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WARNING!
Gore/Bush
Coming ... |
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On
Jobs &
Economic Security,
Al and George W.
Span from Bad to Worse
If Gore's positions are disappointing,
George W. Bush's are frightening ...
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Al Gore likes to remind us that the
Clinton-Gore administration has presided over a nonstop U.S.
economic boom. But it’s been a strange kind of boom. Working
peoples’ wages have barely stayed ahead of inflation. The
typical worker aged 25–34 earned 13 percent less in 1998
than in 1973. The poverty rate (12.7 percent in 1998), is a
point higher than it was in 1979. The Agriculture Department
just released a report which found that a shocking 17 percent
of the nation’s children faced hunger in 1999.
We all know who’s benefited the most: the
rich. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s new book
The State of Working America 2000–2001, the typical CEO now
earns 107 times more than the typical worker. Back in 1989,
CEOs earned 56 times more. If the minimum wage had risen at
the same rate, it would now be $24 an hour.
Meanwhile, record job growth hasn’t kept
people from worrying that they’ll lose the job they’ve
got. Before Clinton and Gore took office, about 20 percent of
Americans surveyed said they were "frequently concerned
about being laid off." By 1997, almost half were.
Meanwhile, the perpetrators of this misery, corporations, have
done extremely well: corporate profits have risen
tremendously. After-tax profits reached record levels in the
late 1990s.
NOT EVEN A TATTERED
SAFETY NET
All this has a lot to do with the policies
both Clinton and Gore espouse. Through the entire Clinton
administration, the top domestic goal was never to increase
Americans’ economic security or standard of living. It was
always to reduce the deficit, pleasing Wall Street and the
Federal Reserve. In his book Locked in the Cabinet, former
labor secretary Robert Reich makes this abundantly clear. And
he says Gore "consistently called for even larger cuts
than the President wanted to make."
The Clinton-Gore administration did virtually
nothing to ease the dislocation caused by their trade policies
and by new technology. Thus, during the "boom,"
large swaths of the working public — especially
manufacturing workers — saw their good jobs disappear. No
wonder job fear remains rampant. The Clinton-Gore drive to
"end welfare as we know it" meant that those who
lost their jobs would no longer have even a tattered safety
net.
You might think, listening now to Gore’s
pledges to reduce poverty and boost family savings, that he
was abandoning the economic austerity program. Not so. Gore
proposes to devote $3 trillion of the expected $4.5 trillion
surplus over the next decade to reducing federal debt — much
more than George W. Bush’s proposed $1 trillion.
Just about the only kind of boost Gore
proposes for working people comes in the form of tax breaks.
He does back legislation to increase the minimum wage from
$5.15 to $6.15 an hour, a fine measure that would still leave
the minimum wage with 15 percent less value than it had in
1979.
FRIGHTENING POSITIONS
If Gore’s positions are disappointing,
George W. Bush’s are frightening. Decent wages and economic
security for workers are not on the radar for the Texas
governor. The centerpiece of Bush’s campaign is a fat tax
cut for the rich that would cost the U.S. some $1.9 trillion
over ten years, according to Citizens for Tax
Justice. The
richest one percent of Americans would reap 43 percent of the
tax cut. CTJ says the Bush plan would use up the entire budget
surplus, and would probably "require dipping heavily into
the Social Security and/or Medicare trust funds."
The Labor Party has a very different approach.
We see no reason why our nation can’t guarantee everyone the
right to a job at a decent minimum wage — at least $10.60 an
hour. This may sound revolutionary today, but it shouldn’t.
In 1945, Congress nearly passed such legislation. Why should
our vastly richer nation set its sights lower now?
Next: Bush & Gore Mostly
Agree
on Globalization and Trade >
< Previous: Warning:
Gore/Bush
Coming. Major Fight Ahead
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