A Good Year for the Outlaw

I am still a tad miffed about the whole “booming economy” discussion a couple of weeks back on Billy’s Blog, on a post originally written by Anon E. Mouse.

While visiting Iowa and my kid this weekend, I grabbed a couple of local papers (Waterloo Courier/Dubuque Telegraph-Herald) while traveling. Saturday’s Courier reported that Iowa’s poverty level is up 30%…30%…from 2000 to 2005. The state’s middle class is shrinking, too, and while wages were up 7.8% in the first half of the decade, that doesn’t come close to the 13% rate of inflation, thus the increase in poverty. The state says median income needed to increase about $4,000 more per family than it did to keep up with inflation. Wow. Booming, eh?

But the most telling line of the story, and the one that helps explains upper-class thinking such as the type that was witnessed at Bill’s site, came from Peter Fisher, research director for the Iowa Policy Project, who said “it’s a recovery in terms of corporate profits [read: 'Greed'], but in’s NOT in terms of real wages and the jobs we’ve lost [read: 'the economy actually sucks'].”

In other words, the rich get richer. And the rich are fine with that. And whenever the “rich” are happy, we’ve got big problems. Bottom line: The economy has been far from “booming” in the last four years, and continues to get worse. What’s going to right the ship? Let’s start by stopping the spending, mainly in Iraq, get these people home, and let’s also do something to curb the corporate greed (close tax loopholes, stop the offshore havens) and really crack down on the single biggest thing affecting the middle class today: gas prices.