Editor’s note: This commentary is by Joseph Gainza, the founder of Vermont Action for Peace and the producer and host of “Gathering Peace” on WGDR and WGDH. He lives in Marshfield.
[W]e now have the empirical data, the American Dream is over for at least 50 percent of the American people. If you were born in 1940, 92 percent of your age cohort made more money than their parents; if you are 36 years old, born in 1980, only 50 percent of your generation are wealthier than mom and dad. And the drop seems to be continuing.
As reported by New York Times columnist David Leonhardt (Dec. 11), a Stanford University team of economists, led by professor Raj Chetty, received access to millions of anonymous tax records and census data that allowed the linking of generations of earners. The results should not be startling to anyone who has paid attention to the growing inequality in income and wealth in this country.
Millions of workers, especially in what was formerly the enormous middle class in this country, know from direct experience that they are worse off economically than their parents; that the American Dream of “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone,” is sputtering and, in fact, is reversing.
The quote is from historian James Truslow Adams, who first defined the dream in 1931. And for a while, due to a tremendous growth in union membership, more equitable federal tax policies, the development of national industries, and a war which propelled the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression, there was rapid widely shared economic growth.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s union membership began to decline due to a number of factors: corporate globalization and the export of manufacturing jobs, the introduction of worker displacing technologies and, in the Reagan ’80s, to tax policies favoring the wealthiest Americans, and labor policies making it more difficult to form unions. Therefore people born in 1950 and subsequent generations have experienced a steady decline in the percentage of those who were economically better off than their parents.
Steel is not coming back to Pittsburgh, coal is so automated and expensive relative to natural gas that jobs in that industry will continue to decline.
Succeeding generations saw an increase in all these union busting and job destroying factors with a growing number of people thrown out of work, losing their homes in the Great Recession, forgoing a college education for their children and finding themselves marginalized in a country they thought was built for them. They are among the people who elected Donald J. Trump to be their president and savior. They also are the millions who voted for Dr. Jill Stein and, in the primaries, for Bernie Sanders. No one had to tell this majority of working people and voters what the economists now have hard data to prove: This economy does not work. If it does not work for the majority, for the approximately 95 percent who are not millionaires or billionaires, it does not work.
Leonhardt reports that the per-capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is now almost twice what it was in 1980. Almost twice the number of goods and services are now produced by the U.S. economy than 36 years ago. But the majority of working people have not shared in that growth. Last year the New York Times reported that over 90 percent of the growth in income and wealth since the Great Recession had gone to the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans. So a near doubling of output by the national economy, with its near doubling of carbon emissions which are the biggest driver of the climate crisis, with its destruction of huge areas of the natural world for the minerals and energy to fuel that growth, has not resulted in more wealth for the average American, in fact it has resulted in younger generations being poorer than preceding generations.
These are good reasons why these voters are angry and were so anxious for change in the recent elections. While we may differ in our prescriptions for how to reverse these dangerous trends, the people who voted for Trump, Stein and Sanders for economic reasons agree the system is fixed against them. We are right, and we have more in common with one another than the wealthy elites and their political stenographers who have fixed the system to serve their own interests.
Unfortunately President-elect Trump, with his proposed appointments to the highest offices in his administration, seems bent on keeping the system pretty much in place. There may be marginal changes to keep his base at bay for the near future, but his prescriptions and the men and women he is installing in power to make America “great” will not reverse the trend which the Stanford economists have analyzed and described. The jobs lost to technological innovation will not be brought back. While stopping the Trans Pacific Partnership trade treaty is a small step in the right direction, we will not see a return of manufacturing on a scale necessary to create the entry level jobs which they once provided. Steel is not coming back to Pittsburgh, coal is so automated and expensive relative to natural gas that jobs in that industry will continue to decline.
Perhaps Mr. Trump and his generals who will lead the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and who will be his national security adviser, will remember that the U.S. economy has long depended on bloated military spending and war to keep from going stagnant. They may decide to exert U.S. military muscle in more foreign crusades. Then the “poverty draft” will enable more young men and women to find employment who are unable to find decent jobs in the civilian economy. War, of course, provides the added “benefit” of distracting us from the justice work we need to do at home.
I hope and pray that before the Trump presidency implodes, those of us who voted for change will begin to talk and listen to each other across the present political divide. Together we could force the change that would improve the lives of all while protecting the earth upon which all life depends. Together we can achieve the greater American dream of justice, equality and democracy. The stakes are very high. I am mindful of the historically proven truth articulated by President John F. Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable.”
