It amazes me that anyone would be surprised by this. 12.7 percent of the U.S. population lives in poverty, up from 12.5% last year. This is in spite of the macroeconomic growth and better than expected job numbers for most of the year. The Democratic spin on this is utterly bankrupt. This is the bargain we, as a society, struck 25 years ago and that we’ve refused to spend a minute to reconsider since. We gave up slow, steady growth, accented by brief recessions or stagnation and a very modest amount of economic security for the possibility of boom and bust, unimaginable wealth for a larger part of us coupled with deeper, darker poverty for others and damn little security for anyone. Ultimately, the neo-liberal claptrap about a rising tide raising all boats is a fantasy. I’m tired of seeing what the rising tide does to people. Ultimately, economics is a zero sum game. At any given point, there’s only so much wealth. How it’s distributed is an important measure of a society. You can’t have record numbers of of millionaires year in and year out and expect that money not to be coming from someone else’s pockets.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2005 at 10:45 pm and is filed under economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.