"If America Is Richer, Why Are Its Families So Much Less Secure? For 25 years, government and business have forced workers to take on mounting risk. A Times analysis shows ever-larger swings in household incomes." That was the headline to a long (12 pages in print format) and important article in the LA Times Sunday. A quote:
In their own ways, the problems encountered by Fredo and Burtless can be traced to the same source — a set of economic policies shaped by government officials and corporate executives intent on creating a more prosperous America.Posted by Marcia Oddi at October 11, 2004 03:29 PMStarting in the late 1970s, the nation's leaders sought to break a corrosive cycle of rising inflation and stagnating output by remaking the U.S. economy in the image of its frontier predecessor — deregulating industries, shrinking social programs and promoting a free-market ideal in which everyone must forge his or her own path, free to rise or fall on merit or luck. On the whole, their effort to transform the economy has succeeded.
But the economy's makeover has come at a large and largely unnoticed price: a measurable increase in the risks that Americans must bear as they provide for their families, pay for their houses, save for their retirements and grab for the good life.
A broad array of protections that families once depended on to shield them from economic turmoil — stable jobs, widely available health coverage, guaranteed pensions, short unemployment spells, long-lasting unemployment benefits and well-funded job training programs — have been scaled back or have vanished altogether.
"Working Americans are on a financial tightrope," said Yale University political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, who is writing a book called "The Great Risk Shift." "Business and government used to see it as their duty to provide safety nets against the worst economic threats we face. But more and more, they're yanking them away."
The yanking may be far from finished.