How upside down have our politics gotten? Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that those making more than $250,000 were "the people who were hit hardest by this recession."
The absurdity of that claim was highlighted that same day when the US Census Bureau released its new poverty numbers. While the big number everyone's talking about is that one in seven Americans is now below the poverty level, that doesn't tell the whole story. Not by a long shot.
If you look deeper at the data, the story of who has actually been "hit hardest" is clear:
But this is not about numbers. It's about real people and real suffering.
The community-level consequences of this spike in poverty are stark and dire. Families are facing tight food budgets. Laid-off workers are losing their homes to foreclosure. Fragile community cohesion is fraying. And the vital infrastructure investments that were ignored during the Bush Administration remain bottled up in partisan politics - and millions of job-seekers suffer as a result.
We can see the pain and struggle in the faces of our neighbors, our family members, our children. But with white, college-educated people still facing non-crisis-level unemployment, it has been disturbingly easy for some politicians to ignore the deep and ongoing economic disaster in America.
If Sen. McConnell and his allies need more numbers to be convinced, how about these (click here for charts):
What do we do about this? Thankfully, a clear path has already been blazed - if we can find the political will to simply walk down it.
The safety net investments made in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act are crucial. Unemployment benefits, temporary worker assistance, food stamps, and state aid all must be extended until this crisis is over.
But we must look beyond just our immediate crisis. We must make sure tomorrow's workforce is on steady footing. First, Congress must pass President Obama's $50 billion infrastructure proposal - a solid start to a decades-long solution. Also, Rep. George Miller's Local Jobs for America Act would stimulate local businesses and immediately put nearly one million Americans back to work. Passing that bill should be a no-brainer.
Tomorrow's workforce will also need more training than ever. This skills crisis means we may soon face a severe shortage of skilled workers to fill our new jobs building and maintaining infrastructure like electrical grips, transit systems, and bridges. Getting low-income black and Latino youth plugged into our community college system would go a long way to preparing for tomorrow. All our families need support to weather this recession.
The jobs crisis in America is deep - and it is deepest for those who were already in a hole to start with. This recession won't end until Congress gets serious about who is really "hit hardest."
Follow Angela Glover Blackwell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/PolicyLink
According to the US Department of Labor, as of "August 2010, the percentage of people with disabilities in the labor force was 22.0. By comparison, the percentage of persons with no disability in the labor force was 70.2. The unemployment rate for those with disabilities was 15.6 percent, compared with 9.3 percent for persons with no disability, not seasonally adjusted." http://www.dol.gov/odep/ These statistics are staggering and call for immediate attention, attention that is not being provided.
As a healthcare analyst with the Disability Policy Consortium in Massachusetts, I am continually perplexed by the simplistic perspective of many in the field of health equity who reduce inequity and it social determinants down to race without delving into other determinants; disability status. In this regard, little work is being done to address the correlation between unemployment, lack of access to health care etc. for persons with disabilities
Excluding persons with disabilities from her article, Ms. Blackwell has not only done a disservice to persons with disabilities in general, she has also failed to raise awareness about those who might likely to be hit hardest by this economic downturn, persons with disabilities who are also members of ethnic and minority populations.
It's only indirectly about race...the fall of America is more about the lacadaisical attitudes that have developed around personal discipline and education than about race...but I guess the race card sells more newspapers....
Executives of the top 50 job-cutting firms in the US earned 42 percent more than their peers in 2009, according to a report published by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
Full Story below
http://www.truth-out.org/study-finds-ceo-salaries-increase-with-layoffs63222