USA Today’s depiction of the household income story.
The “Nation’s Newspaper” boasts that most of its “editorials are coupled with an opposing view–a unique USA Today feature.” So you’re getting both sides, is the implication–when in fact what you’re more likely to get is perception management, as the Gannett-owned paper makes clear which opinions are to be taking seriously and which are beyond the pale.
Take the editorial that appears in the January 6 edition of the paper, “More Jobs Is Not Enough,” which addresses a very real problem–the stagnation of most people’s income in the United States:
The past 15 years have not been great for the non-wealthy. Adjusted for inflation, median household income (now at $51,939) is 9 percent below where it was in 1999. It went sideways from 2000 to 2007, then fell from 2008 to 2011, and has started to perk up only lately. This has to change.
That’s a good point, as far as it goes. Where doesn’t it go? For one thing, it doesn’t point out that this is not a problem that started in 1999, but at least 25 years earlier: US median household income has grown only 7 percent since 1973, even as per capita GDP has roughly doubled.
And where has all that income gone? That phrase “for the non-wealthy” conceals it: While most people have seen little or no income growth over the past four decades, the rich have enjoyed a long-term boom. The top 1 percent of households, for example, have seen their real after-tax income rise by 200 percent since 1979.
CEPR’s rather more complex view of the income crisis.
USA Today‘s vagueness about what the problem is helps it to circumscribe the remedies, which the paper is eager to do:
The first step is to understand that stagnant wages do not have a simple cause or a simple solution. They are not the result of a wealthy elite rigging the system against the middle class, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., argues. Nor are they caused by too many regulations, a refrain of conservatives.
Declaring Warren to be wrong is a favorite pastime of media pundits these days (FAIR Blog, 11/26/14, 12/15/14, 12/24/14)–a good sign that she makes the powers that be nervous. Meanwhile, the paper also mentions that conservatives are wrong about regulations, because it’s an article of faith in corporate media that the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
Is that the case here, though? The Center for Economic and Policy Research put out a helpful chart (9/20/13) that tracks the income share of the top 1 percent along with some of the major policy decisions over the past century. While it’s hard to see how a story that blames income stagnation on “too many regulations” fits with the steady income growth that accompanied the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Glass Steagall, the Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act etc., followed by decades of stagnation that coincided with the era of financial deregulation. But the assertion that wealthy elites are rigging the system against the middle class is harder to dismiss.
Another of the many “stunning technological advances” USA Today seems to have forgotten about. (cc photo: Vestman)
USA Today attempts to rebut the rigging and over-regulation narratives with two counter-explanations. One is that “stunning technological advances have eliminated millions of jobs”–as though there weren’t stunning technological shifts during the era of strong income growth, reducing the agricultural share of the workforce from 41 percent in 1900 to 4 percent in 1970.
Its other explanation is that “rising global competition is pressing wages downward even as it adds new markets for American products”–as though trade agreements like NAFTA and TPP aren’t seen as one of the main ways the wealthy rig the system.
When it comes to offering solutions, USA Today again displays mock even-handedness, offering three lines on raising the minimum wage, and 21 lines on a “saner fiscal policy”–defined as taking less in taxes from “the young, productive and healthy” and spending less on “the retired, the unproductive and the unhealthy.”
That sounds like Mitt Romney when he doesn’t know the camera’s on–so naturally, when it’s time to offer an “opposing view,” USA Today turns to…James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation, one of Romney’s favorite think tanks. Sherk blames slow wage growth on Obamacare and liberals’ unsuccessful attempts to ban fracking–neither of which are very persuasive explanations for an income stagnation that began in 1999, let alone 1973.
But by giving the rebuttal column to a right-winger, Gannett avoids any possibility that someone like Elizabeth Warren might use the space to argue that the wealthy have something to do with why the wealthy have done so well while the rest of us have been left behind.
