Feeling No Pain
Aug 30th, 2008 at 5:28 am by Susie
My first reaction to Bill Clinton’s convention speech was sheer professional jealousy: nobody, but nobody, has his ability to translate economic wonkery into plain, forceful English. In effect, Mr. Clinton provided an executive summary of the new Census report on income, poverty and health insurance — but he did it so eloquently, so seamlessly, that there was no sense that he was giving his audience a lecture.
My second reaction was that in Mr. Clinton’s speech — as in the speeches by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden (this column was filed before Barack Obama spoke on Thursday night) — one heard the fundamental difference between the two parties. Democrats say and, as far as I can tell, really believe that working Americans are getting a raw deal; Republicans, despite occasional attempts to sound sympathetic, basically believe that people have nothing to complain about.
As it happens, the numbers support the Democrats.
That Census report gives a snapshot of the economic status of American families in 2007 — that is, before the financial crisis started dragging the economy down and the unemployment rate up. It’s a given that 2008 will look much worse, so last year was as good as it will get in the Bush years. Yet working-age Americans had significantly lower median income in 2007 than they did in 2000. (The elderly, whose income is supported by Social Security — the program the Bush administration tried to kill — saw modest gains.) Meanwhile, poverty was up, and health insurance — especially the employment-based insurance on which most middle-class Americans depend — was down.
But Republicans, very much including John McCain and his advisers, don’t believe there’s a problem.
Go read the rest.
Yeah, and while I was watching the convention four years ago, it was Bill Clinton’s address that thrilled me, not Barack Obama’s.
Dollars and cents, people, dollars and sense.
After the last two years, I have lost Mr. Krugman’s optimism about the Dem’s concern for working people. He may be correct that they accurately see the problem. I question whether they actually care. For too many it seems to be a convenient issue to paint their opponents as rotten,and they don’t want to lose it by actually changing things.
The Dems are, of course, welcome to prove me wrong.
For McSame and the rest of the corporate world, lower wages and desperate employees are better. Not paying a decent wage, providing a pension or health insurance, and increasing hours all lead to higher profits. As long as someone else does the paying….
We are now seeing the end result of every business dropping wages. Nobody can afford anything. Think your biz can withstand the Cheney dream of a favela economy?