Rich politicians talk about poor
I wondered, as the “two Americas’ theme took center stage at the Democratic Convention recently, how it was playing to the America that didn’t make the trip to Boston this week. This America is back in its apartment, still in its polyester waitress dress or blue work shirt, scooping macaroni and cheese onto plates and listening to rousing speeches about poverty from a presidential ticket that owns enough houses to buy furniture polish by the barrel.
The lifestyles of superrich Democratic candidates John Kerry and John Edwards, along with superrich Republican candidates George Bush and Dick Cheney, point up the gaping chasm between the two Americas. The earnings for the poorest fifth of American families rose less than 1 percent between 1988 and 1998. But earnings jumped 15 percent for the richest fifth, according to a recent joint report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute.
Why, with so much eloquent talk about the working poor during every election, do the two Americas continue to drift farther and farther apart? Two researchers, one in Los Angeles, the other in Washington, D.C., would be happy to give the candidates a primer.
Thomas Kane and Beth Shulman contributed research to a new report from the Russell Sage Foundation called “Social Inequality.’ In it, they pointed to two major reasons why it is tougher today than perhaps at any time in the last half-century for the working poor to climb into the middle class.
First, unskilled-labor jobs have not kept pace with inflation and offer fewer of the “middle-class’ benefits, such as health care and paid sick days, than they once did.
Second, as college has become increasingly important in landing a living-wage job, poor students are having more difficulty attending. The costs of college are going up faster than either wages or government grants.
Thus the longstanding gap in college attendance between poor and more affluent students has widened, even among those with similar grades and test scores, says Kane, a UCLA political science and economics professor. Among the highest income Americans, 73 percent of students went on to college despite low test scores, while just 48 percent of low-income students with such scores did. Among high-income students with high test scores, 84 percent went to four-year colleges — but just 68 percent of low-income students with high scores did.
“We have created an economy where we have one-quarter of workers making less than $8.70 an hour,” says Shulman, a D.C.-based labor consultant who wrote “The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans and Their Families.’
Kerry and Edwards, Bush and Cheney, have their boats and planes and ranches, living like royalty from another era. Their children will live like royalty, as will their children’s children.
Some might see hope in this, saying these men, particularly Edwards, show what is possible in a land of opportunity. As the speeches boomed through the FleetCenter, I imagined the other America leafing through the end-of-the-month bills, waiting for the talking, talking, talking to turn into something they can take to the bank.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].