By VIJAY PRASHAD
The United States: The U.S. Census Bureau points outs that 15.4 per cent of the population, or about 46.3 million Americans, has no health insurance.
REPORTS of distress pile up with disarming regularity. The latest one comes from the United States Census Bureau, which reports that the poverty rate is now 13.2 per cent, the highest level since 1997. Almost 40 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the government sets at $22,025 for a family of four (and downwards for smaller families). The median household income in the U.S. has dropped by 3.6 per cent, and with foreclosures of houses on the rise and as credit card bankruptcies begin to make their appearance, it is hardly a surprise to see more people enter the ranks of the indigent.
David Johnson, who heads the Census’ Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, sounded stoic: “Everyone expected an increase in the poverty rate” because these numbers come from the period after the collapse began in December 2007. More than 14 million of those in poverty are children, “the biggest increase in child poverty since 1992”, said the Children’s Defence Fund.
In early September, the Manpower Employment Outlook Survey projected that job losses would only increase in the fourth quarter of 2009. Two-thirds of the employers surveyed by the largest provider of temporary workers said that they had no plans either to increase or to decrease their workforce. But, of the remainder, more employers threatened to shed jobs. This is a bad sign for an economy that has had seven consecutive quarters of haemorrhaged jobs. The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers pointed out at the same time that the $787-billion stimulus plan had helped save one million jobs. That comes to $787,000 a job, much more than the average salary of the workers.
Meanwhile, large investment firms already began to clock in large profits: Goldman Sachs bringing in $3.4 billion in the second quarter, JPMorgan Chase $2.7 billion in the same time and CitiGroup $4.3 billion. Bonuses have been promised. This gets the ire of the ordinary citizen. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria blew the all-clear in a Pollyannaish essay called “A Capitalist Manifesto: Greed is Good (to a point)” (June 22). “Even though we’ve had an imperfect stimulus package, nationalised no banks and undergone no grand reinvention of capitalism, the sense of panic seems to be easing.” What is good for Wall Street might not be good for those in the unemployment lines.