The Poverty President

David K. Shipler who recently authored The Working Poor: Invisible in America gives us "No Masking the Poverty" in today's Los Angeles Times. Katherine Newman, writing in The Nation, recently wrote a piece titled "The Wages of Fear" that did a nice job looking at Mr. Shipler's work. Today Mr. Shipler states,

Last September, President Bush gave a stirring speech in New Orleans about what he called the "deep, persistent poverty" displayed on television after Hurricane Katrina. "That poverty," he declared, "has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action." .... In the intervening months [since Katrina], Bush has given us no commission, no program, no plan, no "bold action." Instead, he proposes five-year reductions in vocational education, housing, food assistance and other vital services for the most vulnerable Americans. Between 2006 and 2011, housing subsidies are expected to drop by 11.6% and nutrition assistance by 14.9%. These are called discretionary programs. Many grew in the last five years, but they do not increase automatically, the way retirement and health subsidies do. They have to be re-legislated annually by Congress. And so they are caught in the squeeze between two lines on a graph: the rising cost of mandatory spending and the falling revenues from tax cuts. The space between those lines — where this money comes from — is shrinking, and it will vanish in 2012 when the lines intersect, predicts Gene Steuerle, a budget expert at the Urban Institute. In the dance of budget legislation, he told me, "programs for children and working families wear stone slippers — they don't get the automatic growth of health, retirement and tax breaks, hence compete for leftovers, of which there soon won't be any." While New Orleans was straining to celebrate Mardi Gras, the Federal Reserve was issuing a gloomy report on the widening disparity between the rich and the poor. The wealthiest 10% of the nation's households had an average net worth in 2004 of $3.11 million, up 6.1% from 2001. The poorest 25%, whose assets equaled their debts in 2001, dropped into the red; they owed an average of $1,400 more than they possessed.

Bu$hCo simply was working in some GOP talking points. The GOP, and the Democrats to a lesser extent I regret, are seemingly working for the Big Mules. Even today President Bu$h, when visiting India, urged American workers to embrace globalization and outsourcing. As a nation we've got to embrace Progressivism. Indeed protectionism has peril yet investing in our human capital is the only way to compete in a global economy. Peace ... or War!