Wealth, Income, Poverty, Homelessness, and Hunger: Biden’s Record

Rick Baum

 October 4, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Image by Morgan Housel.

“…he [Biden] has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country…” Senator Bernie Sanders

“We know that most people say that they think the economy has performed poorly under the Biden-Harris administration. However, we also know that by standard economic measures the administration has been an incredible success story.” Dean Baker

When Joe Biden was running for president in 2020, he held a fundraiser attended by some of our wealthier friends. According to a reporter for Vox,

Biden repeated his earlier remarks that he didn’t want to “demonize” the wealthy and added that, though “income inequality” is a problem that must be addressed, under his presidency, “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change.” He went on: “I need you very badly. I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down.”

The Federal Reserve Board (the Fed) recently released its 2024 second quarter figures on the distribution of household wealth in the United States. Unlike monthly reports on unemployment and inflation, or how the stock market is doing, the wealth figures produced by the Fed are often not reported on by the mainstream media.

The Fed figures show good news for the wealthiest .1%. They have not been “let…down.” Their share of the nation’s wealth continues to remain above 13%, a level first achieved in the last full quarter of the Trump regime during the pandemic in 2020. In the most recent period, the second quarter of 2024, the share of the nation’s total wealth held by the wealthiest .1% came to 13.5%. In money terms, the value of the holdings of the wealthiest .1% amounts to $20.87 trillion, up over 29.7%, by $4.78 trillion, since the end of 2020, right before Biden was sworn in.

At the end of the second quarter in 2024, according to the Fed, the poorest 50% of the population was holding 2.5% of the nation’s wealth totaling $3.82 trillion, almost a trillion less than the increase in the wealth of the .1% since the end of 2020.

At the end of the second quarter in 2024, the average wealth of a person in the poorest 50%, with many having negative wealth–owing more than all their assets are worth–came to a bit over $23,000 while the average holdings of a member of the .1% was $63 million, more than 2,700 times as much.

How have our ten wealthiest comrades, who are at the top of the wealthiest .1%, done during Biden’s presidency?

Below is a table based on figures taken from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index showing the size of the wealth of the wealthiest ten as of September 28, 2024. They have done even better than the rest of their brethren who are among the wealthiest .1%. Since the beginning of 2021, right before Biden was sworn in as president, their holdings have increased $676 billion, 64.6%.

 

According to the Bloomberg index, the increase in the wealth of these 10 people so far in 2024 comes to $349.4 billion.

Kamala Harris has put forth a proposal to provide each family with a newborn a $6,000 tax credit. In 2023, there were an estimated 3.6 million newborns. Had the credit been in effect in 2023, its cost would have come to $21.6 billion. This is less than the growth in the wealth so far in 2024 of 8 of the wealthiest 10: Musk ($43.3 billion), Bezos ($33.9 billion), Zuckerberg ($73.4 billion), Ellison ($58.6 billion), Gates ($22.5 billion), Page ($22.1 billion), Buffet ($24.5 billion), and Dell ($33.6 billion).

Income

According to government figures (pg. 34), the average income of all households in each of the lowest three quintiles (each representing 20% of the population) have experienced an increase in income since 2021. Additionally, the share of household income gained during the year by the 20% with the lowest average income increased from 2.9% of the country’s total income in 2021 to 3.1% in 2023. During this time, the share of the household income of the top 5% dropped from 23.5% to 23%. Nevertheless, the difference in income between those in the lowest income quintile and those in the top 5% has changed little, remaining over half a million dollars.

More importantly, as of 2023, none of those in the five quintiles, including those in the top 5%, have average household incomes in 2023 dollars adjusted for inflation exceeding the levels of 2019. For example, the average income of those in the lowest 20% stood at $17,650 in 2023, up compared to the previous two years of Biden’s presidency. However, in 2019, it was $520 higher at $18,070.

 

Widening Gap in Pay of Women and Men who Work Full-Time

The government figures (pg. 1) on income of full-time female workers show that the ratio of their median income to that of full-time male workers fell from 84% in the previous year to 82.7% in 2023. This is described as “the first statistically significant annual decrease in female-to-male earnings ratio since 2003.”

Poverty

In contrast to the significant gains of the super wealthy and despite a low official rate of unemployment, government reports continue to show ongoing economic problems for many people.

During the first three years of Biden’s presidency, the government’s official rate of poverty dropped from 11.6% in 2021 to 11.5% in 2022, and to 11.1% in 2023. Despite the drop in 2023, 36.79 million people were living in poverty, 11 million of whom were under age 18.

Homelessness and Food Insecurity Increase

According to The US Department of Housing and Urban Development report (pgs. 2, 10), the “2023 Point-in-Time (PIT) count is the highest number of people reported as experiencing homelessness on a single night since reporting began in 2007,” reaching 653,104 in 2023 compared to 582,462 in 2022.

A U.S. Department of Agriculture report (pgs. 11 and iii) indicated that the number of food insecure people increased from 33.8 million in 2021 to 44.2 million in 2022, and to 47.4 million in 2023.

“Children were food insecure at times during 2023 in 8.9 percent of U.S. households with children (3.2 million households), statistically similar to the 8.8 percent (3.3 million households) in 2022, but up from both 6.2 percent (2.3 million households) in 2021 and 7.6 percent (2.9 million households) in 2020. These households with food insecurity among children were unable at times to provide adequate, nutritious food for their children.”

We are frequently told the economy has done well during Biden’s presidency. Would many people, especially the poorer members of our society, the homeless, and people experiencing food insecurity agree that Biden has been “the most effective president in the modern history of our country,” and that during his time in office, the economy has been “an incredible success story?”

Postscript: The Record under Trump

Much of what has happened during Biden’s presidency represents the past actions of the government including Trump’s tax cuts and, more importantly, the operations of capitalism.

What happened in the areas discussed during Biden’s presidency, as he finishes up his last year, could be characterized as unimpressive. Despite Trump’s claim to have made America great again, the record during his presidency, for some, might not viewed as exhibiting greatness!

According to the Fed, the share of the country’s total wealth held by the wealthiest .1% reached 13% at the end of 2020, one half of a percent more than it was in all of 2017. During this time, the nominal wealth of the .1% increased most quarters growing from $11.49 trillion in the first quarter of 2017 to $16.09 trillion as of the end of 2020. This $4.6 trillion increase alone is more than one and a half times the wealth held by the poorest 50% of the population at the end of 2020.

In 2020, Bloomberg Billionaires Index indicated that the ten wealthiest U.S. citizens were the same people as in 2023 except a Walton instead of Dell was the tenth wealthiest. Despite the misery experienced by many during the first year of the pandemic, the wealth of the wealthiest ten in 2020 increased $346 billion reaching $1,068.5 billion.

During each year of the Trump regime through 2019, the average household income in inflation adjusted 2023 dollars increased. At the end of 2020, the first year of the pandemic, it remained higher than it was in 2017, but lower than in 2019.

Despite declining 1.8% in 2020 from the amount in 2019, the increase in average income of those in the top 5% had gone from $467,100 in 2016 to $523,600 in 2020, up 12% in 2023 inflation adjusted dollars.

The difference in the income of those in the top 5% with those in the bottom 80% widened during Trump’s presidency. For example, in 2023 dollars, the difference in the income of the top 5% of households compared to those in the fourth quintile (those households in the 60^th to the 80^th percentile of income distribution) grew from $348,600 in 2016 to $394,600 in 2020, and for those in the second quintile (those in the 20^th to 40^th percentile), the difference with the top 5% widened from $424,130 in 2016 to $477,110 in 2020.

In 2019, the rate of poverty was 10.5%, the lowest level from 1970 on. It had been 12.7% in 2016. Nevertheless, with that “achievement,” the number of impoverished people in 2019 was almost 34 million. During 2020, the first year of Covid, the percentage shot up to 11.5% with the number of impoverished people reaching 37.5 million, 11.79 million of whom were children under 18 years old.

The number of people experiencing low food security declined during Trump’s first three years from 41.2 million to 35.2 million in 2019. With the onset of the pandemic, it went up to 38.3 million in 2020.

The government count of the number of homeless people went up each year during Trump’s time in office from 549,928 in 2016 to 567,715 in 2019, and to 580,466 in 2020.

Given the above record, are people being unfair to question Trump’s claim that greatness was achieved, once again, during his presidency!!!?

Rick Baum teaches Political Science at City College of San Francisco. He is a member of AFT 2121.

The Revolution Will Not Be Podcast: Pacifica Radio at 75

Iain Boal

October 4, 2024

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

The Exacting Ear, ed. Eleanor McKinney, Pantheon 1966.

At three o’clock on a spring afternoon in 1949, in a sixth floor studio above University Avenue in Berkeley, volunteer sound-proofers, “hammering down the carpet at the last moment”, paused in their work. Lewis Hill stepped to a microphone and in his distinctive baritone announced for the first time: “This is KPFA, listener-sponsored radio in Berkeley.” It was an experiment so unlikely (“Why would anyone subscribe to a station they can hear for free?”) that the scoffers in the local Bay Area press predicted it would be lucky to survive six months.

Seventy five years later, the survival of KPFA, founded by conscientious objectors, poets and pacifists in the aftermath of a catastrophic global war, was celebrated by a flying visit to the Bay Area from Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! which started life in the mid-1990s broadcasting from the Wall Street studios of WBAI, Pacifica’s New York station.

Goodman is a star in the firmament of community radio, and her tribute to Pacifica’s history, in which she has played such a central role for three decades, was warmly applauded by the congregation at the Church of Christ Scientist, Maybeck’s gorgeous architectural masterpiece on the south side of the Berkeley campus. Perhaps the spirit of the occasion forebade mention of the fact that, directly across the street, People’s Park – a landmark both in the history of the city and of KPFA – lies invisible and impenetrable, brutally enclosed by barbed wire and a ring of steel containers planted by the University of California administration bent on erasing both the park and the popular memory of what happened there in the 60s.

The struggle over People’s Park and Pacifica’s own Civil War, triggered by Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 and culminating in the so-called Battle of Berkeley in 1999, are connected through the deep history of settler-colonial dispossession, neoliberal enclosures and now a re-privatization of the liberated common land. The ill-judged revision of the network’s governance in response to the drastic deregulation of the airwaves has left KPFA, and the Pacifica Foundation that owns the station, in deep financial and managerial trouble.

The originating impulse of the Pacifica project, poetically named as a gesture to the founding vision, was to explore through peaceable dialogue the root causes of conflict — between individuals, nations, and belligerent empires. By bringing to the airwaves “informal, intensely personal, uncensored, and free-ranging discussion” – the description is philosopher Erich Fromm’s – together with the finest of the radio arts, the listening community would be equipped with an “exacting ear”, in the happy phrase of Eleanor McKinney, one of the trio of syndicalist founders.

[Image hereabouts]

There is a special intimacy to radio when not used for commercial or state propaganda, understood as the discourse of domination. The tone and rhythm of those first KPFA broadcasts are crucial to understanding the power of “the Pacifica idea” and the enduring loyalty it has evoked in its audience. Recollecting the very early days at the station, another of the founders, the poet and documentarian Richard Moore, expressed it to me this way: “It was our experiment with form that was radical, as much as any content.” Margot Adler, a student at Berkeley in the mid-60s and later host of a phone-in show on Pacifica’s New York station, recalled: “It’s hard to imagine how different it was to hear someone talking honestly — about anything — on the air.”

The bonds forged between the Pacificans and the audience they conjured out of the air was tested after fifteen months, when in the summer of 1950 the money ran out. Lewis Hill’s imagined audience showed up in the flesh at a packed community meeting at the Fellowship Hall in Berkeley, intent on bailing out the sinking vessel. Lewis Hill was never so moved as by that gathering; “We can’t let this die”, he told his confederates. With collective self-salvage in mind, Hill argued in his 1951 manifesto, “The Theory of Listener Sponsored Radio”, that the KPFA experiment entailed a “two-way responsibility”, a “conscious flow of influences, some creative tension between broadcaster and audience”.

What was “the Pacifica idea”? Firstly, for those at the microphone the freedom of not having “to simulate emotions, intentions and beliefs” was the essence. Hill had not shed a vague sense of ethical corruption from his time as an announcer at a commercial radio station in Washington DC – “the words are familiar, and every sentence is grammatically sound, but the text is gibberish”). “The people who actually do the broadcasting should also be responsible for what and why they broadcast”, insisted Hill the syndicalist. At the other end of the apparatus, for the project to succeed, the listener subscribers demonstrated what he called “a kind of cultural engagement”, amounting to a “mutual stimulus”. Success for Hill would mean the pilot experiment resulting in “a new focus of action or a new shaping influence that can hardly fail to strengthen all of us”. The “us” began for Hill with his personal circle of friends and comrades —the war resisters of the CO camps and the poets, artists and writers in San Francisco’s bohemia — but the aim was also to reach, via the apparatus of radio, the shipyards of Richmond and the neighbourhoods of Oakland.

Hill understood very well that listener-sponsorship could go wrong, if subscribing were reduced, as he said, to a tax write-off, or a response to special gift premiums (“We’ve got hoodies, we’ve got socks, we’ve got water bottles – check it out!”, cajoled one announcer during a recent fund drive on KPFA.) ‘Underwriting’ by big business has led directly to the soporific diet now on offer from NPR. (Is that why they’re constantly advertising mattresses?) The recent decision by Pacifica’s management to take advertisers’ money suggests that it may be time to wind up the experiment. Indeed there might be no option. Some readers of CounterPunch will recall the news that, in December 2022, US marshals seized 305,000 dollars from KPFA’s cash reserves to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by a former interim executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, the legal owner of the station. Since then there have been staff layoffs and preparations to sell off physical assets. KPFA, the flagship of the five listener-sponsored stations, is now in real danger of sinking along with its owner and the rest of the network, thanks to mismanagement at the national level and the perversely bloated Pacifica governance structure adopted in the wake of the crisis of 1999-2001.

Can the Pacifica network survive? Notoriously, Pacifica thrives in times of emergency. Dan Coughlin, the executive director who guided the network away from the brink of bankruptcy at the millennium, drily quipped: “War is the health of the station”. Pacifica’s fortunes wax and wane according to the rhythms of the US imperium. Margot Adler, host of ‘Hour of the Wolf’ in the 1970s, put it bluntly: “The Vietnam War ended, and we lost half our audience. It was as simple as that. WBAI grew from the blood of the Vietnamese.”

Some veteran activists believe that KPFA remains a viable institution, provided that the station can get out from under the Pacifica Foundation, owner turned parasite — and lately, asset stripper. The business of cutting KPFA free from its incubus will require serious forensic skills, and very likely some real street heat.

In any case a campaign for KPFA’s survival will have to be waged in the current mediascape, including the new (anti-)social media, whose wider context is the political economy of telecommunications in the US. The situation remains fundamentally unchanged since I spoke at a Federal Communications Commission Hearing on Media Ownership, in the aftermath of the 1996 Telecommunications Act which led to a predictable looting of the public airwaves (see “A May Day Message to the FCC”, CounterPunch, April 30th, 2003). I noted that “the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements well understand the lethal connections between the so-called market, concentrated media ownership, and untrammeled militarism.” I still stand by my assertion to the Commission that “the flourishing of life…around the planet, now depends on the reappropriation of the commons, and that includes – because the means of communication without limits is the very condition of possibility of all else – the seizing back of the electromagnetic spectrum, the de-commodification of the airwaves.”

Now, suppose the good ship Pacifica goes under. What would be lost? Above all, a dependable forum for the candid and dissenting dialogics that inspired the original vision, still embodied in a handful of excellent Public Affairs programs the founding trio would recognize – such as Letters and Politics, Against the Grain, and Behind the News. The rhythm and cadence of Against the Grain, for example, is recognisably in a venerable KPFA tradition, and helps to account for its enduring vitality. The interviews are recorded in advance, impeccably edited, and broadcast three days a week at noon. Taking turns at the microphone, and making decisions independently as to topics and guests, the hosts Sasha Lilley and C.S. Soong evince a congenial complementarity in style and emphasis. Soong is inclined to the philosophical and esoteric (the shade of Alan Watts hovers nearby), while Lilley clearly draws on her training in political economy. Questions are always posed in a spirit of open inquiry, with the aim of drawing out, maieutically, the fruits of new scholarship or critique, often focused on a recently published book, essay or article. By their deep, evident commitment to socratic form, and by coming to the interviews formidably prepared, a mutual respect with the interlocutor is quickly established and conveyed to the listener.

The original idea for the program emerged in discussions in 2002 between the two producers, who agreed there was a kind of vacuum in strategic thinking on the left. The reasons were perhaps not hard to find. Violent state repression directed at the worldwide movement against capitalist enclosures, aka “globalisation”, had taken a toll, both in the streets and in the theory kitchens. The repression only intensified in the wake of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center.

It was clear to Lilley and Soong that, for antagonists of capital and empire, these new conditions lacked critical scrutiny. “When we launched”, recalls Sasha Lilley, “we felt strongly that many of the ideas of the anti-globalization movement, the antiwar movement, and the left more broadly, needed interrogation. Apparently many KPFA listeners agreed, because when C.S. Soong and I ran a four part series challenging conventional wisdom on the left, called Free Radicals, it led to a flurry of emails to KPFA management asking for more.”

An opening in KPFA’s schedule gave them the opportunity for extending the interrogations. In their sights, recalls Lilley, was “the localism fetish of the global justice movement; the anti-war movement’s “No Blood for Oil” simplification, the romanticizing of the subaltern and the Global South; and of course conspiracism instead of anticapitalist analysis.”

The boisterous street carnivals of refusal north and south, galvanised by the spellbinding—and spell-breaking—eloquence of Subcommandante Marcos, and amplified by vibrant indymedia, seemed briefly to herald the birth of a countervailing force that might truly disrupt the specialists in ’structural adjustment’ at the IMF and WTO. But the ’second superpower’ (to use the anxious, hyperventilating language of the New York Times commentariat), which flared brightly in Seattle, Porto Allegre and around the planet, turned out to be a will o’ the wisp, its fragile transnational infrastructure interrupted by, among other things, ‘anti-terrorist’ restrictions on travel. In the assessment of Seamus Davis, cartographer of anticapitalist resistance, “By 2003 the movement was punching below its weight”. Things were not helped by the widespread privileging of activism at the expense of analysis and reflection. “Activist” had become, at least in the US, a badge of identity, an occupation without any content except perhaps a romancing of barricades, which, as their historian Eric Hazan drily observed, were already out of date by 1871.

Two decades on, Against the Grain is going strong. It has been, by any worthwhile measure, a resounding success of the kind the founders of the station hoped for, though they could hardly have imagined the instantaneous planetary reach of the program made possible by the internet. The roster of guests amounts to a pantheon of contemporary radical thought —  to name just a few: geographer David Harvey, socialist feminist Silvia Federici, demographer Amartya Sen, urbanist Mike Davis, classicist Ellen Meiksins Wood, economist Thomas Piketty, historians Robin D. G. Kelley, Peter Linebaugh, Vijay Prashad and Howard Zinn, linguist Noam Chomsky, anthropologist David Graeber, journalist Naomi Klein, psychiatrist Joel Kovel, lawyer Staughton Lynd, sociologist Frances Fox Piven. The program’s archive is a treasure house of critical exchange in the early 21st century.

No doubt Against the Grain could take its chances – likewise Doug Henwood’s Behind the News and Mitch Jeserich’s Letters and Politics – and even flourish among the flood of podcasts coming online at the rate of 500 a week (although half of them expire within six months.) Against the Grain, by now an institution within an institution, has conjured into being an ‘imagined community’, albeit uncertain of its collective powers. We badly need such a program in the days ahead, to assist in the hard work of root-and-branch rethinking of the terms and tactics necessary to a planetary politics for commoners, after the Holocene.

I believe it’s also important for KPFA listeners to organize against the loss of the station’s bricks-and-mortar studios, an underused community asset moored like a ghost ship on MLK Way in Berkeley, and to keep broadcasting from Grizzly Peak and its 94.1MHz home on the FM dial, an island in the privatised spectrum, amid the rumbling basso continuo of commercial America (“I drive my car to supermarket / The way I take is superhigh /A superlot is where I park it /And Super Suds are what I buy.”) It was a minor miracle in a nation Melville saw as dedicated only to commerce that Lewis Hill’s pilot experiment took flight. The choice of fare on offer – drama and literature, music, public affairs, children’s programming – was only part of the magic; more potent was the mutual recognition, respect and camaraderie that passed between the pioneering broadcasters and the audience conjured into being.

Unfortunately, the essential syndicalist principles were overlooked – Hill’s anarchist comrades warned him that worker control would be broken on the anvil of bureaucratic governance required by federal regulation, if state censorship didn’t get them first. It’s a grim irony that the new internal governance structure, put in place after the crisis of 1999 to safeguard the network, may materially contribute to the demise of the Pacificans’ noble experiment.

The radical Cornell scholar Benedict Anderson in the 1980s achieved intellectual fame for his notion of the “imagined community”, about which he later remarked that they were “a pair of words from which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.” Anderson coined the phrase to theorize not the radio but the printing press and the emergence of “the nation,” specifically, the role of print capitalism in the spread of nationalism. Anderson defined the nation as a collection of strangers who do not know each other and will never meet but nevertheless are able to exert a world-changing social force. I think it fair to say that Lewis Hill had such business in mind when he composed “The Theory of Listener Sponsored Radio” back in 1951. But if KPFA is reduced, at best, to an online ‘platform’ of serial, atomized podcasts, then what will surely be lost is the integrating impulse of Hill’s vision, the possibility of a collectively imagined “focus of action” necessary to the building of a peaceable world.

Iain Auchinleck Boal is a social historian of science, technics and the commons. He is associated with the Retort group of antinomians based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In London, he co-founded MayDay Rooms, a safe haven for archives of dissent and a meeting place for weary utopians. He can be reached via carpenox@sonic.net>