Living Standards Under Stress

Isaiah J Poole, Tom Paine

 
It does not take much to understand why a hard-core Republican
district in Mississippi would elect a Democrat to the House of
Representatives by a nine-point margin. Mississippi
is a state under particularly serious economic stress, a point brought home in
a report released this week by the Campaign for America's Future.
"The Stress
Test" shows in graphic detail the impact that seven years of
conservative economic policies have had on working families. It explains why this
week's Washington Post-ABC News poll indicates that "nearly seven out
of 10 Americans are worried about maintaining their standard of living."
The most recent, and perhaps most dramatic, threat to standards of living
has been in the form of higher gasoline prices, which have risen 33 cents a
gallon just in the past month, according to The Post. But the erosion in living
stands has been a long time coming and it comes from multiple sources,
according to the Stress Test report.
Consider this: In Mississippi,
since 2000 the average weekly wage has done up, in inflation-adjusted terms,
$33 since 2000. But there are plenty of indications that Mississippi families have nonetheless fallen
behind, even if you leave out the whopping 128 percent increase in gasoline
prices during that period. The percentage of people without health insurance
increased 63 percent since 2000, and the number of jobs with health coverage
declined 12 percent. Seventy-four percent more people—it's now almost one in
10—spend at least a quarter of their income for health care than was the case
in 2000.
In Mississippi,
the number of people who are below the poverty line is up 8 percent,
bankruptcies are up 27 percent and home foreclosures are up 92 percent.
On a national level, "The Stress Test" reports:
The states experiencing the most economic difficulties are Michigan,
North Carolina, Ohio,
Maine and Tennessee. A cross‐section of middle America, these states are represented by both
political parties and exhibit both industrial and rural characteristics. Michigan’s number one ranking in stress reveals America’s
shrinking industrial base. It has high unemployment as well as the biggest
decline per capita in both manufacturing jobs and construction jobs. North Carolina’s high
ranking also stems from crumbling industry, which led to its having the fourth
highest decrease in goods‐producing jobs and third highest decrease in
manufacturing since 2000. North Carolinians
are also plagued by health care woes. Thirteen percent fewer people in North Carolina got
health care through their employers in 2006 than in 2000. Nine percent of the
residents of North Carolina
pay more than 25 percent of their income on health care. In Ohio, more than one in ten construction jobs
has been lost since 2000. The cost of a year of state college is now up to 20
percent of a median Ohio
family’s income.
It is no wonder conservative lawmakers this week are trying to sell
"change," as if it were someone else besides President George W. Bush
in the White House and as if conservatives weren't running the Congress like a
military precision marching band until voters said "Enough!" in 2006.
The Stress Test shows that real change will not come from more of the same, but
from a radically different set of progressive economic policies. We need to focus
on supporting the aspirations of working-class families, not the avarice of
corporations. There is no better proof of that than the conditions on the
ground in conservative strongholds like Mississippi—and
in how voters are responding behind the voting-booth curtain.