How Can Stocks Boom While 1 in 5 Kids Aren’t Getting Enough to Eat?
By Adam Shah, Senior Policy Analyst, Jobs With Justice | @Handle4Adam
U.S. Stocks are up by about 33% since they hit bottom in March and had its best month in decades in April. At the same time, 1 out of 5 American kids are not eating enough because their parents couldn’t afford enough food. To put it another way, the number of kids in the United States at risk of starvation has exploded while Jeff Bezos has made TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS in the last couple of months. Even for a country used to huge amounts of inequality between rich people and working people, this disparity is shocking.
Here’s a look at the chart showing the billionaires getting richer:
Here’s a look at the number of children in danger of starving:
Why is this happening, and what is to be done? Well, the answer to the second question will soon be pitchforks and guillotines — unless we can figure out the first question and put an end to it.
The answer to “why is this happening” is pretty simple: Congress gave the Trump White House half a trillion dollars to distribute to big companies with almost no strings attached.
That money was not just a huge pile of dough; it was also a signal that the federal government will do whatever it takes to prop up the stock market. If you know that there is no chance the government will allow the market to crash, you should definitely invest in the stock market — if you have the means to do so.
Meanwhile, the government gave crumbs to the rest of us: A one-time payment of $1,200 to most adults and $500 for most children, with many immigrants excluded altogether. And a boost to unemployment benefits for a few months — benefits that disappear as soon as your governor lifts stay-at-home orders.
Bold proposals remain out there, however, and rather than pass another stimulus bill that might let the stock market increase to record highs while more kids starve, perhaps we should all coalesce behind them.
One such bold proposal is Rep. Ilhan Omar’s bill to cancel rent and mortgage payments during the COVID-19 crisis. The bill requires that landlords not to charge rent or evict tenants during the crisis, while also allowing for landlords to recoup their losses via government assistance—but only if they agree to a five-year rent hike freeze, a requirement that tenants cannot be evicted without just cause, and other restrictions. This will not only help during the current crisis, but will create positive, structural change in the U.S. housing market for years to come. If corporate landlords, such as Sam Zell and Cerberus Capital CEO Steve Feinberg — who bought millions of rental properties during the last housing crisis — realize that they will no longer have the same ability to profiteer off their rental properties going forward, they may exit the scene altogether. And that, indeed, is a good thing.
And their are other bold proposals are out there that can start to put working families ahead of corporate profits — such as a proposal by the Roosevelt Institute and the Harvard Law School Clean Slate for Worker Power project that would give workers an active role in designing and implementing the protocols that will govern their work lives during the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting recession.
The COVID-19 crisis has exposed how close to the edge we are. In a country that generated $21 trillion in GDP last year (that’s $21,000,000,000,000) two months of a slowed-down economy leads to 1 in 5 kids, and many more adults, being in danger of starvation. We need to stop the people like Zell and Feinberg who gobble up all that money while leading us begging for crumbs.
And we need to do it in the next stimulus bill.
