Bush's bitter harvest

By Derrick Z. Jackson, 10/1/2003

IT IS OCTOBER, and the harvest from the spring's planting of troops remains a grapeless vine, withering into winter compost. Without weapons of mass destruction, Tikrit has given way to Texas, Fallujah is fading into Florida, and the idiocy of another $87 billion for Iraq is rapidly becoming apparent in the latest news from Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. In the season of pumpkins, Bush is turning into one, with millions of Americans feeling like Cinderella after the ballyhoo of violent, vengeful patriotism. Bush hoped he could sneak back into the White House in 2004 before the clock struck midnight. It is too late. The original support for the war is waning as Americans realize that they have also waged war against themselves.

In the last week, the Census Bureau released data indicating that household income in the United States is on the decrease, poverty is on the increase, and the number of Americans without health insurance grew by 2.4 million, to 43.6 million. The adding of 2.4 million Americans to the rolls of the uninsured comes at a time when 2.7 million Americans have lost their jobs since Bush took office.Bush has depended mightily on the working class and the middle class for support of his war in Iraq. But of the 2.4 million newly uninsured households, 1.4 million come from families making $25,000 to $74,999.

Nervous Republicans are already complaining that the Democrats are using the stumbling economy to foment class warfare. With Bush's trillion-dollar tax cuts and the spending for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, war against everyone except Halliburton and the wealthy was inevitable. One in five households making $25,000 to $49,999 spent 2002 without health insurance, compared with only one in in 10 households making $75,000 or more.

With all the job losses, it is not surprising that 1.7 million people were thrown into poverty in 2002. First lady Laura Bush was over in France representing the United States in its rejoining of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. That show of caring about children in developing countries was lame as the United States added 400,000 children to the ranks of the poor here at home. Poverty rose even in the suburbs, from 12.1 million to 13.3 million people. In Massachusetts, the percentage of people in poverty held stable at 9.5 percent, but the number of people without health insurance went up from 8.5 percent to 9.1 percent.

When Bush signed the first of his tax cuts in the summer of 2001, he said: "Tax relief is a great achievement for the American people. Tax relief is the first achievement produced by the new tone in Washington, and it was produced in record time. Tax relief is an achievement for families struggling to enter the middle class."

Two years later, the Census Bureau tells us that real median money income in Midwestern households has declined by nearly $1,000, from $44,531 to $43,622. The per-capita income of $22,794 represents the first annual decline in per-capita income since 1991, which -- surprise -- was again the first Bush administration.

Meanwhile, according to data released last week by the Internal Revenue Service, American households earning $56,000 to $92,800 still pay 18 percent of the nation's income taxes, more than the 16 percent of the nation's wealthiest households.