America the Vulnerable
The following is by John August, executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions. Read the full version of his column is at L&M Partnership.
The U.S. Census Bureau released new measures of poverty in November. According to the New York Times, “All told 100 million people – one in three Americans – either live in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.”
Or put another way:
“They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as just scrapping by.” (New York Times, November 19, 2011).
The new approach taken by the U.S. Census Bureau gives us a much more Read the rest of this entry »
U.S. Working Poor Now Majority in Poverty
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How appropriate. We’re drowning in rain here in the nation’s capital, while outside the Beltway, America’s working families are drowning in one disastrous economic wave after another. A few recent nuggets.
- The new working-age (18-64) poor now make up nearly three out of five poor people—a switch from the early 1970s, when children made up the main impoverished group. The nation’s working-age poor share surpasses a previous high of 55.5 percent, first reached in 2004—and are at the highest level since the 1960s when the war on poverty was launched.
- People who are laid off from previously stable employment, if they are lucky enough to find work, take a median wage hit of more than 20 percent, which can persist for decades.
- The median working-age household saw its income decline by $2,700 from 2007 to 2009. As a result, the typical working-age household brought in roughly $5,000 less in 2009 than it did in 2000.
- As the chart here shows, CEO pay last year jumped an average 27.8 percent and is now 325 times the average pay of a U.S. worker.
- The New York Times is now asking, “Can the Middle Class Be Rebuilt?” implying, of course, that the foundation of solid middle-wage earners that fueled America’s historic strength is broken beyond possible repair.
U.S. Income Equality May Equal Mexico’s by 2043
Two reports out this week offer a telling glimpse into the direction of the nation.
- The number of U.S. households with a net worth of at least $1 million jumped 16 percent last year after dipping sharply during the financial crisis, according to a new report. The Spectrem Group study also found “ultra-high net worth families—those with at least $5 million—grew 17 percent last year to 980,000.
- Some 6 percent of all workers were living in poverty in 2008, up from 5.1 percent in 2007—the highest proportion since 6.2 percent in 1994, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2008, some 8.9 million adults were among the “working poor”—1.4 million more than in 2007.
Wanted: Jobs for 25.5 Million Americans
There’s a lot more that’s frozen in D.C. this week than the usual fallout from a blizzard. The brains of many Senate Republicans are on ice as well. The House passed a jobs bill in December, but the Senate is dawdling, and worse—threatening to pass bits and pieces, taking apart what should be a comprehensive approach to jobs and turning it into minced cabbage. Or, as Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) put it, Democrats shouldn’t advertise the package as jobs legislation
because it’s just extending a bunch of tax policy and related items that we need to do.
Snow? Oh, No. It’s Still the Economy
Here are a few tidbits worth noting from around the nation’s economic scene.
Bob Herbert at the New York Times puts the sorry U.S. unemployment rate in clearer–and more painful–perspective today, pointing out how the workers losing jobs are those who had almost no income to begin with.
The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to 149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.
Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.
