Exchange between U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders (I-VT)and Alan GreenspanHouse Banking and Financial Institutions Committee Hearing on the Semiannual Report of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Witness: Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve
February 24, 1999
Sanders opening statement at the hearing:
REP. SANDERS: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. John, thank you very much. I would just like to say this . . . . there is no argument that in recent years the economy in fact has been very good. But we should not overdo it in terms of what's going on for the average working person in this country. The good news is that for the last couple of years, for the first time in decades, we have seen wages go up for lower-income workers and middle- income workers -- for the first time.
But the fact is that the median family in 1996 was $1,000 less than in 1989. The inflation-adjusted earnings of the median worker in 1997 were 3.1 percent lower than in 1989. And over the period from '89 to '97, real hourly wages either stagnated or fell for most of the bottom 60 percent of the working population.
So while we can say that in the last few years, for the average worker, things have been getting better, the reality is that most workers in America today are working longer hours and lower wages than was the case 10 or 20 years ago. And if we say this is as good as it's going to be, that's a pretty pessimistic outlook.
More importantly, and this is a point that I want to stress, because it is not talked about too much, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the typical married couple family worked 247 more hours per year in 1996 than in 1989. That's more than six weeks worth of additional work. That means all over this country, and I'm sure it's in your district as well as in mine, you're seeing people working two jobs, working three jobs. In the beginning of the century, workers fought. They said, "We want a 40-hour work week. That's what we want." A hundred years later, workers are working 45, 50, 60 hours a week. Wives are working alongside of husbands because we need two bread-winners in a family to pay the bills.
eah, I have seen improvement in the last couple of years. We should be proud of that. We should continue that effort. But if you look at what's going on for the average American worker today, in many respects, he or she is not where they were 20 years ago. We still have 43 million people without any health insurance. People can't afford the cost of college education. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world; the greatest gap between the rich and the poor.
So if we sit here and we say, "Gee, we are living in Utopia. It's not going to get any better than this," boy, I think that would be a very sad and unfortunate statement. And that would be my point, Mr. Chairman.
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