EDITORIAL
In sickness & in poverty
There are different ways to measure the state of the
capitalist economy. Sales. Profit margins. Stock prices. Those
show how good the economy is for the bosses.
Credit card balance. Bank account. Weekly income. These show
how good or bad it is for an employed worker.
How many children are hungry. How many people ask for money
in the street. How many are sleeping on the street. How many
are dying on the street. These show how bad it is for
unemployed workers and uninsured workers with illnesses.
It's hard to capture the meaning of an economic downturn
from a bunch of numbers. But the Census Bureau released some
statistics as August ended that translated into the pictures
painted by the last paragraph.
There was even some controversy about the timing of the
publication of these numbers. Some Democrats said they were
released early so they didn't hit the media closer to the
election. Let's look at the numbers and see what they mean.
The number of people in the United States living below the
poverty level increased in 2003 by 1.3 million, from 34.5
million to 35.8 million. Children accounted for some 800,000 of
the increase.
One of every eight people in this enormously wealthy country
is dirt poor.
One hand-made sign at the big anti-Bush demonstration Aug.
29 read: "1.3 million more poor. Cost of the war: $144
billion." While the war doesn't explain why the number of poor
grew, it is certainly true that the $144 billion could be
looked at as more than $4,000 that could go to everyone living
in poverty.
Another important statistic: There were 1.4 million more
people without health insurance. This number grew from 43.5
million to almost 45 million, or 15.6 percent of the
population. It actually leaves out a few million people who
don't want to be counted because they don't have legal papers,
but they also don't have health insurance. Since most of the
very poor are eligible for Medicaid, this means that as many as
80 million people--poor or without insurance--are living a
precarious existence.
These numbers mean that more people are hungry, more live in
the streets, and more are sick with no medical care and more
likely to die.
This is where capitalism has brought the people in the
richest country in the world in only 13 years of uncontested
world domination, since the 1991 collapse of the USSR. The
profit system was supposed to be humanity's only future. But
the temporary victory of the bosses wasn't, as some capitalist
apologists argued, the end of history. It was the start of
another chapter of class struggle that will revive the struggle
for socialism.
Reprinted from the Sept. 9, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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