Still Waiting for the Trickledown
This country is dirtier, poorer and less fair as a consequence of breathtakingly irresponsible misrule. Twenty-four percent of American workers now make less that $8.70 an hour, and they have effectively lost their right to unionize. As Harold Meyerson reported in The Washington Post, "When European employers look to the United States, they see roughly the same thing that U.S. employers see when they look to China: millions of low-wage workers who have all but lost the right to organize and a government intent on keeping things the way they are.
Time was when the end of a recession meant that people would once again be able to find a job that would pay a living wage. Well, that time is not now, but it DOES appears that there are plenty of jobs out there- if you want to work at WalMart or Burger King. And just try supporting a family on the wage that those sort of jobs pay.
Republicans got a lot of mileage out of that 8.2 percent growth in the third quarter, "the fastest in 19 years." I was a guest recently on a right-wing talk radio show in Boston, and the host kept coming back to that. As far as he was concerned, this was incontestable proof that the sun was shining brightly on the U.S. economy, and the Republican tax cuts had worked.
I tried to point out that the economy had suffered a net loss of 2.3 million jobs since January of 2001, but he dismissed this as just liberal gloom-and-doom. But one quarter of fast growth won't reverse this kind of damage, and growth for the fourth quarter (ending this month) will probably be about a third of the last one.
Most tellingly, we can see the terrible underperformance of the economy by simply comparing it with previous economic recoveries. It is now a full two years since the recession of 2001 ended. Normally our economy creates millions of jobs when it recovers from a recession. The last recession – the one that cost George W. Bush's father his job – was considered exceptional in that it was followed by a "jobless recovery."
But even that "jobless recovery" had produced a net gain of 1.4 million jobs by the time two years had passed. The two previous economic recoveries (1982 and 1975) produced 7.2 million and 4.7 million jobs, respectively, in their first two years. We are now facing the unprecedented phenomenon of a "job loss" recovery: two years into the rebound, a net loss of 768 thousand jobs.
President Bush may be getting a good deal of political mileage out of "his" recovery, but the sad reality is that the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen. Until Bush and the Republican leadership begin to come to grasp with the impact their policies have on working men and women, nothing will change. Don't hold your breath in the hope that things are going to change, though- no one has ever accused George W. Bush of being a man of the people. Populism is clearly lost on the man.
