Date:   12/17/2006 5:21:25 PM ( 18 y ago)
Popularity:   message viewed 1280 times
URL:   http://www.curezone.org/blogs/c/fm.asp?i=1000937

Oh my god,you are cutting and pasting from the White house blog on Bush.

well here the real Bush economy.

5 million more people living in poverty since the Clinton years

Salaries are still below where they were at the start of the recovery in November 2001. That, while productivity -- the growth of the economic pie -- is up by almost 15 percent. Meaning we're working harder, producing more, for the same money as five years ago.


Since the recession ended in 2001, 50 percent more of the growth in corporate income was sucked up as profits than after past recessions. That's left less for those of us who work for a living.


As a result, median household income has now fallen for five years in a row. It was 4 percent, or $2,000, lower in 2004 than it was in 1999

That last figure means that Joe and Jane Average American -- the household smack in the middle of the booming go-go American economy -- have gotten a pay cut for five years in a row. Small wonder they're sporting long faces.

And that hasn't occurred in a bubble; health care costs for that same family (with kids) rose over 40 percent -- yeah, 40 percent --between 2000 and 2003.

U.S. household debt, adjusted for inflation, rose by more than a third over the last four years. Mortgage and consumer debt equals 115 percent of after-tax income, and the amount American families spend paying off those debts is at an all-time high of almost 14 percent of their paychecks. In other words Americans are all paying a hefty monthly debt tax to banks and creditors on top of what we already pay the government.

The headline is that the unemployment rate is low and holding steady at around 5 percent. But it's a tricky statistic: people who give up trying to find a job aren't counted, nor are people who are underemployed. Private sector jobs have increased by only about 1 percent since the start of the current economic recovery. Four years into previous recoveries, private sector job growth had averaged almost 9 percent and it's never been less than 6 percent. According to EPI, "The percent of the population that has a job has never recovered since the recession and is still 1.3 percent lower than in March 2001."

Yeah great economy for the wealthy, not so good for us middle folks




 

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