Crisis in the White House

America is getting poorer. Census figures, released a week ago, show that 1.7 million more people have dropped below the poverty line over the past year. Nearly 34.6 million Americans are living in poverty. The middle classes and the Midwest - people like Prentice and places like Ohio - have suffered badly. Income levels for the middle class have dipped 1.1 per cent, after rising throughout the 1990s. At the same time, Bush's tax cuts have turned a budget surplus into a predicted deficit of $480 billion for next year. The cumulative deficit over the next decade is now expected to hit a staggering $1.4 trillion.

This is the so-called 'jobless recovery'. Although many economic indicators reveal an improvement, heaving the country out of the after-effects of recession, they fail to create enough employment.

The bare statistics are shocking; employment growth is the lowest for any recovery period since labour statistics were first kept in 1939. More than three million jobs have been lost since Bush took power in 2001, a record not seen since the days of President Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression.

The Observer