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This Week's Cartoon (12/1/03)

This time this year—much like this time last year, and the year before, and the year before that ad nauseum—news media local and national dust off their superlatives over the "record number of holiday shoppers" taking advantage of early morning sales following Thanksgiving. Images of kids visiting Santa and crowds pressed against glass doors and cash registers ringing repeat predictably. They drag out their resident economists to speculate as to the impact holiday shopping will have on the economy, its job creation potential, and this year, a new twist, the influence of that middle class tax cut passed last spring.

It's enough to make a Grinch of you. (No, not that Grinch; I mean the real one—who had a point, dammit.)

But the holiday season always does that to me. Yes, I love giving presents and eating lotsa food with family and friends. Yet I cannot forget that while everyone is sounding so pious and compassionate during the "season of giving", they spend the rest of the year screwing over the poor, the needy, the weak and the underpriveleged. (No, they are not always the same thing.) This year's tax cuts were the most galling of all. I'm no christian, but dammit, neither is George Bush and anyone else who signs on with his program to enrich his corporate cronies while waging class war on the poor at home and a real war on the poor everywhere else. Hence, this week's cartoon.

So how have the middle class handled their tax cut? (Sorry, you poor and low-income people; none for you.) Just as expected. They blew it on crap and racked up their debt. Take this news report as a representative example:

The Enriquez family did exactly what the proponents of President Bush's tax cut were hoping: They pumped their tax check back into the economy.

But like millions of other people, they spent their refunds and then some. That contributed to an unexpected spike in consumer debt in September, more than twice the dollar amount experts had been expecting.

Consumer balances on credit cards, auto loans and other debt rose $15.1 billion to $1.97 trillion, a 9.7 percent increase on an annualized basis. That was on top of a debt increase of nearly $9 billion in August.

So the middle class are only screwing themselves—with Bush and Congress's help, of course.

Ah, but it is now, as noted, the "season of giving," yes? Perhaps more thoughtful folks will contribute to the charity of their choice, as Bush has suggested they do. After all, the need is great:

With Uncle Sam defining 35 million Americans as "food insecure" this season, some of last year's donors have become this year's clients, America's Second Harvest says. The nation's top hunger-relief organization reports that:

• The Houston Food Bank has seen a 45 percent surge in food pantry requests.
  
• The Greater Boston Food Bank finds demand rising in once-affluent suburbs.

Alas, generosity is weak:

Donations are down 15 percent and requests for help up at least 30 percent at the Food Bank of the Rockies. "We're getting squeezed at both ends," said Courtney Hunter-Melo of the Denver food bank, which supplies 16 million pounds of food a year to 900 pantries in Colorado and Wyoming.

Nearly 70 percent of families using a food pantry include a working adult, and half also had help from the federal food stamp program, the Urban Institute reports.
—From the Scripps Howard News Service

Oh. Woops.

UPDATE: For more fun on poverty in the US, check out blue heron's post on low wage work and the wage gap between employee and employer. On the latter, figures were snatched from that flamin' librul Bill Moyers (who got it from The Economist) demonstrating the nation's standing with respect to wage gaps world wide:

Nation----------Wage Gap
Japan--------------11
Germany-----------12
France------------15
Canada------------20
Britain-------------22
Mexico------------47
Venezuela---------50
United States-----475

Moyer's crew also reports on the political power of women in the US and around the world. Oh, look, we rank pretty low there, too. Yay!

Posted by kevinmoore at November 30, 2003 09:03 PM | TrackBack