During his State of the Union address to the joint houses of Congress in January, President Barack Obama placed himself squarely on the side of the middle class that has been decimated since the economic meltdown of 2008 and a lingering recession. He argued that the economic inequities must be redressed and called on the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.
Census data released in 2010 illustrates the depth of the problem. Poverty has exploded, and a record 46.2 million people are counted in that category. But when the near-poor and new poor are added, the number of Americans who live in poverty approaches 150 million. Blacks, Hispanics, children and seniors have been hit particularly hard.
---
Roderick Harrison, Ph.D, a Senior Fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Northwest, said the widening gap between rich and poor has been decades in the making.
"I think that the problem that has generated this inequality is the argument that we had wage stagnation for the past 40 years," he said. "Households maintained their standard of living by the increase of female participation in the labor force. At the same time, people piled up debt to maintain their standard of living and when they couldn't finance debt, they experienced all these economic difficulties."
Harrison, a demographer and sociologist, also explained that there is insufficient consumer demand to put people back to work and so the kind of inequalities America is now experiencing emerged.
"Increased productivity (such as installing machinery) and other gains in productivity used to be split between workers and machinery," he said. "Any improvement in wages came from the increase in productivity. We have dug ourselves a hole that will not be easily addressed. The average banker makes 335 times what the bank teller makes. That's three to five times what it used to be. If more of that money is in tellers' hands that would be money spent for food, to buy a home or car – people would spend."
Read more at The Washington Informer.
Since 1972, FOCUS magazine has provided coverage of national issues to a leadership audience of over 18,0000 readers.
