Editor’s Note: Nothing from Belacqua today. No doubt he crashed a victory celebration last night and is nursing a massive hangover. It gives me a chance for a few observations.
Bush’s greatest talent is his ability to divorce economics from numbers. Vision soars when it jettisons the millstone of facts. “W” touts the ownership society, a utopia of privatization in which free citizens have their privately funded health savings accounts and pension plans. What he doesn’t explain is how in the hell the public is going to pay for this utopia.
Doug Henwood in his book, After the New Economy, tells us that the United States has the second smallest middle class in the developed world. The only other country with a smaller middle class is Russia. The middle class is defined as consisting of those individuals whose income is between 65 percent and 125 percent of the median income. The median income for a family of four in the United States is $62,732, which means middle class families are those earning between $40,776 and $78,415.
Another area where our country excels is in our percentage of poor and working poor. Again, only Russia has a bigger percentage than us. The poor are defined as those earning fifty percent of the median income and working poor as those earning between fifty and 62.5 percent of the median income. (To Bush’s credit, he seems to be trying to close this income gap.)
And, naturally we are up there in the percentage of well-to-do families, again in second place behind the Russians.
Poverty is up by 1.3 million and the rolls of the uninsured have swelled by 1.4 million. 12.9 children live in poverty. What does it mean for a family living from paycheck to paycheck? It means a tightrope. It means that if the water pump on their 1997 Gran Am breaks down it’s a major financial crises. It means having just enough to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head, providing the water pump hold up. And Bush expects these people to fund their retirement and their health care?
When you’re just scraping by, your horizon is the next paycheck, not retirement which is a pie in the sky for the poor. Would such a family use a tax credit (which would be paltry for a family of four struggling to eke out an existence on an annual income of $30,000) to fund a pension plan, or would they use it to pay some overdue bills?
In the world of Bushian newspeak the “ownership society” is a euhemerism for the “impoverished society”, a society of the working poor balancing on their tightrope without the benefit of a safety net.
(Damn! Silly me! I keep forgetting that poverty is a mark of God's disapproval.)
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