How Poor Do You Feel?
People who were born before WWII love to torture their children and grandchildren with this old refrain: "We were poor, but we didn't know it." That's because in the years before widespread television ownership, people did not have an easy way to compare their standard of living to the wealthy. Most of their neighbors lived the same way they did, so everyone thought life in cramped homes without new cars and restaurant dinners and away vacations - or even meat for dinner - was normal.
Today, it's true in a twisted way: the poor are in many ways much worse off than 80 years ago, but it doesn't seem that way because of the anti-worker economy of the last 30 years.
David Atkins "thereisnospoon" at Hullabaloo explains:
There are three key reasons that the lack of significant increase in middle-class wages vis-a-vis productivity and inflation since the 1970s has not led to the sort of riots and revolution we are seeing in the Middle East. The first is massive subsidies of agribusiness and processed foods in the U.S., which keep prices for unhealthy foods low, leading to America's poor rarely experiencing starvation, but often experiencing massive diet-related health problems.
The second is cheap prices due to globalization and lack of tariffs: even as jobs manufacturing microwave ovens in America have disappeared, leading to lower wages and higher unemployment, the price of a Chinese-manufactured microwave oven has become more affordable. Wage deflation due to labor arbitrage has also led to price deflation--particularly in the prices of the sorts of electronic goods like refrigerators and videogame consoles on which the Heritage Foundation places such a keen focus.
The third reason is the widespread availability of credit, which has served to mask the inability of middle-class and poorer American households to balance incomes and expenses. Shred the credit cards of every single American, and you would have riots the very next day. And in fact, that very explosion of credit in the United States that both keeps the pitchforks away from investment bankers' mansions in the Hamptons and makes those mansions possible, is part of what has driven the world economy into recession.
It's a nifty trick Heritage has pulled: promote agribusiness subsidy, free trade and credit expansion policies that kill domestic jobs while putting households in debt, but make DVD players and cheeseburgers cheap to obtain. Then criticize America's poor for being overweight, in debt, and owning a DVD player, in order to con the beleaguered American middle class into cutting taxes on billionaires.
Of course, good luck trying to explain that to the average American. They're a little busy these days trying desperately to make ends meet during their 10-hour workday, and compensating for it by at least relaxing in front of a movie on their cheap flatscreen TV at night. Altogether a quite convenient set of circumstances for Thomas Friedman's Flatworld utopians and the Heritage Foundation's wealthy donors, if somewhat inconvenient for those struggling to get by in today's America.
Via The Nation, watch Steven Colbert skewer the poverty-deniers:
Liberals know impoverished citizens lead to an impoverished nation. We all do better when we all do better.
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