I like to say that our generation - we who are under 35 - are the Johnny Rotten generation. Not in the sense that we all like punk, but instead in the sense that we all can sympathize with his famous statement. We all have the feeling we've been cheated.
Cheated out of our futures, really. For most of this decade I felt that something wasn't quite right. My friends and I worked hard, studied hard, kept out of trouble. We played by the rules. We did what we were supposed to do. And yet we find ourselves struggling to stay afloat.
Whenever I've mentioned this before, I've had some older Kossacks dismiss my claims, saying that every young generations feels they have it hard, that things are unfair. Perhaps. But last summer the California Budget Project came out with a comprehensive study that suggests, in fact, things really are different today. A Generation of Inequality: The State of Working California, 1979-2006 is the title of their study. And I would like to discuss it with you tonight.
Note: An earlier, California-specific version of this diary was posted at Calitics back in August. What follows is updated and revised for a broader audience.
Kossacks Under 35 is a weekly diary series designed to create a community within DailyKos that focuses on young people. Our overall goals are to work on increasing young voters' Democratic majority, and to raise awareness about issues that particularly affect young people, with a potential eye to policy solutions. Kossacks of all ages are welcome to participate (and do!), but the overall framework of each diary will likely be on or from a younger person's perspective. If you would like more information or want to contribute a diary, please email kath25 at kossacksunder35 (at) gmail dot com
That disclaimer is important, especially in this diary. It's not my intention to suggest that we who are under 35 are the only people who have suffered from the widening inequality in American life. Most Americans, in fact, face this problem. But I think we face it in specific ways. I think it shapes our worldview and our politics in specific ways. Hell, it shapes our very lives in specific ways. After all, I cannot help but notice that this "generation of inequality" began in 1979 - the very year in which I came into this world in Orange County, California.
The California Budget Project's report grabbed a lot of public attention here when it was released last summer, such as a front-page article in the SF Chronicle.
It's about time. Although neoliberalism has been hurting working people since 1979, it's been in the last few years that the situation has become dramatically worse. Low wages, poor job growth prospects, and soaring costs of living are killing the American Dream for millions of people.
Below I offer an overview of the report, and some suggestions on what we can - and should - do about the growing crisis.
The CBP has identified several major factors that illustrate the widening inequality in California:
- 70% of job creation in California since 1979 has been in high-wage or low-wage jobs. The middle-income folks have faced stagnation or declining incomes.
- Wage gains are not only unevenly shared, but inflation and the soaring cost of living has hit low- and middle-income workers harder than their counterparts in other states.
- Workers are getting fewer benefits - health care has been slashed, as have pensions.
- Young Californians - those born since 1979 - have fared poorly in the state's job market, and since 2000 those with college degrees have had fewer job prospects than those with only a high school diploma, though the latter group is still facing poor prospects of their own.
California is becoming a place where only the rich can afford to enjoy basic economic security - whereas everyone else must face high housing costs, rising energy, food, and health care costs with shrinking wages and poor job prospects.
It's apt that this report focuses on 1979 to the present, as that corresponds to my own lifespan. Parts of this report ring all to true to my own cohort. Take my high school class, which graduated from an Orange County school in 1997. Today most of us work either in financial services, high-tech, or education, with many of the grads who did not attend college working in the service sector.
This is not a recipe for economic security. Those who work in financial services are facing the specter of widespread job losses as a 25-year long asset bubble starts to unwind. Those who work in high-tech already faced a bust in 2000, and know all too well how easily their jobs can be outsourced. Those of us who work in education are dependent on government funding, which Republicans are seeking to cut at every opportunity. Those who work in the service sector find their employment to be unsteady and their wages wholly inadequate to the cost of living in California. And most of us who attended college are saddled with student loan debts, cutting into our incomes even more deeply.
And that's just from a suburban high school - Californians from poorer backgrounds obviously have fared much worse than we. For example, in 1979 Latino workers earned 71 cents to every dollar earned by a white worker. That was bad enough - but by 2006 that had plummeted to 59 cents to every dollar earned by a white worker.
Much of the cause of our generation's dire straits is the creeping privatization of public higher education. Here in California this is an especially serious problem. It also demonstrates how some of these problems are unique to our generation - how we suffer worse than previous generations.
California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who recently proposed outright privatization of UC as a budget deficit "solution," graduated from UC Berkeley in 1965. He and/or his family would have only paid $880 in student fees for his 4-year education from 1961 to 1965. The equivalent of that in 2007 dollars would be, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, $5,808. Currently undergraduate fees at UC are $6,141 - a four year total is $24,564. That's over a 300% increase beyond the rate of inflation. That's nearly $20,000 that individuals must pay now that the state, through distributed taxation, paid in previous years.
It is shameful that so many who benefited from state subsidies are now arguing that current and future generations should not have the same opportunity. Perhaps we should ask Bill Lockyer and other California politicians who argue for privatization to reimburse the state $20,000 for the cost of their education.
Meanwhile the economic situation continues to worsen. The bursting of the housing bubble has already caused the state's unemployment rate to soar from 4.8% in December 2006 to 6.1% in December 2007. Gas prices are rising to an unsustainably high level - here in Monterey we're at $3.35 and rising fast. At the same time Republicans successfully gutted state mass transit funds, effectively shackling Californians to their cars and to the oil companies.
Worse is Arnold's budget plan, which would rely on spending cuts to close a $16 billion deficit by firing tens of thousands of teachers, close classrooms and probably even schools and kicking tens of thousands off of health care. When the bill came due for 25 years of reckless tax cuts and economic inequality, Arnold's response was to make those of us who have experienced more inequality suffer the burden. And while your state is probably not as badly off as California, this fate will be yours soon enough.
This report illustrates a state in crisis, lurching toward catastrophe. 29 years of neoliberalism has put us on the edge of a precipice. How do we deal with it, then?
Do we follow the advice of conservatives like Joel Kotkin, who in the SF Chronicle article about the CBP study called for more of the same - less regulation and taxation of business, implying though not saying that this will also require further cuts to vital public services? That would be like turning to the folks who broke Iraq and asking them to fix it.
Instead we need to revive the old progressive, New Deal era emphasis on economic security. Some believe that progressive politics remains amorphous and without a core agenda. Economic security, I believe, MUST be that agenda.
We must build a diverse coalition of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, of middle- and low-income households, to challenge the neoliberal economy. Instead we must demand and put into action policies that will help even out the balance, and save our country from impending ruin.
We need, at minimum, the following:
- Universal health care. Providing cost certainty to families, as well as health, is vital to providing for our future security.
- A redefinition of the American Dream - a new urban strategy for American life, providing for affordable housing, sustainable transportation, and better use of our resources. We must stop subsidizing suburban sprawl, one of the culprits behind this inequality, and instead redirect our energies to building up our cities.
- A new, long-term source of good jobs for low- and middle-income families. The Green Jobs initiative pioneered by Rep. Hilda Solis could well be the prototype for this, providing for a clean environment, sustainable practices, and jobs for ALL people, across class and racial lines. The US can become a leader in 21st century manufacturing, building on local resources to provide a sustainable and clean range of products for America as we face the dual shocks of climate change and peak oil.
- Root-and-branch reform of agriculture. Californians have already become major leaders of the Farm Bill reform movement and we need to ramp this up significantly. Agriculture is the backbone of California's economy and remains so in many other states. We need to shift ag toward sustainable, organic, healthy practices, linking city and country in a new network of local food production and consumption that provides income and jobs for rural counties and affordable, quality food for the cities.
- Educational reform and affordability. The cost of higher education - including technical and vocational training - has soared, and these costs represent a massive drain on earning power for working families. We need to put into place a plan to forgive ALL student loans, and redeem the promise we made in 1960 to give Californians free higher education - and extend that promise to all young Americans, in whichever state they live. This will spur entrepreneurial activity, as well as ensure that the young can help pay for the needs of aged.
All of those solutions will help Americans of all backgrounds and class status. We cannot follow in the footsteps of those who will tell us that in the hard times that we now face, we must choose who to include and who to exclude - a choice that always seems to come down to race.
This is the challenge we face as progressives. And these can be the solutions that we offer. This can be our opportunity to build a prosperous and secure 21st century nation.