Posted on: Monday, August 9, 2004

EDITORIAL
Getting better, says Bush — but it's not

For those whose eyes glaze over at the sight of economics data, Friday's assurance from President Bush, "I say we have a strong economy, and it's getting stronger," may be reassuring.

But it's precisely those unsophisticates, if you will, who have the most to lose in accepting such bland artfulness, because for them the economic picture is neither strong nor strengthening.

"Getting stronger" was Bush's take on new jobs creation numbers that provided yet another indication the economy has in fact weakened.

Employers added just 32,000 jobs nationwide last month, far short of the 150,000 to 200,000 new jobs it takes simply to accommodate population growth. May and June numbers, which had led Bush to hope the country was turning a corner in jobs creation, were also revised downward yesterday.

Bush has presided over the net loss of 1.1 million jobs during his term. He will stand for re-election with an employment level lower than when he took office — the first time that's happened since Herbert Hoover led the nation into the Great Depression.

The American working class has little to thank Bush for. For those with jobs, their pay has risen only 2.4 percent over the last year, a lot slower than 3-percent-plus inflation. Meanwhile, household debt grew to more than 115 percent of disposable income.

Growing numbers of the working class do without health insurance and live in cities whose federal aid — and thus social services and public safety — have been slashed.

It's their children who will struggle with a ballooning national debt caused by the war in Iraq, and by bush's magnanimous tax cuts for rich people. And to a startling degree, it's the working class that has buried almost 1,000 of its sons and daughters in Iraq.

Yet it's largely the American working class — Nascar dads and the like — who put Bush in office and who may yet return him for a second term.

They have done this despite the fact, as Howell Raines observed in a commentary in last Sunday's Focus section, that they're voting "against their own financial, medical and educational interests." When they vote at all, that is.

They have done this because of the enormous appeal of Bush's social agenda: anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, pro-school prayer, pro-guns and, by a wink and a nod, through some appalling judicial appointments, pro-racial discrimination.

"As long as affluent, educated Republicans are allowed to control the wealth in this country," wrote Raines, "they're willing for the rednecks to pray in the public schools that rich Republicans don't attend, to buy guns at Wal-marts they don't patronize, to ban safe abortions that are always available to the affluent, and to oppose marriage for gay people who don't vote republican anyway."

As the Enrons are supplanted at the public trough by the Halliburtons, it's the working class that pays for Bush's shameful energy policies and shameless cronyism in defense contracting. As Bush's tax cuts for the rich become permanent and the estate tax is phased out, it's the working class that must pay much more in taxes for things they once counted on, like Social Security and Medicare, or see them weakened or collapse.

The gap between "two Americas," as John Edwards put it, is widening. When will it end? Will it ever?