{"id":739,"date":"2019-03-05T13:08:18","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T13:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?page_id=739"},"modified":"2019-10-20T12:07:11","modified_gmt":"2019-10-20T11:07:11","slug":"th-th-th-thats-all-folks","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/th-th-th-thats-all-folks\/","title":{"rendered":"Th-th-th-that’s all folks!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
March 2004, U.S.A.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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Now that it has become comfortable, even de rigueur, to admit capitalism can\u2019t necessarily deliver the\ngoods, we hear a lot less about that old standby, the standard of living. Socialists have often pointed out\nthat capitalism is much better at providing us with poverty than with a living, and that we should more\naccurately speak of a standard of poverty instead. Capitalism, more than any previous form of class\nexploitation, runs on empty promises (See the Socialist Standard, May 2003).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nIn \u201cThe Collapse of Globalism\u201d (Harper\u2019s Magazine, March 2004), John Ralston Saul points out that\nsometime in the 1990s, people abruptly became aware \u201ca middle-class family required two incomes. They\nnoticed that in a mere 25 years CEO salaries in the United States had gone from 39 times the pay of an\naverage worker to more than 1,000 times.\u201d \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nSo far, no one has discovered where in the United States the streets are paved with gold. They are\nmore likely to be littered with dead packaging, old newspapers and all kinds of odd garbage. Yet the legend\nof the fabled per capita income of the U.S. continues to draw in the desperate. But now, ominously,\nsomeone has coined a new phrase: the poverty gap(1). David R. Francis (\u201cEconomic Scene,\u201d CSM) tells us \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
 \u201cHow the poverty gap fell \u2013 and why few are rejoicing,\u201d that \u201cin \nterms of income, the disadvantaged are catching up (a little) with the \nwhite Joneses; but overall,\nthe gap between the prosperous and the poor is growing.\u201d \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This comment is supported by the statistics. As The Economist <\/em>puts it:\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“By whatever measure you use, the richest Americans have done very \nwell over the past few decades. According to the Census Bureau, the \nshare of national income going to those in the top fifth of earners rose\n from 44% in 1973 to 50% in 2000. The share going to the top 1% rose to \n15% in 1998, higher than it has ever been since the second world war, \naccording to a recent study of tax returns by two economists, Thomas \nPiketty and Emmanuel Saez. 
\nTake wealth rather than income, and America’s disparity is even more \nstartling. The wealthiest 1% of all households controls 38% of national \nwealth, while the bottom 80% of households holds only 17%, according to \nthe Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Around 85% of stockmarket wealth is\n held by a lucky 20%.
\nIf the rich have been doing much better than other Americans in relative\n terms, the poor have failed to improve their lot as they did in the \n1950s and 1960s. The wage incomes of the bottom 20% of households have \nbarely grown in real terms since the mid-1970s. As for wealth, the \nbottom fifth has debts that exceed its assets, making its wealth a \nnegative number. The bottom fifth’s percentage of national wealth \nworsened from -0.3% in 1983 to -0.6% in 1998.”(2)\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Economist adds that “poorer Americans are better off than they \nonce were. The proportion of Americans in poverty now stands at 12%; in \nMr Krugman’s supposedly golden 1950s, it reached 22%.”(3)\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arguing that the poverty gap is not a statistically simple one, Francis cites the opinion of an income expert\nat the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC that a short-term narrowing of \u201cthe racial poverty\ngap\u201d between 1995 and 2002 probably resulted from \u201cthe tight labor market of the late 1990s,\u201d which\n\u201cprompted employers to hire more blacks and other minorities and to pay them more, lifting many out of\npoverty.\u201d \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nUnfortunately, capitalists are servants of profit and don\u2019t see their job as lifting people out of poverty;\nwhich is why capitalism eventually dumps most of its working-class buddies when the \u201cbusiness cycle\u201d\nreaches one of its periodic downturns. \u201cOverall poverty,\u201d says Francis, \u201cdeepened in 2002 \u2026 The jobless\nrate for blacks rose from 7.6 percent in 2000 to 10.8 percent in 2003.\u201d So now not only is the bloom off the\nrose, but for most of those who got a taste of what being \u201cout of poverty\u201d is like, it\u2019s back to Square One.\nCapitalism does not reward blind optimism, only investors; and its enforcer the marketplace is a relentless\npsychopath that punishes even the innocent. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nFrancis\u2019s optimism is, to say the least, extraordinarily tepid. In spite of all the income ground gained\nin the 90s by \u201cnonwhites,\u201d in 2002 they were \u201cstill 162 percent more likely to be poor than whites.\u201d Maybe,\nat this rate, suggest the experts, they might catch up by 2018 or 2031? The \u201cManchester [Indiana]\nresearchers\u201d cited by Francis may see \u201cthese income gaps [as] not good for a society which holds equality as\na primary value,\u201d but they are assuming that capitalists, who own the foundations of society to begin with\nand are therefore at the top of the economic hierarchy, actually include equality in their business plans.\nThese plans, however, are framed almost exclusively in terms of maximizing profit or cutting losses \u2014 and\nstrictly over the short term, at that.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everyone knows that \u201cif you aint got the dough-re-mi,\u201d(4) no kind-hearted economist is going to step\nout from behind the fountain with a small check to tide you over in hard times. You aren\u2019t going to get\nmuch out of welfare anymore, either; charitable organizations maintaining soup kitchens and assorted\novernight bunkings, yes. A life, no. And when the next big depression comes along, even this tattered little\nblanket will shrink dramatically, inducing perhaps panic and consternation among both haves and havenots. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nFor now, the millionaires rule. And thanks to the generosity of a working-class trained to think small\nand stupid, to accept as natural donating its surplus labor to its employers, there are even enough\nmillionaires around to spawn a new industry: the study of million-dollar houses.(5) \u201cMore than 400,000 exist\nin the U.S. today, up at least 120 percent from 1989.\u201d The poverty gap moves from dismal to abysmal:\n\u201cOne out of 17 white homeowners owns a luxury home, but only one of 33 minority homeowners has such\na costly house.\u201d \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nCheer up, fellow workers! Hell\u2019s not so bad: the economic well-being of American households and\nfamilies (in another study cited by Francis) is currently \u201ca bit\u201d less unequal than you might think. The large\nmajority, that is, who earn \u201cless than $50,000 in money income are a bit better off in terms of being able to\nobtain goods and services than the government\u2019s income statistics indicate.\u201d Few of us, though, will confuse\nhaving two jobs with living the good life. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nSignificantly, the author takes no notice of homelessness as something intimately connected with\ncapitalism\u2019s notorious bottom line. History and propaganda have combined to deflect most people\u2019s\nattention from the well-established fact that capitalism was never designed to deliver the goods except to\npaying customers; no one has ever claimed in its defense it should give those customers the funds they will\nneed to survive in the marketplace. It could not have obtained its early workforce if it had. The great\npostwar boom that ended in the 70s left behind a penumbra of unrequited optimism and confidence in the\nsystem\u2019s ability to straighten out its act that amazingly still persists, in\nspite of the deeper and grosser poverty that continues to exist. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n