The Rising Tide of the Working Poor

July 10, 2002

It‘s simply amazing how Americans have submitted to being plucked like chickens since the Reagan Revolution of the ‘80s.
Result? A thin line between the working poor and the middle class, with more of us crossing that border in the wrong direction.
Beyond the statistics and studies, this has struck me as evident over the past few months due to the number of people I know who are treading water financially at best. One friend spends much of her paycheck on health insurance; others don’t have any, with no hope of becoming insured. And I know a surprising number of people who have credit card debts of $10,000 or more. Others can’t find jobs they can afford to live on. So many people are driving around in new cars and SUVs, but beyond the gloss you often find them up to their eyeballs in debt with the giant sucking sound getting louder.
It’s not an illusion. The relative worth of wages has declined steadily since the ‘60s. There are now 40-50 million Americans working at poverty-level jobs of $8.10 per hour or less, according to Joel Rogers, an analyst with the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS). Rogers recently completed a study on the growing number of working poor in America.
You, perhaps?
“We‘ve found that $8.10 an hour is worth less today than the minimum wage in 1968,“ he says. “If wages had kept up with 1968 levels, then $12 per hour should be the minimum wage today.“
Nonetheless, Americans and their elected representatives have said “no thanks“ at every turn over the past two decades when it comes to programs which the citizens of every other democracy in the world take for granted.
• Universal health care for all under the single-payer plan? No thanks.
• A living minimum wage? Nix.
• Free college education? No way, Jose.
• And now, we‘re chopping away at public education, the last real benefit Americans receive between birth and the age of 65.
We don‘t want such entitlements because they smack of socialism, and there has been a constant blare on talk radio and TV warning of that bugaboo over the past 20 years.
But that’s a smokescreen to keep us hypnotized into paying for corporate welfare rather than using taxes to help the floundering middle class.
Corporations and the CEOs of businesses such as K-Mart, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen, Enron and WorldCom have no such scruples. And rather than using our tax dollars for universal health care or college education, we‘re content to funnel our taxes into corporate bank accounts to pay for sheer larcenies such as the bilking of California during its “energy crisis“ (engineered by Enron), or the trillion dollar Savings & Loan bailout of the ‘80s.
And while we‘ve been paying taxes in support of defense contracts and a global military effort to prop up U.S. oil companies and their profits, what are the CEOs doing? Setting up off-shore tax shelters in Bermuda and Aruba in order to pay even less than the tax breaks they already receive.
We -- the growing ranks of the working poor -- were content to give a $6 trillion tax cut to the rich last year while America has the lowest standard of welfare for women in the democracies of the world.
Personally, I’m angry about it. I see people all around me getting poorer, yet our taxes are being bled into a huge corporate welfare scheme instead of benefiting those of us who are shelling them out.
We‘re content to have our elected officials destroy America‘s labor movement with right-to-work laws, NAFTA and “free trade,“ forgetting that it was the blood shed by unions a century ago which gave us a living wage and the 40-hour week. Today, there are only seven unions left in the country which have more than 250,000 workers. That means only 9% of Americans have access to collective bargaining.
Just wait and see where that road leads.
Meanwhile, health care benefits are being stripped away by companies which can no longer afford them. Remember the 33 million Americans who didn‘t have health insurance in 2000? It‘s 40 million now.
Remember the promises of both George Bush, Jr. and Al Gore to do something about the high cost of prescription drugs in the last election? It was a major issue -- a desperate cause for seniors.
Yet, Rep. Bart Stupak says a bill for prescription drug reform that was recently passed in the House offers “no real reform and has no chance of being signed into law.“
“The bottom line,“ Stupak says, “is that seniors themselves, who have been vigorously supported and represented by Democrats in the prescription drug debate, were completely shut out of the process of shaping legislation on what is a major health issue for many seniors and even a life-and-death matter for some.“
And so it goes. Rogers predicts rising economic insecurity and inequality as the working poor continue getting plucked with barely a cluck.
Ironically, the kings and princes of Europe said America‘s democracy would never work in the 1700s because left to their own devices, free men would plunder their nation‘s treasury with the zeal of a mob.
How very wrong they were. We are the ones getting plundered.