There is no way the Democrats can lose this election. That is not a prediction. It is necessty.
In todays news there are two related, unsurprising items, except perhaps there MSM nature:
The poor get poorer is a Reuters wire report heading Yahoo news from our friends at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Economic Policy Institute.
Meanwhile NY Times Business columnist David Leonhardt, no DFH, headlines The Boom That Wasn't - The Stagnant Middle Class
As the Reuters report says:
The gap between rich and poor in many states has broadened at a quickening pace since the last U.S. recession, which could make it difficult for low-income families to weather the current economic downturn, according to a report issued Wednesday.
Since the late 1990's average incomes have declined 2.5 percent for families on the bottom fifth of the country's economic ladder, while incomes have increased 9.1 percent for families on the top fifth, said the report from the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Economic Policy Institute.
The result is that the average incomes of the top five percent of families are 12 times the average incomes of the bottom 20 percent.
"The report's bottom line is that since the late 1980's income gaps widened in 37 states and have not narrowed in any states," said Jared Bernstein, one of the report's authors. "In fact, we've found that the trend toward growing inequality has accelerated during this decade."
Meanwhile, the middle class has remained virtually stagnant, with average incomes growing by just 1.3 percent in nearly eight years, the report said.
and from NY Times:
The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.
This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?
In the second half of the 20th century, the United States passed the test in a way that arguably no other country ever has. It became, as the cliché goes, the richest country on earth. Now, though, most families aren’t getting any richer.
"We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well," said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. "But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth."
This is what both Republicans and the center-right mainstream economists and business leader among Democrats have refused to get. While the Rich, the Corporate, the Connected, the GNP and Wall Street may be up over times... Main Street is not:
More than anything else — more than even the war in Iraq — the stagnation of the great American middle-class machine explains the glum national mood today. As part of a poll that will be released Wednesday, the Pew Research Center asked people how they had done over the last five years. During that time, remember, the overall economy grew every year, often at a good pace.
Yet most respondents said they had either been stuck in place or fallen backward. Pew says this is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in almost a half century of polling.
Now admittedly we have been saying this forever. It is not just poverty and the poor, although it is that too. We have also been railing about the majarity of Americans for whom these have been times of economic insecurity.
Worse Under Republicans: This graph has gotten a lot of attention in recent days. It shows how Americans consistently do better economically under Democratic presidents then with Republicans:
Ever Since Reagan:
Tax cuts for the rich (top rate of income and capital gains) and corporate, increases in total taxes for the middle and working class (payroll deduction social security and medicare, state and local), Stagnant wages, strong employers and weak unions, boom times for finance and speculators, stagnation for workning people. The first generation of Americans to do worse overall then their parents.
But Even Worse Since Bush:
From Presidential candidates, to Congres to the State houses... will the Democrats have the inclination and guts to include this in their message?
Is there a party for other 90% of us?