Biden's Unheralded War on Poverty
By creating a full-employment economy, Biden enabled millions of low-wage workers to raise their pay.
BY HAROLD MEYERSON JULY 10, 2023
The Great American Quit Rate (full name: Great American Quit-Your-Stinkin-Job-for-a-Better-One Rate) has finally subsided. While it lasted, though, it enabled the nations low-wage workers to make the first substantial economic gains theyve made in 40 years. And that the GAQR existed at all was due almost entirely to President Bidens war on povertya war that has gone largely unnoticed by both the public and the media.
How sizable were the gains that those low-wage workers made? According to a study by economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew, so many workerspredominantly young, with no more than high school educations, working overwhelmingly in low-wage service-sector jobsquit those jobs in 2021 and 2022 for better-paying ones that this collective job switch actually reduced such indices of inequality as the gaps between college-educated and non-college workers, and that between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile, by a full 25 percent. Both those gaps had been steadily widening for the past four decades. So sizable were these gains among low-wage workers that they were the only group of workers over the past two years who have seen wage increases that outpaced the rise in inflation. It was chiefly they who were doing the quitting and moving to better jobs over the past several years; better-paid workers largely stayed put.
Autor, Dube, and McGrew attribute this entirely unexpected boost to the fortunes of the working poor to the equally unexpected conditions of full employment that followed the economic collapse brought on by the COVID pandemic. It was only under those conditions that the job-quitters could feel assured that theyd find better-paying work.
At that point, the study ends, because the question of where that full employment came from is not, strictly speaking, an economic one. Its a political question. And the answer to the whence-full-employment question is the policies that Biden and the Democratic Congress enacted soon after Biden took office. Specifically, its the much maligned $1.9 trillion recovery bill that Congress passed in the late winter of 2021.
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/
( Yep. )
usonian
(13,063 posts)Academic studies like the one below 💡 refute "trickle down economics" as so much welfare for the rich, who basically hoard the money.
Bidenomics:
Thanks to LetMyPeopleVote for this.
https://democraticunderground.com/100218052493
more at the link.
BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)That's it. lol
calimary
(83,812 posts)Some of us saw the whole trickle-down canard as just a (supposedly) nicer version of peed-upon.
2naSalit
(91,672 posts)SunSeeker
(53,394 posts)usonian
(13,063 posts)Fantastic accomplishments against EXTREMIST opposition.
Do you remember how LBJ used that against Goldwater?
I jotted down what I think are key points in an earlier post.
https://democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=18042278
Keep government from dictating what you read, your religion and your private life.
The working person deserves a break rather than welfare for the rich.
Americans believe in and defend the constitution because no American gains from harming another.
We fight for individual rights where others would deny them.
America's needs are met by responsive, responsible government rather than contrived and fruitless culture wars.
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I'm for any combination of these and others THAT WORKS!
It goes without saying, and maybe IT SHOULD BE SAID:
The extremists are guilty of everything they accuse others of.
When I read stories of police and religious "leaders" destroying the lives of kids by pounding them ....
THERE'S YOUR WILLIE HORTON, lots of Willie Hortons.
It's true, use it.