Too many top
economic commentators are drawn from a pool of talking heads and economists who
treat the welfare of corporations as a top priority.
David
Kocieniewski just won the Pulitzer Prize for his in-depth reporting on the
loopholes that the richest Americans and corporations routinely exploit to
minimize their tax bills. Congratulations to him! But most of his counterparts
covering economics and business are a bunch of lapdogs.
Do
you get your economic news from TV or newspapers? Big mistake.
Their
income derives heavily from corporations that need you to buy things. You're
more likely to do so if you think (accurately or not) that the economy is OK.Increasingly, well-known journalists on the
business and finance beats top off their earnings with speaking fees from Wall
Street outfits, according to a recent Columbia
Journalism Review article
appropriately headlined "Money Talks."
With
notable exceptions like Paul Krugman, most of the prominent commentators who tackle the economy are drawn from
a pool of talking heads and economists who treat the welfare of corporations as
a top priority. This claque includes business journalists who understand that
their continued employment depends on making the economy sound chipper.
Trapped
in the middle of this artifice is Fox News. While it too prefers to sound
upbeat about the economy for the benefit of its advertisers, it simultaneously
prefers to sound downbeat so as to drive President Barack Obama from office.
What a dilemma.
At
any rate, the bushy-tailed economists on TV (and even those on NPR) emphasize
the expanding economy and declining unemployment rate. Hallelujah! Salient
questions of whether those new jobs are part-time or full-time and how much
they pay are often shoved aside. The news on that front isn't good. Too many
Americans are taking any crummy job they can find just to keep up with the
mortgage or to hold off the landlord.
Perhaps
the most telling benchmark for America
Then
there's the fact that another 2.6 million folks
drifted out of the painful "near poor" world down into real poverty
in 2010. In addition, devastating "extreme poverty" has also
mushroomed to 6.7 percent of the population, a new record. (Extreme poverty is
when you earn less than half of a poverty-line income. In 2010, the income for
the poorest poor totaled $5,570 or less for an individual and $11,157 for a
family of four.)
Looked
at from another angle, the bottom line on pay rates in 2010 was very scary. The
median annual wage per employee was only $26,364, meaning that half of all workers made
less. Inflation adjusted, that's the lowest income since 1999. And those are
just the folks who are working. If you add together those who are officially
unemployed, those who have given up, and those who are part-time but seek to be
full-time, it comes out to around 27 million Americans. And besides that, prices are
still going up.
So
is there a cure? You bet. John Maynard Keynes figured it out back in the 1930s.
Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented it. What you do is have the
government hire poor people to build stuff. You know, schools, bridges, parks,
ports, works of art, and all those wonderful projects that date back to the
WPA. I attended just such a great high school which still serves as our city
hall today, complete with enough original murals to be a tourist attraction.
Yes, the country went way into debt, but when the Depression and World War II
ended, we paid it off.
Today's
Republicans "just say no" to similar plans. Obama's stimulus package
got us off to a good start, but the GOP soon squelched it. They want the
recession to last at least until November so that the public will vote out
you-know-who. And why not? Corporations are doing OK.
Plus
there's no danger that it will all be explained on TV.
OtherWords columnist William A. Collins is a
former state representative, and a former mayor of Norwalk , Connecticut