Economy Still Hurting The Poor & The Young

The economic pundits are telling us that the recession is over. These myopic pundits must be just looking at Wall Street and corporate America, because those are the only sectors of our economy that have recovered and are doing well. Everyone else is still hurting and waiting for the "recovery" to reach down to them. Unemployment is still too high and wages are either stagnant or dropping (except for the richest people).

This is especially true among young adults in America. As these young people try to enter the workforce, they are finding that they must accept lower wages. In fact, those without a college education would have made more in the 1970's than they could make today. And it's not a whole lot better for the college educated. They are finding starting wages lower than they were is the 1990's.

The one so-called "bright spot" is that the difference in wages between young men and young women is getting smaller. Sadly though, this is not because young women are making more. It is because the wages of young men are dropping faster than for young women. And employers can get away with paying ever shrinking starting wages because unemployment is so high.

And the unemployment is staying abnormally high even though Wall Street and corporate America is no longer hurting, because the congressional Republicans have obstructed the efforts of the president (and Democrats) to create jobs. They are doing this to keep their corporate masters happy -- and those corporate executives love the current situation, because they no longer have to pay decent wages to get workers.

Here’s a breakdown of the numbers:

• The entry-level hourly wage of a young male high school graduate in 2011 was 25.3 percent less than that for the equivalent worker in 1979, a drop of roughly $4.00 per hour in 2011.
• Among women, the entry-level high school wage fell 14.2 percent over the same period, and dropped by $1.64 last year.
• Wages for high-school educated women are still far below those of their male counterparts, a gap of 15 percent.
• In 2011 the hourly wage of entry-level male college graduates was just a bit over $1.00 higher than in 1979, a rise of 5.2 percent over thirty-two years.
• Women college grads did better, with their wages growing by 15.4 percent, or $2.50, from 1979 to 2011.
• The gender pay gap among this group, however, still persists. The hourly wage for college educated men was $21.68 in 2011, compared with $18.80 for women.

The lower starting wages and the falling wages of those already employed (due to the lack of wages to keep up with inflation and all the benefits of increases in productivity going only to the rich), is affecting our society as a whole. Census Bureau figures have shown us that about half of the United States population is either living below the poverty line or classified as low income (making less than 50% above the poverty line).

That figure alone should shock Americans into demanding that the government do something to create jobs and help those hurting Americans. But it gets even worse. We now learn that the number of households living in extreme poverty (where each member of the household lives on less than $2 a day) has doubled in the last 15 years. In 1996, 636,000 households lived in extreme poverty. Today that figure has climbed to 1.4 million households.

And in that same time period the number of children being raised in extreme poverty has also doubled -- from 1.4 million in 1996 to about 2.8 million currently. And the numbers of households (and children) living in extreme poverty keeps growing larger. It grows larger because the Republicans block job creation efforts and cut social programs meant to keep people out of extreme poverty.

Of course there are those who will accuse me of waging class warfare by pointing out these economic injustices. To an extent they are right. There is a class war going on in America. It was declared and is waged by the rich on ordinary Americans. And they are winning it. It is time for the 99% to fight back.