Stock market sell-offs and collapsing corporations have been the most visible signs of the United States economic downturn over the past two years.
But as growth slowed the economic pain spread well beyond chastened dotcom millionaires, hitting disadvantaged groups that had only just begun to benefit from the long boom of the late 1990s.
For all its supposed classlessness and new-world meritocracy, the US is a deeply divided society.
Figures released by the government this week painted a bleak picture of the lives of the 36-million African-Americans — those who are ”non-institutionalised” and do not form part of the notoriously large and disproportionately black US prison population.
Unemployment within the white population last year was 5%; among African-Americans it was 11%. Poverty is also disproportionately concentrated among black people. In the population as a whole, 12% live in poverty, but the incidence among black people is 23%. For children, that rises to an astonishing 30%.
As the economy turned downwards in 2001, with global trade depressed and the consequences of the heady years of over-investment making themselves felt, hopes for the poorest stopped moving in the right direction.
In 1979 the poverty rate among black people was 31%. Ten years and two presidential terms for Ronald Reagan later, it was unchanged. But through the roaring 1990s, things began to improve.
Jared Bernstein, of the Washington think-tank the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said the benefits of the extraordinary period of expansion had begun to trickle down to the bottom of society.
”Black families made quite significant gains against poverty in the late 1990s,” he said. ”The rising tide finally did lift some of the rowboats.”
By 2000 the black poverty rate had dropped to 22,5%: still high, but the lowest figure since the US government began measuring it, in 1959.
Progress in the 1990s was not the result of economic growth alone. The mininum wage was raised, bringing up the incomes of those at the bottom of the income scale — and Bill Clinton experimented with welfare to work policies, raising the in-work tax credits.
As Bernstein put it: ”Welfare to work was pushing, the economy was pulling, and full employment certainly helps.”
In The State of Working America, its survey of US society published last year, the EPI said: ”Truly effective poverty reduction depends on both market forces and the redistribution of economic resources.”
With market forces — for the moment, at least — pointing in the wrong direction, it would be simplistic to put the blame for rising poverty on the change of personnel in the White House.
But, with US President George W Bush fighting to convince Congress that the best way of boosting the economy is cutting taxes for the rich, it seems certain that policy is not going to help. — Â