Video

The video that goes along with this post was created as a single form of media to some up what this blog has been about.  It does not go too in depth into the issues, but it provides a wide overview of what has caused economic inequality and how it affects people.  It should be helpful in promoting this issue and bringing awareness to it.  Also, being a video it may be more attractive to more people than just reading.  Hopefully it is useful in this way and everybody learns from it.

The Dream Is Not Over

With the recent passing of the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination there have been a few articles circulating that recognize his contributions to the betterment of society.  One in particular by Amy Goodman in the Seattle PI brings special attention to King’s struggle to relieve poverty and promote economic equality.  In particular she references a report made by Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies entitled 40 Years Later: The Unrealized American Dream.  Both authors address the fact that while our nation claims to be more socially conscious, we have by no means arrived at a point of equality, and it will take that reminder in the public mind to maintain a movement towards a truly free and equal society.  Some of Muhammad’s findings state that if current rates and trends continue then, even though African American college graduation rates have increased 400% since 1968, it is estimated that it will take between 537 and 634 years for Blacks to reach wealth equality with Whites.  It seems that the majority of white Americans reference the civil rights movement as the end of racism, and it is now the job of Blacks to make god for themselves.  It may have been the end of formal institutionalized racism, but since the successes of the civil rights movement there are still racial prejudices hiding just below the surface of society that create inequality in employment and income.  This makes it clear that true change is far from over, and as we discuss issues of domestic economic inequality it cannot be separated from the issues of race inequality.  It is important to look back on what progress we have seen in the last forty years as a way to remember that the US is not yet a place of equality, but we can still take positive steps as a nation to get there.

Take Back America!

There was a national “Take Back America” conference held in D.C. a couple of weeks ago put on by the Campaign for America’s Future. One of its major goals was to bring up proposals to reverse extreme inequality and broaden prosperity. It has been difficult to find out exactly what those proposals were, or anything specific about the conference due to a lack of media coverage and it being such a recent ecent. However, it seems that one positive step to come from the conference will be a campaign to mobalize youth, liberal, and minority voters for the comming 2008 election. It’s good to see positive steps like this being taken in an effort to unite people to fight inequality, and to push real solutions into the public arena. Hopefully more information will come out in the near future as to the details of this conference. If you want to take a look at it visit http://www.ourfuture.org/tba-live or http://www.ips-dc.org/events/145.

Economic Inequality and the Recession

I was recently browsing around to see if the current economic problem our country has been moving towards has been linked at all to the problems we also have with economic inequality.  I found this video that does a little bit of that, and also discusses the implications of the housing crisis for the “forgotten class.”  There has been a big push by the government to introduce a stimulus package into our economic market to try and boost the economy.  Basically, the commentators in the video believe that the economic stimulus package will turn out to give a sense of false hope to people of the lower class.  They will benefit from a little extra money in their pockets, but in the long run, if the stimulus does not fix the economy, many of the these people will actually have more problems as the industries they are most heavily employed by experience job loss and unemployment.  The video continues on with just who the “forgotten class” is, and how many of the recent positive strides they’ve made may be erased by the housing crisis. 

Trickling Down The Risk

The trickle down effect has long been the defense of conservative policies and tax plans. Giving tax relief to the upper-income level in assumption that their wealth will somehow raise up the people below them in lower-income levels puts a lot of faith in the goodwill of the wealthy. Looking at the period of “Reaganomics” when this idea was put to full power shows us the actual results of the trickle down ideal. Rather than raising the income of all Americans as the ideal suggests, during the period of 1980 through 1993 it was the wealthiest 25 percent of the country who benefited, while the middle-class remained unaffected, and the bottom fifth actually saw an income decline of 10 percent (Democracy: A Journal of Ideas). Despite these figures people on the supply side of the economic system glorify this period as the “golden age.” It is this blind attitude towards the average person that has led to economic policies which are increasingly leaving people on their own and under high risk in the market.

Measuring Growth

I was reading an article recently, “Rising-Tide Economics” by Gene Sperling. Sperling was a former national economic advisor to President Clinton, and in this article he references his time in the white house and his comments to the speechwriters, encouraging them to drop the cliche “hang together, or … hang separately” by Benjamin Franklin and instead make an economic caution that “we will grow together or grow apart.” This is an interesting point to make in our day and age of corporate globalization. The way “progression” has typically been measured is by the GDP, strictly a measure of capital, and even when the country’s economy is on the rise there is no inclusion of who sees the benefit. It would be much more progressive, in fact, if we measured positive economic growth by the solidarity and more equal distribution of wealth throughout the country. Until we include some form of equality component to our measures of the economy, inequality will always be able to be explained away or overlooked in by the rich and in politics.

Three For Three

The most obvious cause contributing to economic inequality in the US is the economic system; capitalism. Capitalism is what the United States was built from, and what we owe our current lifestyle to. However, whether our current state of living is positive or negeative is a matter of opinion. The bias of capatilism is to reward people for making money, the more money the better and more immediate the reward. So, it is only natural for a divide to occur between the rich and the poor, as the rich see their accumulated capital grow and earn intrest and the poor scrape by on minimum wage. It is not to say that this would not occur under a different economic model, or that capitalism is the root of the problem, but it does go hand in hand with a government who has a history of perverting the tax system, and global corporations driving wages down.

The Government Too?

It is one thing to see inequalities in pay, after all the people making money are making the rules. It seems that at least our government would attempt to be fair in distributing wealth, it only seems though. In fact, the government has been part of the problem. Part of the government’s job is to take in money through taxes and then use this money to fund public programs, like education, infrastructure, and health care. This is, in part, a way to redistribute wealth. However, this redistribution has been unbalanced in favor of the wealthy. We only need to turn as far as the policy that Bush implemented shortly after coming to office to see a prime example. His tax cuts, which were sold as a necessaty to boost the economy, directly redistribute 500 million dollars out of social services funds and into the pockets of a select few making over 375,000 dollars a year. It is bad enough that it is only the rich seeing their bank accounts grow through tax cuts, but as stated above, this money comes out of funds meant to support the average person’s schools, housing, and health care. Almost worse than the rich get richer, poor get poorer saying, there is a new problem developing where the rich get richer and the poor and middle class lose opportunities and adequate access to basic services.

The Pay Difference

One of the contributing factors to the economic inequality in the U.S. today is the pay difference between differing job positions. According to Business Week, it generally takes the CEO of a major corporation just over half a day to make the same as their average workers make in a year. This gross difference has not always been so wide spread. The gap has been growing as corporate executives overcompensate themselves for a company loss and chip away at union organizations. The number of American workers unionized has dropped twenty percent over the last fifty years, making it more difficult to raise the minimum wage as the cost of living increases. In fact, if we take inflation into account, the minimum wage has actually dropped twenty-one percent since 1979. Bringing the argument full circle, CEO’s in 1980 made only forty-five times that of their average worker, compared to the five hundred times more they make today. Although the U.S. has always experienced some degree of economic inequality, the problem is obviously getting worse.

What This Is

This blog is a requirement for a Social Justice class at Washington State University. It is meant to look at the economic inequality that exists here in the united states. The way our economic and political systems are arranged there is not much chance for people to make a positive change in their economic status, especially rising from poverty. It seems that things are only getting worse as the top five percent of American families saw their incomes increase 81 percent between 1979 and 2005. While over the same period of time, the lowest-income fifth saw their incomes decline 1 percent.(Census Bureau) How will this play out in the future, and how can it be changed?