The Equity Factor

Will the Real “Everyday Americans” Please Stand Up

Americans have a complicated relationship with the “middle class” and government aid.

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks to a group of “everyday Americans” in Marshalltown, Iowa on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

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Last Sunday, Hillary Clinton announced that she would be running for president in 2016 by saying, “Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.”

The New York Times reports that Clinton’s use of the phrase “everyday Americans” was carefully premeditated. Her advisers have prescribed that she use the phrase in lieu of “middle class,” because “the term no longer connotes a stable life” for the public.

Over the past year, she’s been drawing attention to the issues of stagnant wages and wealth inequality, which has become a source of anxiety for many Americans. Indeed, this week fast-food workers in cities around the country rallied for a raise to $15 an hour. Just as Clinton is tapping into issues of economic insecurity and job hunting, several new reports are touching on these very same themes.

We Are the 87 Percent
While Clinton’s campaign advisers think the “middle class” might illicit thoughts of economic instability in the heads the American public, a study from the Pew Research Center confirms that a wide majority of Americans — 87 percent — still consider themselves members of the middle class.

Only 1 percent of Americans asked consider themselves a part of the upper class, while 11 percent count themselves as upper-middle class; 47 percent say they fall squarely in the middle class, 29 percent think they are lower-middle class, and 10 percent say they belong in the lower class.

Even so, Clinton’s team might be on to something. Of the Pew respondents, 72 percent said that in general, the government’s policies following the recession have done little or nothing to help the middle class, and 68 percent said the government has done little to nothing to help small businesses. A whopping 65 percent said that the government has done little or nothing to help the poor. Yet at the same time, 44 percent said they think aiding those in poverty does more harm than good because it makes people dependent on government assistance.

Nonetheless, there is a bit of optimism in public opinion about the jobs horizon: 67 percent said that the job situation has improved — up 20 percent since a similar study was done in September 2013.

The Public Cost of Low Wages
A report released on Monday by UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education throws light on the complicated correlation between stagnant wages and government aid.

It finds that real hourly wages of the median American worker in 2013 were only 5 percent higher in 2013 than they were in 1979. When adjusted for inflation, wage growth from 2003 to 2013 is negative or flat for the bottom 70 percent of wage earners.

When working families cannot make ends meet, they turn to public assistance programs. Nearly three-quarters of people enrolled in these programs are members of working families, according to the report.

Between 2009 and 2011, the study found that the federal government spent $127.8 billion per year on four programs: Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The researchers conclude that, “When jobs don’t pay enough, workers turn to public assistance in order to meet their basic needs. These programs provide vital support to millions of working families whose employers pay less than a livable wage.”

Further, if the nation’s employers stepped up to raise wages and provide more people with health insurance, the federal government would be able to shift and direct taxpayers’ money to other programs and priorities.

The Impact of Minimum Wage Laws on Employment in Cities
In response to the conservative backlash against #Fightfor15 this week, Mother Jones points to a number of studies from recent years that squelch the idea that raising minimum wage laws create doom and gloom scenarios for low-wage employment in cities.

A Center for Economic Policy and Research study found that when the minimum wage was raised in San Francisco and Santa Fe in 2004 most of the impacts were negligible, with more measurably positive impacts than negative. A 2014 working paper from UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment finds that in nine cities where local wage minimums had been established, there was no significant evidence that employers cut hours or employees in response. Instead, “the costs to businesses are absorbed largely by reduced turnover costs and by small price increases among restaurants.”

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Alexis Stephens was Next City’s 2014-2015 equitable cities fellow. She’s written about housing, pop culture, global music subcultures, and more for publications like Shelterforce, Rolling Stone, SPIN, and MTV Iggy. She has a B.A. in urban studies from Barnard College and an M.S. in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Tags: jobsincome inequalityminimum wage

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