Our sinful economy.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Column

On the homepage of whitehouse.gov, there is a headline that reads "Strong Economy" and a blurb that touts the President's "pro-growth strategies." So proud was Bush of his economic policies that he thought they would carry Republicans to victory in November.

He was wrong about the popularity of his policies. And he was wrong about the perceptions Americans have of our economy.

Most Americans can see through the Bush flim-flam.

Even though Bush brags that real wages have gone up by 2.8 percent over the last year, most people's incomes are still not ahead of where they were six years ago.

People know their wallet isn't any fatter, and their bank account's no healthier, and their credit card bills no smaller.

"Revealing the depth and breadth of economic anxieties, 81 percent of the voters told the exit pollsters that they had just enough to get by financially or were falling behind, and 68 percent thought the next generation would have it worse," according to Talking Past Each Other, a new study by the Economic Policy Institute.

A story on the front page of the New York Times business section on November 28 spells out some of the reasons for these anxieties.

Average real incomes fell by 3 percent between 2000 and 2004.

Looked at over the past twenty-five years, things don't get any better. From 1979 to 2004, "the bottom 60 percent of Americans, on average, made less than ninety-five cents in 2004 for each dollar they reported in 1979," the Times reports. For those on the top 95th to top 99th rungs of the income ladder, the past quarter century was splendid: Their income went up 53 percent. And those on the top 0.1 percent rung? Their income went up 348 percent.

That is obscene.

We have a plutocracy in this country, not just of the rich or the very rich but of the unbelievably rich. Those in the 0.1 percent category are the ones who benefit most from the George Bush economy.

As he once put it, "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."

Meanwhile, in 2004, "the poorest sixty million Americans reported average incomes of less than $7 a day," the Times story said, including the twelve million kids in that bracket.

Seven bucks a day! That barely gets you one meal at McDonald's.

The distribution of wealth in this country is also woefully skewed. In 2004, the top 1 percent of Americans owned 34 percent of the nation's wealth. That's more than the combined wealth of 90 percent of Americans, according to The State of Working America...