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8-30-06, 9:13 am
Despite Bush administration claims that the economy made strong gains this past year, real median household income did not grow and for full-time, year-round individual workers, real income actually declined more than 1%. The official poverty rate failed to shrink, while the number of uninsured Americans grew by 1.3 million to 46.6 million in 2005, according to the latest figures provided by the US Census Bureau earlier this week.
In other bad news for working families, income disparities by race continued. Real median household income for African Americans stood at approximately only 60% of white household, and Latino households took in approximately 70%. The supposed economic boom also failed to reduce poverty rates for African Americans (24.9%) and Latinos (21.8%), about double that of whites households. The economic boom also seems to have left lower-income Asian American families behind as their poverty rate rose by 1.3 percentage points.
Bush’s "prosperity" failed to reduce child poverty, which stands at 17.6%, and the number of poor seniors grew to 3.6 million in 2005. Altogether, the 37 million people officially counted as poor were left behind by the so-called economic boom. Note: Official government figures put the poverty line at just over $19,000 a year for a family of four. In the real world, this figure is far lower than what a family of four needs to survive, thus underestimating the actual number of people who struggle financially. Internationally, one accepted statistical method is to estimate the number of people who earn less than half of the median wage, which, in the US, is much higher than $19,000.
Good times also failed to stop the hemorrhage of people losing health care coverage. The total number of people without coverage of any kind grew to 15.9% of the population, by far the highest percentage of uninsured people among the 20 wealthiest countries in the world, according to analysis provided by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute.
Racial inequality in access to health care is also indicated by very high rates of the uninsured among non-white communities. Nearly 20% of African Americans, 17.9% (a jump of 1.4% over 2004) of Asian Americans, almost 33% of Latinos, and almost 30% of Native Americans lacked health care coverage in 2005.
Since Bush took office, as a percentage of GDP wage income has collapsed by 5 percentage points, according to a report in the New York Times. Also, 3 million new people were declared officially poor, with a rise in the child poverty rate of 1.4 percentage points since 2001. The total number of uninsured Americans has grown by 5.4 million since 2001.
Clearly, tax cuts for the rich, boondoggles and huge subsidies to politically connected corporations, and failed, endless war are the main priorities of the Bush administration. It and the Republican-dominated Congress have refused to address basic issues like jobs with good wages and benefits, universal health care, and ending poverty.
In the Bush/Republican economy, working hard and getting less is par for the course.
--Contact Leo Walsh at
pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net
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