I blame the tide metaphor.
March 3, 2014 8:17 AM   Subscribe

In America's War on Poverty, the Free Market is AWOL. (SLWAPO) The 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty focused some long-overdue attention on the plight of America’s poor. President Obama said that Johnson’s Great Society programs “lived up to our best hopes as a people” but that “our work is far from over.” Conservative critics like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) argued that the government “needs to dump decades-old programs” and “remember that the best anti-poverty program is economic growth.” It’s easy to be in favor of economic growth — Obama, too, called for broader access to “the opportunities a growing economy provides,” concluding that “we rise or fall together.” Unfortunately, while that’s a nice sentiment, one of the clearest lessons of the past 50 years is that, in the modern American economy, we do not “rise or fall together.”
posted by MisantropicPainforest (5 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Pretty short blog/editorial piece on a recurring topic is not super great material for a post. -- cortex



 
I'm just waiting for a trickle down conservative type to say "but work will set you free" ..
posted by k5.user at 8:18 AM on March 3, 2014


" A rising tide lifts all boats."

If you don't have a boat just STFU and work harder so you can buy a boat.
posted by COD at 8:34 AM on March 3, 2014


“remember that the best anti-poverty program is economic growth.”

OH REALLY?!?

The last forty fucking years of economic growth have gone to the 1%. It's not an anti-poverty program if none of the fucking money goes to the people that need it.
posted by Talez at 8:35 AM on March 3, 2014 [2 favorites]


It would be much easier to alleviate poverty if we stopped deliberately creating it.
posted by srboisvert at 8:41 AM on March 3, 2014


The key problem, and the one which underlies the first chart in the article—which shows household GDP going up, up, up but average income trailing it and bottom-40% income flat as a board—is that the economic gains due to that increased GDP have accrued not to workers but to business owners (shareholders), and to a lesser extent upper management and executives.

This is a swindle on an epic scale: workers are more productive than ever, but are only getting a fraction of their labor back in take-home pay. But it is possible because the labor market is slack. Workers don't have any negotiating power when they are lucky just to have jobs.

Compare this chart of unemployment over the same period. There was "full employment" in the late 60s, which presumably justified some of Johnson's optimism about the free market helping the poor. If that had continued, much of the economic growth in the ensuing decades might have gone to workers. But it didn't: since 1970, there have been only two significant periods where the economy crossed the 5% "full employment" level, one in the late 90s under Clinton, and another in the late 00s under Bush. Both were ended by recessions.

Without resorting to outright conspiracy theories—not that it would be very hard to do, given that both full-employment periods were ended by Wall Street-induced bubbles—you can pretty easily connect the dots from policy decisions (low inflation uber alles, China trade, NAFTA) to employment levels, to the decline and fall of organized labor and heavy industry, and finally to the perfectly flat bottom-40% line on the income chart.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:43 AM on March 3, 2014


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