Working class people have been wondering for the last few years when the economic growth the Bush administration regularly trumpets will touch their lives. Many, no doubt, have wondered whether this economic growth will manage to entirely pass them by. Maybe they can stop wondering now. The growing economy is blessing the lives of some, but it ain’t them. It ain’t people with low wage jobs. It ain’t people with upper-middle-income jobs either. That – surprise, surprise – leaves just the fat cats getting fatter.
WaPo reports the results of a study which shows who the winners and the losers are in Bush’s economy. The party which angrily claims it cares about poor folks too somehow manages to distribute the fruits of prosperity in distinctly lopsided ways:
Wages are rising more than twice as fast for highly paid workers in the Washington area as they are for low-paid workers, an analysis of federal data by The Washington Post shows.
That means the spoils of the region’s economic expansion are going disproportionately to workers who are already well-paid, widening a gap between rich and poor in a place where it is already wider than in most of the country.
Businesspeople cite shifts in the world economy that give educated workers leverage to negotiate for higher wages but make low-paid workers replaceable — a disparity that is especially pronounced in a service economy like Washington’s.
[…]
…from 2003 to 2005, the average wage for people in the lowest pay bracket, with salaries around $20,000, rose only 5.4 percent in the Washington region — not enough to keep up with rising prices. For the jobs that pay around $60,000, salaries rose 12.4 percent, well ahead of the 6.8 percent inflation in that period.
[…]
Nationwide, the wage gap is widening more slowly: The average wage for upper-middle-income jobs rose 5.8 percent, and low-wage jobs saw pay increases of 3.4 percent, from 2003 to 2005.
This means that nationwide, even wages for upper-middle-income jobs did not keep pace with inflation. But Karl Rove apparently plans to bet that he can convince people this election season that they’re doing better even though their real wages have declined.