America the Poor

Thanks to deliberate policies designed to create a permanent underclass, the situation in America is dire indeed:

Economically, America has descended into poverty. As Peter Edelman says, “Low-wage work is pandemic.” Today in “freedom and democracy” America, “the world’s only superpower,” one fourth of the work force is employed in jobs that pay less than $22,000, the poverty line for a family of four. Some of these lowly-paid persons are young college graduates, burdened by education loans, who share housing with three or four others in the same desperate situation. Other of these persons are single parents only one medical problem or lost job away from homelessness.

Others might be Ph.D.s teaching at universities as adjunct professors for $10,000 per year or less. Education is still touted as the way out of poverty, but increasingly is a path into poverty or into enlistments into the military services.

Edelman, who studies these issues, reports that 20.5 million Americans have incomes less than $9,500 per year, which is half of the poverty definition for a family of three.

There are six million Americans whose only income is food stamps. That means that there are six million Americans who live on the streets or under bridges or in the homes of relatives or friends. Hard-hearted Republicans continue to rail at welfare, but Edelman says, “basically welfare is gone.”

You can thank Bill Clinton and "triangulation" for this. I will just say it like it is. Both political parties are responsible for this mess and have no intention of reversing it.

Speaking of economic ruin, reporters Barlett and Steele over twenty years ago wrote about the declining middle class and how that was a result of deliberate Washington policies. They are revisiting their earlier work in a new book, The Betrayal of the American Dream.

Instead of its members being our servants, Congress is in fact the enemy of the American people:

Before today's workers reach retirement age, decisions by Congress favoring moneyed interests will drive millions of older Americans - most of them women - into poverty, push millions more to the brink, and turn the golden years into a time of need for everyone but the affluent.

For all of this you can thank the rule makers of Wall Street and Washington, who have colluded to rewrite the rules on retirement in ways that will harm millions of middle-class Americans for decades. Here is what they have done:

In addition to the 84,350 pension plans killed by corporations since 1985, companies have frozen thousands of other plans, meaning that new employees are barred from participating or benefit levels are frozen, or both. Freezing a pension plan is often the first step toward eliminating it.

The congressionally touted replacements for pensions - 401(k) plans - have insufficient holdings to provide a serious retirement benefit. This even though millions will depend on them.

As companies have killed or curtailed pensions for employees, executive pensions have soared, largely because they are based on executives' compensation - which has ballooned in recent decades.