Reply #23: The EITC was to a large extent cancelled out by welfare "reform" [View All]

[eridani]

Poverty rates are meaningless because how they are calculated has nothing to do with the real world. Expansions are useless if they don't benefit people at the bottom. If all that stuff is supposed to be "prosperity," how come an increase homelessness and food banks? Why would normal people give a flying fuck that a few people benefitted from the tech bubble? It's all been downhill for the bottom half since 1973, the peak postwar year for median income. That Clinton slowed down the slide is certainly better than not having done that, but it isn't anything to be ecstatic about either.

1. Homelessness

http://www.nhlp.org/html/hlb/299/299conference.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/9691/homelessnesshowmany.html

2. Food insecurity and use of food banks

http://www.seedsofchange.org/hunger_malnutrition.htm

Is the situation in the U.S. getting better or worse? "The U.S. Government just recently began gathering data on hunger and food insecurity. But the dramatic growth of private charitable feeding efforts since the late 1970s suggests growing hunger. . . . There were few in 1980, but an estimated 150 thousand private feeding agencies are . . . passing out food to hungry Americans ." (Beckman & Simon., p. 27) ". . . Catholic Charities, Lutheran Services of America, the Salvation Army and other assistance networks all reported sharp increases in requests for emergency food in the late 1990s . Catholic Charities reported a 26 percent increase between June 1997 and April 1998. The U.S. Conference of Mayors reported a 14 percent increase in requests for emergency assistance in 1998, and said that 21 percent of all requests went unmet." (Id., p. 29)


3. Prison population (continuing trend started by Reagan)

http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/law15.htm

As of June 1999, prisons and jails held 1,860,520 people, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report. That's an increase of more than a million people since 1985, when the figure was less 800,000.


4. Income disparity

http://pnews.org/ArT/YuR/DiS.shtml

During the years of the Clinton administration, the rich became richer at much faster rate than during Reagan's regime. In Clinton's first term, from 1993 to 1996, the average income of the richest five percent of households rose from $173,784 to $201,220. 46 Even during the Reagan years, the plunderers had not seen their income rise as fast. And in 1997 - the first year of Clinton's second term - it leapt to $215,436. All the statistics reveal that since Clinton has resided in the White House, the rich have experienced a financial bonanza unprecedented in modern times.


As economist Paul Krugman noted, "These widening disparities are often attributed to the increasing importance of education. But while it's true that, on average, workers with college education have done better than those without, the bulk of the divergence has been among those with similar levels of education. High-school teachers have not done as badly as janitors but they have fallen dramatically behind corporate CEOs, even though they have about the same amount of education." Insofar as corporate chief executives pay themselves and thus are able to collectively drive up the level of their own wages, thereby establishing the appearance of a "market-driven" norm, that should hardly be surprising.