Imagine a country where economic inequality is going back to the future circa the 1930s. The combined after-tax income of the top 1 percent of tax filers was about half that of the bottom 50 percent of tax filers in 1986. By the late 1990s, the top 1 percent had a larger share of after-tax income than the bottom 50 percent.

Imagine a country with a greed surplus and justice deficit.

Imagine a country where the poor and middle class bear the brunt of severe cutbacks in education, health, environmental programs, and other public services to close state and federal budget deficits fueled by ballooning tax give-aways for wealthy households and corporations.

It's not Argentina.

Wage Inequities

Imagine a country which demands that people work for a living while denying many a living wage.

Imagine a country where health care aides can't afford health insurance. Where people working in the food industry depend on food banks to help feed their children. Where childcare teachers don't make enough to save for their own children's education.

It's not the Philippines.

Imagine a country where productivity went up, but workers' wages went down.

In the words of the national labor department, "As the productivity of workers increases, one would expect worker compensation [wages and benefits] to experience similar gains." That's not what happened.

Since 1968, worker productivity has risen 81 percent while the average hourly wage barely budged, adjusting for inflation, and the real value of the minimum wage dropped 38 percent.

Imagine a country where the minimum wage just doesn't add up. Where minimum wage workers earn more than a third less than their counterparts earned a third of a century ago, adjusting for inflation. Where a couple with two children would have to work more than three full-time jobs at the $5.15 minimum wage to make ends meet.

It's not Mexico.

Imagine a country where some of the worst CEOs make millions more in a year than the best CEOs of earlier generations made in their lifetimes. CEOs made 45 times the pay of average production and nonsupervisory workers in 1980. They made 96 times as much in 1990, 160 times as much in 1995 and 369 times as much in 2001. Back in 1960, CEOs made an average 38 times more than schoolteachers. CEOs made 63 times as much in 1990 and 264 times as much as public schoolteachers in 2001.

Imagine a country that had a record-breaking ten-year economic expansion in 1991-2001, but millions of workers make wages so low they have to choose between eating or heating, health care or childcare.

A leading business magazine observed, "People who worked hard to make their companies competitive are angry at the way the profits are distributed. They think it is unfair, and they are right."

It's not England.

Falling Living Standards

Imagine a country where living standards are falling for younger generations despite increased education. Since 1973, the share of workers without a high school degree has fallen by half. The share of workers with at least a four-year college degree has doubled. But the 2002 average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers (the majority of the workforce) is 7.5 percent below 1973, adjusting for inflation. Median net worth (assets minus debt) dropped between 1995 and 2001 for households headed by persons under age 35 and households that don't own their own home.

About one out of four workers makes $8.70 an hour or less. That's not much more than the real value of the minimum wage of 1968 at $8.27 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

It's not Russia.

Imagine a country where for more and more people a job doesn't keep you out of poverty, it keeps you working poor. Imagine a country much richer than it was 25 years ago, but the percentage of full-time workers living in poverty has jumped 50 percent.

Imagine a country that sets the official poverty line well below the actual cost of minimally adequate housing, health care, food, and other necessities. You were not counted as poor in 2001 (latest available final data) unless you had pre-tax incomes below these thresholds: $9,214 for a person under 65, $8,494 for a person 65 and older, $11,569 for a two-person family, $14,128 for a three-person family, and $18,104 for a family of four. On average, households need more than double the official poverty threshold to meet basic needs.

Imagine a country where homelessness is on the rise, but federal funding for low-income housing is about 50 percent lower than it was in 1976, adjusting for inflation. The largest federal housing support program is the mortgage interest deduction, which disproportionately benefits higher-income families.

Imagine a country where more workers are going back to the future of sweatshops and day labor. Corporations are replacing full-time jobs with disposable "contingent workers." They include temporary employees, contract workers, and "leased" employees--some of them fired and then "rented" back at a large discount by the same company--and involuntary part-time workers, who want permanent full-time work.

It's not Spain.

How do workers increasingly forced to migrate from job to job, at low and variable wage rates, without health insurance or paid vacation, much less a pension, care for themselves and their families, pay for college, save for retirement, plan a future, build strong communities?

Corporate Profiteering

Imagine a country where after mass layoffs and union busting, just 13.5 percent of workers are unionized. One out of three workers were union members in 1955. Full-time workers who were union members had median 2001 weekly earnings of $718 compared with just $575 for workers not represented by unions.

Imagine a country where the concerns of working people are dismissed as "special interests" and the profit-making interests of globetrotting corporations substitute for the "national interest."

Imagine a country negotiating "free trade" agreements that help corporations trade freely on cheap labor at home and abroad.

One ad financed by the country's agency for international development showed a Salvadoran woman in front of a sewing machine. It told corporations, "You can hire her for 33 cents an hour. Rosa is more than just colorful. She and her co-workers are known for their industriousness, reliability and quick learning. They make El Salvador one of the best buys." The country that financed the ad intervened militarily to make sure El Salvador would stay a "best buy" for corporations.

It's not Canada.

Gender Discrimination

Imagine a country where nearly two-thirds of women with children under age 6 and more than three-fourths of women with children ages 6-17 are in the labor force, but affordable childcare and after-school programs are scarce. Apparently, kids are expected to have three parents: Two parents with jobs to pay the bills, and another parent to be home in mid-afternoon when school lets out--as well as all summer.

Imagine a country where women working full time earn 76 cents for every dollar men earn. Women don't pay 76 cents on a man's dollar for their education, rent, food or childcare. The gender wage gap has closed just 12 cents since 1955, when women earned 64 cents for every dollar earned by men. There's still another 24 cents to go....

Imagine a country where discrimination against women is pervasive from the bottom to the top of the pay scale and it's not because women are on the "mommy track." In the words of a leading business magazine, "At the same level of management, the typical woman's pay is lower than her male colleague's--even when she has the exact same qualifications, works just as many years, relocates just as often, provides the main financial support for her family, takes no time off for personal reasons, and wins the same number of promotions to comparable jobs."

Imagine a country where instead of rooting out discrimination, many policy makers are busily blaming women for their disproportionate poverty. If women earned as much as similarly qualified men, poverty in single-mother households would be cut in half.

It's not Japan.

Imagine a country where the awful labeling of children as "illegitimate" has again been legitimized. Besides meaning born out of wedlock, illegitimate also means illegal, contrary to rules and logic, misbegotten, not genuine, wrong--to be a bastard. The word illegitimate has consequences. It helps make people more disposable. Single mothers and their children have become prime scapegoats for illegitimate economics....

Education, Race, and Income

Imagine a country whose school system is rigged in favor of the already privileged, with lower caste children tracked by race and income into the most deficient and demoralizing schools and classrooms. Public school budgets are heavily determined by private property taxes, allowing higher income districts to spend much more than poor ones. In the state with the largest gap in 1999-2000, state and local spending per pupil in districts with the lowest child poverty rates was more than $2,152 greater than districts with the highest child poverty rates. The difference amounts to about $861,000 for a typical elementary school of 400 students--money that could be used for teachers, books, and other resources. Disparities are even wider among states, with spending in districts with enrollments of 15,000 or more ranging from $3,932 per pupil in one district to $14,244 in another.

In rich districts kids take well-stocked libraries, laboratories, and state-of-the-art computers for granted. In poor schools they are rationing out-of-date textbooks and toilet paper. Rich schools often look like country clubs--with manicured sports fields and swimming pools. Poor schools often look more like jails--with concrete grounds and grated windows. College prep courses, art, music, physical education, field trips, and foreign languages are often considered necessities for the affluent, luxuries for the poor.

Wealthier citizens argue that lack of money isn't the problem in poorer schools--family values are--until proposals are made to make school spending more equitable. Then money matters greatly for those who already have more.

It's not India.

Imagine a country whose constitution once counted black slaves as worth three-fifths of whites. Today, black per capita income is about three-fifths of whites.

Imagine a country where racial disparities take their toll from birth to death. The black infant mortality rate is more than double that of whites. Black life expectancy is nearly six years less. Black unemployment is more than twice that of whites and the black poverty rate is almost triple that of whites.

Imagine a country where the government subsidized decades of segregated suburbanization for whites while the inner cities left to people of color were treated as outsider cities--separate, unequal, and disposable. Recent studies have documented continuing discrimination in education, employment, banking, insurance, housing, and health care.

It's not South Africa.

Imagine a country where the typical non-Hispanic white household has seven times as much net worth (including home equity) as the typical household of color. From 1995 to 2001, the typical white household's net worth rose from $88,500 to $120,900 while the net worth of the typical household of color fell from $18,300 to $17,100.

Imagine a country that doesn't count you as unemployed just because you're unemployed. To be counted in the official unemployment rate you must have searched for work in the past four weeks. The government doesn't count people as "unemployed" if they are so discouraged from long and fruitless job searches they have given up looking. It doesn't count as "unemployed" those who couldn't look for work in the past month because they had no childcare, for example. If you need a fuIl-time job, but you're working part-time--whether 1 hour or 34 hours weekly--because that's all you can find, you're counted as employed.

A leading business magazine observed, "Increasingly the labor market is filled with surplus workers who are not being counted as unemployed."

It's not Germany....

The Cycle of Unequal Opportunity

Imagine a country where the cycle of unequal opportunity is intensifying. Its beneficiaries often slander those most systematically undervalued, underpaid, underemployed, underfinanced, underinsured, underrated, and otherwise underserved and undermined--as undeserving, "underclass," impoverished in moral and social values, and lacking the proper "work ethic." The oft-heard stereotype of deadbeat poor people masks the growing reality of dead-end jobs and disposable workers.

Imagine a country that abolished aid to families with dependent children while maintaining aid for dependent corporations.

Imagine a country where state and local governments are rushing to expand lotteries, video poker, and other government-promoted gambling to raise revenues, disproportionately from the poor, which they should be raising from a fair tax system.

Imagine a country whose military budget tops average Cold War levels although the break up of the Soviet Union produced friends, not foes. This nation spends almost as much on the military as the rest of the world combined and leads the world in arms exports.

Imagine a country that ranks first in the world in wealth and military power, and 34th in child mortality (under five), tied with Malaysia and well behind countries such as Singapore and South Korea. If the government were a parent it would be guilty of child abuse. Thousands of children die preventable deaths.

Imagine a country where health care is managed for healthy profit. In many countries health care is a right, but in this nation one out of six people under age 65 has no health insurance, public or private.

Healthcare is literally a matter of life and death. Lack of health insurance typically means lack of preventive health care and delayed or second-rate treatment. The uninsured are at much higher risk for chronic disease and disability, and have a 25 percent greater chance of dying (adjusting for physical, economic, and behavioral factors). Uninsured women are 49 percent more likely to die than women with insurance during the four to seven years following an initial diagnosis of breast cancer.

Imagine a country where many descendants of its first inhabitants live on reservations strip-mined of natural resources and have a higher proportion of people in poverty than any other ethnic group.

Imagine a country where 500 years of plunder and lies are masked in expressions like "Indian giver." Where the military still dubs enemy territory, "Indian country."...

The Blame Game

Imagine a country where white men who are "falling down" the economic ladder are being encouraged to believe they are falling because women and people of color are climbing over them to the top or dragging them down from the bottom. That way, they will blame women and people of color rather than corporate and government policy. They will buy the myth of "reverse discrimination." Never mind that white males hold most senior management positions and continuing unreversed discrimination is well documented.

Imagine a country with a president [George W. Bush] who, even more than his father before him, "was born on third base and thought he hit a triple." The president wants to undo affirmative action. Never mind that despite all his advantages he was a mediocre student who relied on legacy affirmative action for the children of rich alumni to get into a top prep school and college. Never mind that he rode his family connections in business and politics.

Imagine a country where on top of discrimination comes insult. It's common for people of color to get none of the credit when they succeed--portrayed as undeserving beneficiaries of affirmative action and "reverse discrimination"--and all of the blame when they fail....

It's not Italy.

It's the United States.

Decades ago Martin Luther King Jr. called on us to take the high road in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? King wrote: "A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. We are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but ... one day the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life....

"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.... There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except short-sightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum--and livable--income for every American family."

FURTHER READINGS

Books

• Randy Albelda and Ann Withorn, eds. Lost Ground: Welfare Reform, Poverty, and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002.
• Douglas I. Besharov, ed. Family Well-Being After Welfare Reform. Somerset, NJ: Transaction, 2003.
• Martha Burt et al. Helping America's Homeless: Emergency Shelter or Affordable Housing. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2001.
• Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel. Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity. New York: New Press, 2000.
• Dalton Conley, ed. Wealth and Poverty in America: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
• Sheldon Danziger and Robert H. Haveman, eds. Poverty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Todd DePastino. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Rosemarie T. Downer. Homelessness and Its Consequences: Impact on Children's Psychological Well-Being. New York: Routledge, 2001.
• Barbara Ehrenreich. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
• D. Stanley Eitzen et al. Experiencing Poverty: Voices from the Bottom. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002.
• Sharon Hays. Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Lori Holyfield. Moving Up and Out: Poverty, Education, and the Single Parent Family. Philadephia: Temple University Press, 2002.
• Kim Hopper. Reckoning with Homelessness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.
• James Jennings. Welfare Reform and the Revitalization of Inner City Neighborhoods. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003.
• Joanna Lipper. Growing Up Fast. New York: Picador, 2003.
• Marjorie Mayers. Street Kids and Streetscapes: Panhandling, Politics, and Prophecies. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
• George S. McGovern. The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.
• Lawrence M. Mead. Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Michelle Miller-Adams. Owning Up: Poverty Assets, and the American Dream. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002.
• David Neumark. How Living Wage Laws Affect Low-Wage Workers and Low-Income Families. San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2002.
• Benjamin I. Page and James Roy Simmons. What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
• James T. Patterson. America's Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Sanford F. Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, eds. Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
• Loretta Schwartz-Nobel. Growing Up Empty: The Hanger Epidemic in America. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
• Steven Shafarman. We the People: Healing Our Democracy and Saving Our World. Van Nuys, CA: Gain, 2001.
• Holly Sklar et al. Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for Us All. New York: Ms. Foundation for Women, 2001.

Periodicals

• Caralee J. Adams. "A Time of Compassion," Better Homes and Gardens, December 1999.
• Willie Baptist and Mary Bricker-Jenkins. "A New Era in the Struggle Against Poverty," Dollars and Sense, September/October 2002.
• Deepak Bhargava and Joan Kuriansky. "Drawing the Line on Poverty," Washington Post National Weekly Edition, September 23-29, 2002.
• Albert Bliss. "Homeless Man Interviews Himself," Harper's Magazine, September 2001.
• Charmion Browne. "When Shelter Feels Like a Prison," New York Time, August 13, 2002.
• W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm. "Why Decry the Wealth Gap?" New York Times, January 24, 2000.
• Economist. "America's Great Achievement: Welfare Reform," August 25, 2001.
• Peter Edelman. "Poverty and Welfare: Does Compassionate Conservatism Have a Heart?" Albany Law Review, Spring 2001.
• Barbara Ehrenreich. "America's Torrent of Need," Los Angeles Times, August 5, 2001.
• Fred Gaboury. "Homelessness Rises Across the Nation," People's Weekly World, January 12, 2002.
• Lawrence E. Harrison. "The Cultural Roots of Poverty," Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1999.
• Ron Haskins. "Giving Is NOT Enough," Brookings Review, Summer 2001.
• Robert V. Hess. "Helping People Off the Streets: Real Solutions to Urban Homelessness," USA Today (Magazine), January 2000.
• Jacob G. Hornberger. "The Minimum Wage: Enemy of the Poor," Liberty, July 1999.
• Fidelis Iyebote. "How Poverty-Stricken Is the U.S.?" World & I, January 2000.
• Patricia Ann Lamoureux. "Improving Welfare Reform," America, April 8, 2002.
• Ed Loring. "Housing Comes First," The Other Side, May/June 2002.
• Ed Marciniak. "Recalculating Poverty," Commonweal, January 28, 2000.
• Marci McDonald. "Homeless in Silicon Valley," Redbook, November 2000.
• Jack Newfield. "How the Other Half Still Lives: In the Shadow of Wealth, New York's Poor Increase," Nation, March 17, 2003.
• Margot Patterson. "Hungry in America," National Catholic Reporter, February 15, 2002.
• Robert Pear. "Number of People Living in Poverty Increases in U.S.," New York Times, August 25, 2002.
• Robert E. Rector. "Not So Poor: The Luxury of American Poverty," National Review, October 25, 1999.
• Holly Sklar. "$5.15 an Hour Just Doesn't Add Up," Democratic Left, Spring 2002.
• Thomas Sowell. "Leftists Use Poor as Means to an End," Human Events, December 15, 2000.
• Joel Stein. "The Real Face of Homelessness: More than Ever, It Is Mothers with Kids Who Are Ending Up on the Streets," Time, January 20, 2003.
• Peter Stock. "Poverty on Paper: Claims of Rising Child Destitution Do Not Hold Up to Scrutiny," Report Newsmagazine, February 16, 2002.
• Mark Stricherz. "How Faith-Based Charities Can Work: The Success of Covenant House," Crisis, September 2002.
• Michael Tanner. "Welfare Reform: How Successful?" World & I, October 2001.
• Jim Tull. "Shall the Poor Always Be with Us?" The Other Side, May/June 2002.
• Jim Wallis. "Amid Prosperity, Many Kinds of Poverty," Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2000.