Liars: Dismantling the Republican Reality of the Pandemic
Before the COVID-19 pandemic began back in December, 2019, President Trump and Republican politicians across the country constantly made claims that we, in the US, were living in the best economy in the history of the country (and the world). The stock market was at an all-time high, and it has continued to break records even through the pandemic. Why then has the country been so decimated by the pandemic?
We must first look at how the country was doing in normal times before the pandemic started. In 2019, the official poverty rate was 10.5%, and around 1 in 7 children in the US lived in poverty, one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world. Additionally, over 35 million Americans were food-insecure, including 13.6% of households with children.
When Trump speaks about the pre-COVID unemployment rates being the lowest in decades, this should be a good thing, right? Well that depends on what exactly you value — simply having a job, or making enough money to get by. 44% of all workers, primarily in the service sector, earn barely enough to live on — their median income is only $18,000. So while one could argue that having a low rate of unemployment is a good thing, I would argue that a low unemployment rate is pretty meaningless if the jobs that people are working to account for this low rate are so low-paid that workers likely have to rely on government assistance programs to make ends meet.
During the pandemic, it has been the low-wage and low-skilled workers that have suffered disproportionately. These workers are often in the service sector doing jobs that cannot be done safely from home. They are the cashiers, waiters, bartenders, nursing home aids, etc. So while many white-collar workers can continue their work safely in their homes, these workers have either lost their jobs or must put themselves at risk of contracting COVID every day by going to work. Low-wage workers are six times less likely to be able to work from home compared to high-wage workers.
Black workers, as is usual in the US, are affected disproportionately by the pandemic. The unemployment rate for black Americans was higher than for white Americans even before the pandemic, but that divide has been exacerbated by the pandemic. And for black workers that have lost their jobs, they are about half as likely to receive unemployment benefits than unemployed whites.
The pandemic has also caused a dramatic increase in food-insecurity in the US; data from June, 2020 shows that the number of households with children that are food-insecure has more than doubled, to 27.5%. Food insecurity can have long-lasting effects on children, whose brains and bodies are still developing. There have been record long lines for food pantries around the country as families struggle to put enough food on the table, a problem that should never exist in the “richest country on Earth”.
The economy continues to break records, while record numbers of Americans continue to seek food and income assistance. To understand how these two realities can exist simultaneously, it is important that we examine what is actually being measured when politicians say that the economy is the best it’s ever been. Often, politicians look to the stock market to measure economic health and growth — after all, more investment in the market should reflect a trust that investors feel in the economy, right?
More importantly, who actually benefits from strong stock performance? Only 14% of American families are invested in individual stocks, while around half of Americans have a stake in the stock market through retirement accounts such as IRAs and 401(k)s. However, the richest 10% of Americans control 84% of the value of the stock market. When the market soars, it is those at the top that receive the greatest benefit, and because the lowest income Americans are less likely to have any stake in the stock market, the wealth gap continues to widen.
So while the stock market may continue to soar, average Americans will continue to feel the economic impact of the pandemic. These effects will not be short-lived either, especially for young people. People that enter the workforce during a recession earn less for 10 to 15 years than those that start working during a prosperous period. This group is also less likely to be married or have kids by midlife, and also suffer higher death rates by middle age.
It’s hard to say exactly what the future holds, with the end of the pandemic not likely until the entire world is vaccinated. One thing seems certain though, the adage “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer” has remained true throughout the pandemic. America’s 651 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by a total of over $1 trillion, or 36%, since March, while 67 million Americans have lost their jobs between March and October.
