Five Signs That We're Still In The Woods
No amount of filtered selfies & cute vacation pics on Instagram or rosy assessment headlines of things are "slowly returning back to normal" can window dress how bad it is.
Publisher’s Riff
It goes without saying that we all want to emerge from this pandemic. We’re ready to brush the dust of disaster off our pants, we crave for the light at the end of the tunnel - well, at least most of us, since there are people out there we should be aware of who, in contrast, crave for the chaos. But, for the most part, most of us want the return to a sense of “normalcy” - despite renewed and needed debate on what that means, exactly.
The problem is that our obsession with normalcy leads us into a denial of real conditions on the ground. That’s led us to prematurely ease restrictions such as essential mask mandates and the re-opening of many public spaces from restaurants to schools when not even 35 percent of the population has been completely vaccinated, yet …
Our collective mirage of pandemic’s end is driven largely by the dominance of White middle class narratives and news segments. Social media does not help at all because we’re all faking happy and bullying each other into presenting our most perfect mass consumer culture self as if everything is alright when, clearly, it’s not … because, remember: we’re in the middle of a damn pandemic. Such conversation is what drives the response resulting in continually high rates of vaccine inequity. Demographic groups such as White and Asian communities that are (in “normal times”) relatively secure financially compared to Black and Latino communities, find themselves vaccinated at wickedly faster rates than everyone else …
Seeing ourselves in a comfortable pandemic rhythm bears the risk of us leaving people behind who haven’t caught up, and having very little empathy for their cause. Here are five very alarming indicators showing that while we may not be in lock-down as we were a year ago, we’re still very much tripping around in the woods with no flashlight.
Unemployment is Deeper Than We Think
Economists, who’ve been sitting indoors with stable housing and income through this ordeal, hyped themselves into believing April would really create (or restore) 1 million jobs. However, pandemic snapped them and everyone else back into reality with a sobering addition of just 266,000 jobs nationwide.
That’s because official unemployment rates are always masking deeper hemorhagging in the labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps telling us the unemployment rate is 6.1 percent, but that’s not grasping the full picture of discouraged workers who’ve fallen out of the labor force or those working part-time jobs that barely make ends meet. Once that’s all factored in, the unemployment rate is 25.5 percent, according to ShadowStats economist John Williams …
Income is Stagnant
As witnessed here in this recent Morning Consult analysis where increased pay loss is slowing recovery down …
Corporate lobbies and Republicans are trying to seize on this moment as proof unemployment benefits don’t work since the general public is catching on that it hasn’t been getting paid what it’s worth. The demonization of unemployment is really another step towards a form of slavery. If the corporate lobbies and Republicans (white nationalists) had their way, we’d all be working for free … and accepting that as something normal. As Erik Sherman brilliantly points out in Forbes …
I’ve never found that many people who like to do nothing but stay at home or hang out. One of the impacts of expanded unemployment insurance is that millions have begun to realize just how little they make and that low wages, which add to employer profits and potentially lower costs to keep customers returning, undermine living.
Aggravating this is seeing how pay at the top keeps rising, like this New York Times story about CEO compensation and how many saw big increases in compensation during 2020 when the companies they head did terribly.
The wages issue isn’t one that suddenly appeared. It’s grown over decades of observation by employees that their employers kept more and more of the proceeds for themselves and dribbled out cost of living expenses, even as such critical categories as housing, healthcare, and education race boldly ahead of what people make, unless they’re in the relatively protected upper quartile of pay.
All this time, even before pandemic, wages have pretty much stayed flat even as American productivity has risen …
If three-quarters of the economy is driven by consumer activity, how do companies and retailers expect to make money if no one can afford to buy their stuff? Make it make sense.
The Increasing Price of Things
But, even when we think we’re recovering and even if we think we have enough money in our pockets to survive, in step the speculators, traders and assortment of free market hustlers who make the price of everything go up. So, not only are we in a pandemic, but we’re in the middle of a dollar squeeze, as this very important Bloomberg analysis points out …
The Rise of Dollar Stores
Adding insult to injury is the sudden pandemic-fueled resurgence of Dollar General stores, which feels both comedic and dystopic. These are now circling around the economy like vultures to pick on the pockets of populations who have very little. So, of course, Dollar General ends up being the only place many households can go to with very little money to eat a solid, nutritious meal. As CNN reports …
About 45% of the 3,597 store openings that large retail chains in the United States have announced so far this year are from Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar, according to the latest figures from Coresight Research, a firm that aggregates the numbers from company filings and press releases.
These openings are a continuation of dollar stores' rapid growth even before the pandemic. Economists and retail analysts say dollar stores are expanding in part because of growing wealth inequality in the United States and the hollowing out of the middle class. The share of American adults who live in middle-income households decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019, according to Pew Research Center.
3 Million Missing K-12 Students
And, lastly: what happened to 3 million young people who vanished from school district rolls during the pandemic, according to Bellwhether Education Partners? What sort of damage will this do to the country’s future and economic competitiveness? This should be of great alarm not only to school districts scrambling to find them (and not out of genuine concern, but because their budgets are based on per pupil funding schemes), but to the broader community. The downstream social costs - from rising crime to a large chunk of the population being unskilled and illiterate - will only cause further destabilization.