Posted on 09/21/2011 1:33:10 AM PDT by WilliamHouston
For the third straight year, the median income of the typical American family fell in 2010. Adjusted for inflation, it is back where it was in 1996, the longest period of zero growth since the Depression.
And the poverty rate has inched up to 15.1 percent.
Both figures, however, should be put in perspective.
For example, a family can be classified as poor and own a car, a flat-screen TV and a computer, and have a washer-dryer and a garbage disposal.
Folks below the poverty line have their kids educated free in Head Start, for 13 years in public schools, then get Pell grants for college. They get free food stamps and health care through Medicaid. They get subsidized housing and earned income tax credits, are eligible for all other safety-net programs, and can earn $23,300 in pretax income and pay no income taxes.
Poverty in 21st century America is not poverty in the Paris of "Les Miserables" or the London of Oliver Twist or the Dust Bowl of Tom Joad.
The 15-year stagnation in the median income of the American family, however -- a vanishing of the American Dream that one's children will know a better life -- is a more serious matter.
For there are causes of the stunted growth in the standard of living of the American family that neither party is willing to address, if either of them even recognizes those causes.
First is the immersion of the U.S. economy in a global economy. This plunged U.S. workers into direct competition with workers in Asia and Latin America willing to do the same jobs for far less, in factories where regulations are far lighter.
U.S. corporate executives leapt at the opportunity to close plants here and relocate abroad. This explains the 50,000 factories that disappeared in the Bush decade and the 5.5 million manufacturing jobs that vanished.
You cannot have a rising standard of living when your highest-paid production jobs are being exported overseas.
Now, to buy the goods of the foreign factories that used to be here, we are shoveling out more and more of America's wealth. Our national bill for imported goods and services is $2.5 trillion a year. The U.S. trade deficit is back up to between $550 billion and $600 billion a year.
If President Obama wishes to know why his $800 billion stimulus bill didn't have the kick he expected, he should look at the "seepage" problem.
How do you stimulate the U.S. economy when the workers you retain or rehire with your stimulus billions head for Walmarts on Saturday to buy goods made in Japan, Korea and China?
Our $6 trillion in trade deficits in the Bush decade stimulated economies all over the world, just not our own. Indeed, the most successful economies of the last decade were China and Germany. Not coincidentally, they were the world's two largest exporting countries.
There are time-honored ways that nations have turned around such situations. What prevents us from adopting them? An ignorance of our own history, the immense investment of our transnational corporations in the new global arrangement, and the opposition of a World Trade Organization to which we have surrendered our national sovereignty.
A second reason why the median income of American families is back to 1996 levels and sinking is mass immigration, legal and illegal.
According to analyst Ed Rubenstein of VDARE.com, the United States, despite an unemployment rate above 9 percent, imports 100,000 immigrant workers every single month. Numbers USA contends that 125,000 foreign workers are brought in every month.
Thus, well over a million workers are added annually to our labor force when 14 million Americans are looking for work.
Why are we doing this?
Is it xenophobic to say our own citizens should come first, that the importation of foreign workers must halt until our own unemployed have found jobs?
A huge share of our immigrant population is Hispanic. And Rubenstein finds that for every 100 Hispanics employed in the United States in year 2001, 126 are employed today. But for every 100 non-Hispanics employed in 2001, only 98 are working today.
What prevents our politicians from putting Americans first, deporting illegal aliens and suspending the importation of foreign labor until our own workers are back on the job?
Politics is one reason. Democrats see illegal aliens and their children as future Democratic voters. Republicans are terrified of being called racists and alienating the ethnic lobbies.
Crass commercial interest is another reason.
U.S. companies see immigrants, legal or illegal, as an endless source of cheap labor to keep wage costs down. And they are right.
But who is looking out for the national interest, for all of the members of the American family, especially the unemployed?
If the median income of the American family is falling, already back to where it was in Bill Clinton's first term, Middle America is one of the big losers in the global economy. And who are the big winners?
So Obama’s plan is right on track..
The single most substantial loss of income and economic engine for prosperity in the US is energy, especially oil. The political elite have determined that our nation should be dependent upon foreign sources for oil. This is madness.
We are capable of becoming energy independent in a few short years. This alone would add trillions to our economy and tens of millions of jobs. We should be the major exporter of oil to the world instead of the world’s major importer of oil.
Changing the economics of our country requires a thorough house cleaning of every component of government and industry. We are rife with corruption. It has become ingrained in every institution in our culture.
We must have revolution that brings us into compliance with our Constitutional foundation. We can do it at the ballot box or on the streets with guns. Either way we will rid ourselves of the parasites that infest our body politic or we will die a long, slow, agonizing death.
“Either way we will rid ourselves of the parasites that infest our body politic or we will die a long, slow, agonizing death.”
Hear ye, hear ye, well said.
Good article, but PB doesn’t quite identify the true goal which is obvious to anyone not cowed by the false racism charges. It is the replacement of the white middle class American by a wave of affirmative active 3rd world peasants.
I am tending to agree w/ you. I also am wary of how they classify poverty. Yesterday I had early breakfast duty at school and they had an individual packet of frosted flakes, choice of apple or watermelon, cheese toast, and milk for breakfast. This is a K- 2nd grade school & SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO many kids threw out all or 1/2 of their food. Same at lunch.
This is taxpayer funded & hungry people DON’T throw away food, they just don’t. The food waste is criminal, I think of the people who would give their left arm for this food. Also we are told over & over to tell our kids to go thru the line & get a tray, even if thy throw it away so that we don’t lose federal funds.
It sickens me.
Hispanics and Asians are imported by companies (with the cooperation of the government they’ve bought) to suppress wages in those fields that could not be outsourced to Latin America or Asia.
And the replacement of our current form of government by that which is the form of government in the homelands of those third-world peasants.
It is an economic depression.
With inflation AND government aided currency devaluation via printing press.
It is Obama’s depression, and the moron thinks he’s done such a great job that he deserves another term.
Or that we need to funnel food thrown away from free lunch programs to the homeless.
Northern NJ is a perfect case in point; unskilled Americans out of work while unskilled (often illegal) Hispanics doing all the work they used to do for a fraction of the price. The imported people become a niche of their own, where big chain supermarkets or other jobs that require interaction won’t hire you unless you speak one of the “goo-back” tongues.
Nah man, we’re doomed at this point. The situation is too far out of hand. It doesn’t matter who becomes president in 2012.
Dark Ages, here we come!
Those who support the uninterrupted stream of illegals to create a permanent underclass of minorities, have the gall to point the finger at “conservatives” as racists.
Man, that chaps my hide.
The uninterrupted stream of illegals is creating a permanent underclass of “Anglo” Americans, without which Obama would never have been elected. We already had a permanent underclass of minorities; now we’re just making that underclass “look like America”.
ping
immigration ping
Ping!
The BIG LIE has succeeded. For the next 150 years at least, the world will run on Oil, Coal, Natural Gas and Nuclear energy. Hydroelectric Power is real. Solar and wind power are not, but eminently suitable for small applications. What is a better automotive energy deal, for example, a VW TDI getting 60mpg, or a Prius getting 45?
Switching passenger cars to small turbo-charged, computer controlled diesels alone would end our dependence upon foreign oil right now. Is there some mystical reason why a 30 mpg Toyota Corolla needs to do 0-60 in 6 seconds, with its 4 cyl gasoline engine, when the same car with its Japan-available diesel does 0-60 in 12 seconds and gets 50 mpg?
Yes,Yes, oil wells can be a little sloppy in the opening phases, but after they start pumping, they are little problem. Beverly Hills produces oil! People all over the country literally have producing oil wells next door ... even in their back yards. It is not a problem.
There is more oil available than the world can refine. There is enough oil available in the United States to at least deliver OPEC a stunning blow. When Michelle Bachmann says "$2.00 Gasoline" she isn't kidding. The constraints on oil are artificial.
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