Michael Zweig on Bill Moyers JournalThe week after governments across the world announced major interventions in their economies saw wild gyrations in stocks, but little movement in credit markets, a more telling indicator of economic health. Banks admitted mid-week that the centerpiece of the new plan, injecting capital directly into large banks to encourage lending, is unlikely to make them start lending. The question, according to prominent economists, is no longer whether the U.S. and other major economies are headed into recessions, but how long and deep the downturn will be.
Michael Zweig joins Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL to shift the focus from Wall Street to the people who will be most hurt by a protracted recession, the everyday workers who struggled to make ends meet even in fatter times. As the director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life, Prof. Zweig recently released a report outlining policies he believes will aid these workers and benefit the overall economy. He described who these "distressed workers" were in a recent op-ed for Reuters:
They are cashiers, home health care workers, truck drivers, janitors, retail salespeople, secretaries, and many other people we see and rely on every day. They are people whose income is so low they cannot rise above the lowest twenty-five percent of housing stock for a family of their size in the community where they live without spending more than the government standard of thirty percent of income for housing. In short, they are over sixty million people in nearly twenty-three million households with eighteen million kids who can't afford to pay for the basic necessities of housing, food, medical care, and transportation.
Economic Stimulus and Economically Distressed Workers: Read full report >>
Further Reading
