The epidemic of poverty has hit minorities especially hard. According to Census data, between 2009 and 2010 alone the black poverty rate jumped from 25% to 27%. For Hispanics, it climbed from 25% to 26%, and for whites, from 9.4% to 9.9%. At 16.4 million, more children now live in poverty than at any time since 1962. Put another way, 22% of kids currently live below the poverty line, a 17-year record.
America's lost decade also did a remarkable job of destroying the wealth of nonwhite families, the Pew Research Center reported in July. Between 2005 and 2009, the household wealth of a typical black family dropped off a cliff, plunging by a whopping 53%; for a typical Hispanic family, it was even worse, at 66%. For white middle-class households, losses on average totaled "only" 16%.
Here's a more eye-opening way to look at it: in 2009, the median wealth for a white family was $113,149, for a black family $5,677, and for a Hispanic family $6,325. The second half of the lost decade, in other words, laid ruin to whatever wealth was possessed by blacks and Hispanics -- largely home ownership devastated by the popping of the housing bubble.
The New Lost Decade
As for this decade, less than two years in, we already know that the news isn't likely to be much better. The problems that plagued Americans in the previous decade show little sign of improvement.
Take the jobs market. Tally the number of jobs eliminated since the recession began and also the labor market's failure to create enough jobs to keep up with normal population growth, and you're left with an 11.2 million jobs deficit, a chasm between where the economy should be and where it is now. Filling that gap is the key to any recovery, but to do so by mid-2016 would mean adding 280,000 jobs a month -- a pipe dream in an economy limping along creating an average of just 35,000 jobs a month for the past three months. Unless the country's jobs engine were somehow jump-started, 11.2 million jobs in this decade would be a real stretch.
But few in Congress, and none of the controlling Republican politicians, will even think about using the jumper cables. President Obama's relatively modest American Jobs Act, for instance, was declared a corpse on arrival at the House of Representatives. On Monday, a reporter asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), "The $447 billion jobs package as a package: dead?" Yes, Cantor assured him, indeed it was.
The president and his administration watch despondently from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And for the majority of Americans, a jobless "recovery" exacts an ever-greater toll on their earnings, their families, their health, their basic ability to make ends meet.
The question on many economists' minds is: Will the U.S. slump into a double-dip recession? But for so many Americans living outside the political and media hothouses of Washington and New York, this question is silly. After all, how can the economy tumble back into recession if it never left in the first place?
No one can say for certain how many years will pass before America regains anything like its pre-recession swagger -- and even then, there's little to suggest that the devastating effects of the middle class's lost decade won't have changed this country in ways that will prove permanent, or that the gap between the wealthy and everyone else will do anything but increase in good times or bad in the decade to come. The deep polarization between the very rich and everyone else has been decades in the making and is a global phenomenon. Reversing it could be the task of a lifetime.
In the meantime, the middle class has flat-lined. Life support is nowhere close to arriving. One lost decade may have ended, but the next one has likely only begun.
Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. He writes about the economy and national politics, and has appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, and Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
Copyright 2011 Andy Kroll
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