From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/02/us-economy-recovery-wealth-inequality
Yes, the economy is improving, but too many Americans are being left behind, while the rich keep getting richer
Bernie Sanders
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 2 June 2013
The front pages of American newspapers are filled with stories about how the US economy is recovering. There is some truth to that. Since President George W Bush left office in 2009, significant progress has been made in moving our economy out of the abyss of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But in the midst of this slow recovery, we must not accept a “new normal”.
We must not be content with an economic reality in which the middle class of this country continues to disappear, poverty is near an all-time high and the gap between the very rich and everyone else grows wider and wider.
The good news is that instead of losing more than 700,000 jobs a month as we were five years ago, we’ve been gaining almost 200,000 jobs a month since January. The bad news is that, in addition to those job numbers being much too low, nearly 60% of the jobs gained since the “recovery” are low-wage jobs that pay less than $14 an hour, while most of the jobs lost during the recession were decent-paying middle-class jobs.
The good news is that the official unemployment rate has gone down from 10% in October of 2009 to 7.5% in April. The bad news is that 20 million Americans still are looking for work and the real unemployment rate – counting those who have given up looking for work and those working part time when they need full time jobs – is 13.9% The very bad news is that youth and minority unemployment is far higher than that and, with the decline in factory jobs, income for poorly educated men has shrunk by nearly two-thirds over the past four decades.
The good news is that housing prices are beginning to rise, providing some additional wealth for most home owners. The bad news is that from 2009 – 2011, all of the new wealth generated in this country went to the top 7% of American households, while the bottom 93% saw a net reduction in their wealth. Further, the US has more wealth inequality than any major country on earth with the top 1% now owning 38% of the financial wealth, while the bottom 60% owns just 2.3% of the wealth.
The good news is that the stock market has fully recovered from its collapse in 2008 and is now at an all time high. The bad news is that the top one percent of Americans earn more income than the bottom 50%, and 100% of the new income generated in this country from 2009-2011 went to the top 1%. During that period the bottom 99% of Americans lost ground economically.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/02/us-economy-recovery-wealth-inequality
