carranza--
>>>The inner city in the 1950s was a thriving, active and exciting place to be in most large American cities. Two things destroyed the nascent black middle class which had adopted all the "right" values, and which could have been the spearhead of a potential racial harmony which was unfortunately never realized. First, the LBJ-led handouts. This is old hat.<<<
An old, wrong hat.
The War On Poverty was a reaction to a decline already underway:
>>>In the 1950s and early 1960s, poverty was hidden and ignored to a degree that is hard to imagine today when welfare, homelessness, and the brutality of urban life are staples of the nightly television news. In 1962, Michael Harrington's book, The Other America, made poverty invisible. In the opening paragraphs of the book, Harrington held up a mirror to the middle class: "There is a familiar America. it is celebrated in speeches and advertised on television and in the magazines. It has the highest mass standards of living the world has ever known." Even its anxieties, he wrote, were "products of abundance."
"While this discussion was carried on," Harrington added, "there existed another America. In it dwelt somewhere between 40,000,000 and 50,000,000 citizens of this land. They were poor. They still are."
The reaction to Harrington was extraordinary, especially given today's cynicism about the ability of government to fight poverty There was an almost unbounded optimism about the nation's capacity to cure poverty and all other economic ills. With the middle class taken care of, the only remaining economic challenge was to eradicate "pockets of poverty," as they were called, and that was seen as a manageable task. "The United States," President Lyndon Johnson's Council of Economic Advisers declared in the heady days of the War on Poverty, "is the first large nation in the history of the world wealthy enough to end poverty within its borders." James Tobin, a Kennedy economic adviser who would later win the Nobel Prize (though not for his forecasting ability), put a date on it. His article in the New Republic, in 1967, carried the headline: "It Can be Done! Conquering Poverty in the US by 1976." He was counting on sound macroeconomic policies and a "negative income tax" to help the poor; the government delivered neither. "The promised land receded," Tobin wrote years later. "We'll be lucky to reach it by 2026,"
It wasn't just poverty that would be licked. Recessions would be abolished, too. Believing that the cycle of recession-recovery-recession was over, the government renamed its monthly "Business Cycle Digest," dubbing it "Business Conditions Digest." TIME gushed in 1969: " The amazing U.S. economy may defy even the law of physics: what goes up need not necessarily come down." Fortune ebulliently predicted in 1967 that wages would increase by 150% over the next twenty-five years. (Fortune was off by a factor of six. Including fringe benefits, total compensation for all workers in the United States actually rose by only 25% between 1967 and 1992, and wages for the typical worker rose much less.)<<<
The War On Poverty could not repeal the business cycle nor could it change trends underway.
The decline went like this for the middle class in general:
>>>* The shift from high-wage manufacturing jobs to low-wage service jobs. At the end of the 1950s, in the America of the expanding middle class, 31 percent of U.S. workers were employed in manufacturing industries; by 1987 only 18 percent were, the thirteen-point difference encompassing those who lost their jobs either to foreign manufacturers or to automation. In Negotiating the Future, A Labor Perspective on American Business, Barry and Irving Bluestone cite research that counted 900,000 manufacturing jobs, many of them paying family-sustaining wages, that were erased each year from 1978 to 1982, for a total of nearly five million jobs lost in five years. That is one of the most stunning social facts of our times, and also one of the most thoroughly ignored. Where were you when this catastrophe took place?
* The decline in private-sector union membership. At the start of the 1980s roughly 17 percent of employees in the private sector belonged to unions; at the end only 12 percent belonged. Back in the 1950s, 40 percent of the work force belonged. Those were the days of the expanding middle class. Unions were crucial to the difference.<<<
Discrimination made it worse for blacks as the business cycle did its thing and changing manufacturing trends made it difficult for anyone without a college education.
It got tough for the middle class in general during the mid-1970s.
>>>Something happened to this expanding middle class around 1973: the economic floor it stood on started to give way. After increasing by an average of 2.7 percent annually from 1947 to 1973, the median family income, adjusted for inflation, actually decreased, hitting a low point in the early 1980s, when it was supposed to be "morning in America"--and this even though the number of two-income families was rising.
The numbers bludgeon complacency. From 1960 to 1974 real wages and salaries of experienced workers--regardless of their level of education- increased by 20 percent; from 1974 to 1989 workers with less than a high school education saw their wages fall by 21.7 percent, and high school graduates saw theirs fall by 14.7 percent. According to Lester Thurow, from 1973 to 1992 average wages for the bottom 60 percent of male workers fell 20 percent, and overall median male wages fell 12 percent. For nonsupervisory workers real weekly wages fell by 20 percent and hourly wages by 13 percent. Among young males aged eighteen to twenty four who worked full time, the percentage earning less than $12,195 (in 1990 dollars) a year more than doubled during the 1980s, from 18 to 40. Among young women the percentage earning less than $12,195 a year increased from 29 to 48. "Earnings prospects are collapsing for the bottom two-thirds of the work force," Thurow says.<<<
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