Main Street

The Real Economy

Ronald Brownstein has a wrap-up on the Bush administration’s economic record and how it affected working families. When we consider where we are now, economically speaking, let’s be sure to consider how we got here.

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton’s two terms, often substantially.

–snip–

Consider first the median income. When Bill Clinton left office after 2000, the median income-the income line around which half of households come in above, and half fall below-stood at $52,500 (measured in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars). When Bush left office after 2008, the median income had fallen to $50,303. That’s a decline of 4.2 per cent.

–snip–

When Clinton left office in 2000 13.7 per cent of Americans were uninsured; when Bush left that number stood at 15.4 per cent. (Under Bush, the share of Americans who received health insurance through their employer declined every year of his presidency-from 64.2 per cent in 2000 to 58.5 per cent in 2008.)

When Clinton left the number of Americans in poverty stood at 11.3 per cent; when Bush left that had increased to 13.2 per cent. The poverty rate for children jumped from 16.2 per cent when Clinton left office to 19 per cent when Bush stepped down.

We got to this economic moment not because of gremlins in the finance industry’s computers, but because of a set of policies that didn’t work for working families. We get out of it by thinking about people before profit, through health care reform, by regulating the finance industry, by making it easier for working people to join unions and bargain for better wages and working conditions. We don’t get out of it by pretending that people are not struggling:

Consider this: Some 9.4 million new jobs would have to be created to get us back to the level of employment at the time that the recession began in December 2007. But last month, we lost 216,000 jobs. If the recession technically ends soon and we get to a point where some modest number of jobs are created — say, 100,000 or 150,000 a month — the politicians and the business commentators will celebrate like it’s New Year’s.

But think about how puny that level of job creation really is in an environment that needs nearly 10 million jobs just to get us back to the lean years of the George W. Bush administration.

No celebrating the recovery of “the economy” until the people who live in it are employed and have health care and aren’t being foreclosed on. Working people are the most important part of the economy, and must be treated as such.

Tags: economy, poverty, unemployment