Had Enough?
The world is warning George W. Bush to ‘BACK OFF IRAN!!!’ before he gets hurt waging his increasingly expensive “International War On Terror” while neglecting the signs that he’s sowing the seeds of a much different kind of war with his domestic policies.This week, the Senate voted 94-3 to approve the increase in the minimum wage after Democrats and Republicans agreed to extend tax breaks for small businesses that would bear the cost of the higher wages. The cost to the U.S. Treasury of that and other tax benefits in the Senate measure would be $8.3 billion over 10 years, according to estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation.
And yet, these tax breaks aren’t necessary! Three out of four small business owners polled by Gallup in March 2006 believe a higher minimum wage would have no effect on them. In fact, 46% would favor an increase in the minimum wage, believing that a higher minimum wage would attract and retain better workers, improve the employment situation in their area, and is “the right thing to do” for their employees.
The partisan hype against the minimum-wage increase goes against a whole raft of US government data. For example, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the majority of workers who would see their wages rise under the Democratic proposal are not part-time workers earning the current minimum wage of $5.15 per hour.
This finding is supported by a study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute [PDF], which found that 54 percent of those who would be affected by the Democratic minimum-wage proposal are working at least 35 hours a week. This is backed by an October 25 EPI study, which found that “[i]f the federal minimum wage were increased to $7.25 per hour by 2008, 14.9 million workers would see their wages rise,” and that these workers would be “mainly adults who typically work full time and provide significant income to their families.”
And yet, the Bush administration still wants us to think that things are just ducky in our economy, despite the hundreds of billions spent attempting to lure Osama out of his lavish condo in Riyadh to attack American forces somewhere in Southwest Asia.
It isn’t working, none of it. The latest poll numbers aren’t encouraging for the Bush administration. According to the most recent NEWSWEEK Poll, 58 percent of those surveyed “personally wish” Bush’s presidency were over, and 53 percent of those polled by Gallup in results released last week believe economic conditions are getting worse.
Two weeks ago, Gallup found Bush’s handling of the economy rated just 45 percent approval.
There is plenty for the Americans of the 99% not to like under Dubya’s stewed stewardship. US unemployment is back up to 4.6% after fewer new jobs than expected were created last month. But fear not, America! The figures suggest that economic growth is not overheating and causing inflation, which the Federal Reserve and the economic class it serves see that as good news.
Meanwhile, your health care costs have gone through the roof, and census figures show that a record 46.6 million Americans, 8.3 million of whom are minor children, have no health insurance at all.
Where’s all that loudly-touted compassion, conservatives???
Does one have to be an Iraqi Shi’a
to earn your professed mercy???
Oh, wait! You have other priorities, don’t you? As Peter Torreele, managing director of the World Economic Forum in Davos said recently, “It is clear from this [Gallup International Voice of the People] survey that the leaders who will be gathering in Davos … view the world and its problems in a different way than the wider global population.”
That might explain why, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd presents, “Even after releasing parts of [the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate] so pessimistic that it may as well have been titled Iraq: We’re Cooked, Bush officials clung to their alternate reality, using nonsensical logic and cherry-picking whatever phrases they could find in the report that they could use to sell the Surge.”
All while they continue use the same method to hype their ridiculous notions of domestic economic prosperity to those of us in the 99% who know better from our own direct experience. This may be one reason why the public gives the Bush administration’s such a low rating on economic policy, with Gallup finding 70% thinking economic conditions are getting worse.
Only in the foreign media is the question being asked,
Is this the End of the American Dream?
Welcome To Our Nightmare! Globalisation produces losers as well as winners! “The changes in the pattern of production are likely to threaten the livelihoods of some workers and the profits of some firms, even when these changes lead to greater productivity,” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke recently admitted.
The Economic Policy Institute reports cited above find that while low minimum wages, weakened union power, and the loss of both blue and white-collar jobs to foreign lands do much to explain the sorry jobs picture, the downward pressure on wages is probably coming from other sources: immigration, which effect the wages of low-skilled workers; and the “China effect”, the idea that low prices of imported manufactured goods are pushing US industry to cut its workforce in order to increase productivity from those still employed.
Whatever the causes, the results are clear. During the five years from 2000 to 2005, the US GDP grew 14% from $9.8 trillion to $11.2 trillion while productivity grew by 16.6%. But little of that new wealth landed into the hands of the average worker. Over the same five years, the median family’s income slid by 2.9%, in contrast to the 11.3% gain registered in the second half of Bill Clinton’s tenure. And the median household income at which half of households earn more and half less has also fallen over these same five years.
It’s not hard to imagine why when average hourly real wages for both college and high school graduates actually fell across the first Bush term, and fewer jobs still offer health care benefits or company pensions. The wages of households of African or Hispanic origin fell even faster, and new entrants to the labour market fared particularly badly. It’s hard to find a job when unemployment has remains “stubbornly” high despite the economic “recovery”. The latest unemployment figure doesn’t impress when compared to 4% at the end of 2000, as job growth since then has been merely 1.3%.
So how is the Bush administration aboe to make such wildly differing claims against the factual data? Anna Fahey, Sightline Communications Strategist, thinks it’s all in how the polling questions are phrased:
The wording of a survey question can distort results (Demos and Frameworks have done all kinds of research on this very thing). Changing a single word seems subtle, but it can produce powerful results. This is called priming… [which] brings certain thoughts to the foreground of our minds. It sets dominant frames in our head as we make sense of the information coming our way. This could affect your answer. I’m not suggesting we scrap public opinion research altogether. Just take these Gallup numbers – and others – with a grain of salt. And don’t take summary reports at face value without a little digging into the context.
Such is the case of this little strategic gem offered up by Ruy Teixeira, Joint Fellow at the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation. He concludes a January 18, 2007 post, What the Public Really Wants on Globalization and Trade, with this sentence:
In short, the discontents of globalization must be dealt with effectively — and soon — if we ever hope to reach the ideal of a truly open, dynamic global economy.
Sounds rather big business friendly, doesn’t it? And yet, Teixeira points out in his article the differences in opinion when Americans are asked by pollsters to think like consumers, and when they are asked to think like workers. Such is a good example of Ms. Fahey’s framing.
For instance, an October 2006 Chicago Council on Foreign Relations survey found that Americans thought international trade is good for “consumers like you” by a 70 percent-to-26-percent margin and that international trade is good for “your own standard of living” by 64 percent to 31 percent.
And yet, when responding as workers and not as consumers, the American public believes they are not benefiting from the increase in international trade, and that U.S. trade policy is not attentive to the needs of American workers. Even 61 percent of upper-income workers (incomes over $75,000) thought outsourcing was bad for the economy, as discovered by a March 2005 Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Survey for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Economic Resiliency Group.
So now that we have the context, let’s look again at Teixeira’s comment in a slightly expanded form [I slanted it this way to make a point, so like it!]:
It will be necessary to design policies to mitigate and manage the dislocations of globalization if the support of these [upper income workers] is to be maintained. In short, the discontents of globalization must be dealt with effectively — and soon — if we ever hope to reach the ideal of a truly open, dynamic global economy.
Now it sounds more like the Democratic Party strategem intended to widen the distribution of the benefits of globalization that it is intended to be instead of a means by which to sway public opinion to get us behind the latest big business push to continue to ship American jobs to foreign lands and erode the means by which Americans have traditionally pulled themselves up economically.
Just for the record, this still doesn’t sound like a good thing to me, but I digress.
International trade is such a huge concern to the 99 percenters who aren’t raking in obscene incomes that when new Senator Jim Webb gave the Democratic State of the Union response, he described an economy that seemed “as if we are living in two different countries” with “dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt.” With the traditionally confortable middle class barely scraping by and fearing a serious downturn in their economic futures, that makes for a lot of disposession.
Savvy candiates took advantage of this condition. Minnesota had one of the strongest economies in the country last year, yet freshman Senator Amy Klobuchar still based her campaign largely on people’s economic worries. “They feel insecure,” Ms. Klobuchar said last week. “And the point of this is, they’re right.”
There is a fair amount of evidence to support her contention. Except for a few years in the late 1990s, pay increases contribute to the anxiety for most of the last three decades by being modest. That historical fact is why fewer than one in three people queried by exit polls on Election Day said they expected life for the next generation of Americans to be better than life today.
Democratic leaders in Congress see this as an opportunity. Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois calls this “suburban populism,” the predictable response to the Bureau of Labor Statistics news that the real hourly pay of rank-and-file workers has risen only 3 percent since Bush took office while productivity has risen 18 percent. This means that American workers labor much harder - yet are seeing less for it - while their costs are rising out of your control.
This is why the Democrats are feeling confident that they have an opportunity. All they have to do is ask the American worker:
“Fill ‘er up?
Or have you had enough?”