The Doug Jones average.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist

To report on how our economy is doing, media outlets keep a constant eye on the Dow Jones Average. But they're like cats watching the wrong mouse hole, for the great majority of Americans have between zero and next to nothing in the stock market.

The economic measure that matters most to most folks is the Doug Jones Average. The Doug is concerned about such key indicators as the pump price on a gallon of regular, the value of today's $7.25 minimum wage, and the impact of global inflationary pressures on the cost of a six-pack.

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So, how're Doug and Dottie Jones doing? Not well, report the number crunchers at the Federal Reserve. In the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, Fed economists found that from 2007 through 2010, the median net worth of U.S. households tumbled by a startling 39 percent, falling to the lowest level in twenty years.

In short, Americans are not merely feeling poorer--they are poorer. Foreclosures, lost jobs, wage declines, and other reductions (combined with rising costs of everything from gasoline to child care) have become the norm, even shoving many proud middle-classers onto food stamp rolls. Yet Washington remains fixated on propping up Wall Street. Congressional Republicans are actually clamoring for more financial deregulation and tax giveaways to coddle Wall Streeters

(the same disastrous approach that caused the mess we're in) while also voting to slash funding for the food stamp program that more and more people need.

To keep a mighty tree alive you must nourish the grassroots, not just spritz the few leaves at the top. But Washington has become a town of leaf-spritzers, ignoring the massive housing crunch, ongoing joblessness, and mounting consumer debt. Indeed, three-fourths of Americans today have more invested in their aging cars and trucks than in stocks (and, by the way, those vehicles-which are the chief asset for millions of people--are now, on average, eleven years old).

Winds of hurricane force are knocking down the Doug and Dottle Jones and others in America's workaday majority. This is not the natural functioning of inscrutable market forces, but the direct result of government policy that favors the elite--and of criminal shenanigans by the Wall Streeters. They keep putting the short-term...