October 8, 2004

• 

  
  

  October 8, 2004

  
  

  OP-ED COLUMNIST

  
  

  Working for a Pittance

  
  

  By BOB HERBERT
  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  eality keeps rearing its ugly head. The Bush administration’s case for the war in Iraq has completely fallen apart, as evidenced by the report this week from the president’s handpicked inspector that Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles in the early 1990′s.

  
  

  Coming next week are the results of a new study that shows – here at home – how tough a time American families are having in their never-ending struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. The White House, as deep in denial about the economy as it is about Iraq, insists that things are fine – despite the embarrassing fact that President Bush is on track to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs during his four years in office.

  
  

  The study, jointly sponsored by the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, will show that 9.2 million working families in the United States – one out of every four – earn wages that are so low they are barely able to survive financially.

  
  

  “Our data is very solid and shows that this is a much bigger problem than most people imagine,” said Brandon Roberts, one of the authors of the report, which is to be formally released on Tuesday. The report found that there are 20 million children in these low-income working families.

  
  

  For the purposes of the study, any family in which at least one person was employed was considered a working family. Very wealthy families were included.

  
  

  The median income for a family of four in the U.S. is $62,732. According to the study, a family of four earning less than $36,784 is considered low-income. A family of four earning less than $18,392 is considered poor. The 9.2 million struggling families cited by the report fell into one of the latter two categories. And those families have one-third of all the children in American working families.

  
  

  Not surprisingly, the problem for millions of families is that they have jobs that pay very low wages and provide no benefits. “Consider the motel housekeeper, the retail clerk at the hardware store or the coffee shop cook,” the report said. “If they have children, chances are good that their families are living on an income too low to provide for their basic needs.”

  
  

  Neither politicians nor the media put much of a spotlight on families that are struggling economically. According to the study, one in five workers are in occupations where the median wage is less than $8.84 an hour, which is a poverty-level wage for a family of four. A full-time job at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour is not even sufficient to keep a family of three out of poverty.

  
  

  Families with that kind of income are teetering on the edge of an economic abyss. Any misfortune might push them over the edge – an illness, an automobile breakdown, even something as seemingly minor as a flooded basement.

  
  

  For the families in these lower-income brackets, life is often a harrowing day-to-day struggle to pay for the bare necessities. According to federal government statistics, the median annual rent for a two-bedroom apartment in major metropolitan markets is more than $8,000. The annual cost of food for a low-income family of four is nearly $4,000. Utility bills are nearly $2,000. Transportation costs are about $1,500. And then there are costs for child care, health care and clothing.

  
  

  You do the math. How are these millions of poor and low-income families making it?

  
  

  (A lot of those families are going to get a shock this winter as price increases for crude oil get translated into big jumps in home heating bills.)

  
  

  The economy relies heavily on the services provided by low-wage workers but, as the report notes, “our society has not taken adequate steps to ensure that these workers can make ends meet and build a future for their families, no matter how determined they are to be self-sufficient.”

  
  

  Mr. Roberts said he hoped the study, titled “Working Hard, Falling Short,” would help initiate a national discussion of the plight of families who are doing the right thing but not earning enough to get ahead. “Seventy-one percent of low-income families work,” he said. More than half are headed by married couples. But economic self-sufficiency remains maddeningly out of reach.

  
  

  Even in a presidential election year, these matters have not been explored in any sustained way. We’re quick to give lip service to the need to work hard, but very slow to properly reward hard work.

  
  

   

  
  

  ——————————————————————

  
  

  ——————————————————————

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  

  
  

  October 8, 2004

  
  

  OP-ED COLUMNIST

  
  

  Ignorance Isn’t Strength

  
  

  By PAUL KRUGMAN
  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  first used the word “Orwellian” to describe the Bush team in October 2000. Even then it was obvious that George W. Bush surrounds himself with people who insist that up is down, and ignorance is strength. But the full costs of his denial of reality are only now becoming clear.

  
  

  President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have an unparalleled ability to insulate themselves from inconvenient facts. They lead a party that controls all three branches of government, and face news media that in some cases are partisan supporters, and in other cases are reluctant to state plainly that officials aren’t telling the truth. They also still enjoy the residue of the faith placed in them after 9/11.

  
  

  This has allowed them to engage in what Orwell called “reality control.” In the world according to the Bush administration, our leaders are infallible, and their policies always succeed. If the facts don’t fit that assumption, they just deny the facts.

  
  

  As a political strategy, reality control has worked very well. But as a strategy for governing, it has led to predictable disaster. When leaders live in an invented reality, they do a bad job of dealing with real reality.

  
  

  In the last few days we’ve seen some impressive demonstrations of reality control at work. During the debate on Tuesday, Mr. Cheney insisted that “I have not suggested there’s a connection between Iraq and 9/11.” After the release of the Duelfer report, which shows that Saddam’s weapons capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, at the time of the invasion, Mr. Cheney declared that the report proved that “delay, defer, wait wasn’t an option.”

  
  

  From a political point of view, such exercises in denial have been very successful. For example, the Bush administration has managed to convince many people that its tax cuts, which go primarily to the wealthiest few percent of the population, are populist measures benefiting middle-class families and small businesses. (Under the administration’s definition, anyone with “business income” – a group that includes Dick Cheney and George Bush – is a struggling small-business owner.)

  
  

  The administration has also managed to convince at least some people that its economic record, which includes the worst employment performance in 70 years, is a great success, and that the economy is “strong and getting stronger.” (The data to be released today, which are expected to improve the numbers a bit, won’t change the basic picture of a dismal four years.)

  
  

  Officials have even managed to convince many people that they are moving forward on environmental policy. They boast of their “Clear Skies” plan even as the inspector general of the E.P.A. declares that the enforcement of existing air-quality rules has collapsed.

  
  

  But the political ability of the Bush administration to deny reality – to live in an invented world in which everything is the way officials want it to be – has led to an ongoing disaster in Iraq and looming disaster elsewhere.

  
  

  How did the occupation of Iraq go so wrong? (The security situation has deteriorated to the point where there are no safe places: a bomb was discovered on Tuesday in front of a popular restaurant inside the Green Zone.)

  
  

  The insulation of officials from reality is central to the story. They wanted to believe Ahmad Chalabi’s promises that we’d be welcomed with flowers; nobody could tell them different. They wanted to believe – months after everyone outside the administration realized that we were facing a large, dangerous insurgency and needed more troops – that the attackers were a handful of foreign terrorists and Baathist dead-enders; nobody could tell them different.

  
  

  Why did the economy perform so badly? Long after it was obvious to everyone outside the administration that the tax-cut strategy wasn’t an effective way of creating jobs, administration officials kept promising huge job gains, any day now. Nobody could tell them different.

  
  

  Why has the pursuit of terrorists been so unsuccessful? It has been obvious for years that John Ashcroft isn’t just scary; he’s also scarily incompetent. But inside the administration, he’s considered the man for the job – and nobody can say different.

  
  

  The point is that in the real world, as opposed to the political world, ignorance isn’t strength. A leader who has the political power to pretend that he’s infallible, and uses that power to avoid ever admitting mistakes, eventually makes mistakes so large that they can’t be covered up. And that’s what’s happening to Mr. Bush.

  
  

   

  
  

  ——————————————————————–

  
  

  ——————————————————————–

  
  

   

  
  

   

  • 8:25 am
  • 1 Comment