Jes sayin'
So I was on Fountain Square one night cutting through during their unplugged Thursday, an acoustic music event. It was being sponsored that night but a local Baptist church. The preacher started out the opening prayer with
“These are hard times, troubled times.”
I looked around the Square and observed I was probably the only person not wearing at least a couple hundred in clothes.
The reason I bring this up now is that preachers and politicians are always selling bad news aren’t they? Doom and gloom, I mean look how bad the economy is. But I guess that’s Bush’s fault also, he can’t do anything right, it was simple, all he had to do was make the rich richer and the poor poorer but he can’t even get that right. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution noted
“the bottom fifth (poorest people) increased its earnings by 80 percent”
All this mismanagement under Bush’s watch, wow.
I'm not quite sure what your point is, but I think this is a perfect example of how politicians (preachers are just politicians of the religious variety) will set up straw-men to appear to have power which they do not. This is crucial to their "doom-and-gloom" soapbox speeches, of course, because it's not possible to be "right" without a "wrong", yes? You can't have a hero/champion without an enemy, right? At least that's what they would have you believe.
ReplyDeleteTo address Haskins' assertion of the "rise" of the bottom fifth, you need not look any further than when he touts "this increase in earnings and total income by low-income families" as "the biggest success in American social policy of recent decades" to realize how misguided he truly is. At best he's being hyperbolic and at worst he's flat-out lying.
While I'm sure we're all quite astute in math, it should also be noted that in the same report it states (among other things) that the highest fifth increased their incomes by 50% during the same period. Rich and poor are, of course, relative terms and a company CEO whose salary increased from $1 million to $1.5 million increases the income gap at an exponentially faster rate than when a McDonald's cook increases their salary from $15,000 to $27,000 and simultaneously "closes" that gap.
Of course Haskins' assertions are based around the assumption that these household incomes are from one worker working one job. A more accurate representation would be to measure income growth per hour worked coupled with hours worked per week. I have not read the entire article as of yet given it is fairly lengthy, but I would venture to say that a good portion of these households have obtained a second and third source of income (through a second job and/or second worker in the family). My assumption is confirmed by the fact that these income levels have supposedly been adjusted for inflation AND the fact that minimum wage was negligibly increased during that period (certainly not enough to account for an 80% real increase in income).
Is it better that the children of these poor families are now working? Is it better that their parent(s) is working 60 or 70 hours per week instead of 40 or 50? I think not. There are other flaws here too, but I can't go into all of them. Here's a link to the published article for anyone who happens to be interested. (Sorry for the length of my diatribe.)
So do you believe the doctor, lawyer or executive making 1.5 mil a year is punching a clocking and working 40 hour weeks? I don't think so.
ReplyDeleteAnother example of why you shouldn't make career decisions based on McyD's.