting wages nor do they provide the type of health and pension support that has sustained our traditionally vibrant middle class.

And speaking of that middle class, the Times piece offers yet one more example of how the nation’s middle class is eroding: Average income has declined since 2000.

Total reported income, in 2004 dollars, fell 1.4 percent, but because the population grew during that period average real incomes declined more than twice as much, falling $1,641, or 3 percent, to $53,974.

Margaret Graczyk in Chelsea, Mich., identifies 2000 as the year after which economic problems hit her family—and the nation: “It’s been a slippery slope, from 2000 on.” Graczyk’s husband has had five jobs in five years due to layoffs. A teaching assistant, she injured herself at work and now isn’t receiving compensation. She is accepting the possibility she may lose her home. At 49, she expected things to be better as she got older and she asks: “Where is my certainty?”

There’s a reason voters cited the economy as one of the top reasons they backed working family candidates such as Ohio’s Sherrod Brown for Senate and Zack Space for the U.S. House. Now dubbed “economic populists,” these newly elected Democrats understand that giving massive tax cuts to the rich—a process Bush and his extremist cronies in Congress have voted for repeatedly since 2001—doesn’t help working people.

The AFL-CIO union movement is pushing the new Congress for immediate action on a series of pocketbook issues. In addition to raising the minimum wage, we want lawmakers to restore workers’ freedom to form unions by passing the Employee Free Choice Act, overturn the ban prohibiting Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for more affordable prescription drugs and reverse the cuts in student loans made by the Republican Congress. In addition, we want policies enacted that will stop giving companies taxpayer dollars for sending our best jobs overseas and instead reward them for creating jobs at home.

There’s no short fix for getting us out of this economic mess—but beginning in January, we have a lot better chance to make a good start.

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