Human Yardsticks
Instead of Corporate Yardsticks

excerpted from the book

The Ralph Nader Reader

If, instead of corporate yardsticks, we use human yardsticks to measure the performance of the economy and go beyond the quantitative indices of annual economic growth, structural deficiencies become readily evident. The complete dominion of traditional yardsticks for measuring economic prosperity masks not only these failures but also the inability of a weakened democracy to address how and why a majority of Americans are not benefiting from this prosperity in their daily lives. Despite record economic growth, corporate profits, and stock market highs year after year, a stunning array of deplorable conditions still prevails year after year. For example:

* A majority of workers are making less now, inflation adjusted, than in I979.

* Over 20% of children were growing up in poverty during the past decade, by far the highest percentage among comparable western countries.

* The minimum wage is lower today, inflation-adjusted, than in I979.

* American workers are working longer and longer hours-on average, an additional I63 hours per year, compared to twenty years ago-with less time for family and community.

* Many full-time family farms cannot make a living in a market of giant buyer concentration and industrial agriculture.

* The public works (infrastructure) are crumbling, with decrepit schools and clinics, library closings, antiquated mass transit and more.

* Corporate welfare programs, paid for largely by middle-class taxpayers and amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars per year, continue to rise along with government giveaways of taxpayer assets such as public forests, minerals and new medicines.

* Affordable housing needs are at record levels while secondary mortgage market companies show record profits.

* The number of Americans without health insurance grows every year

* There have been twenty-five straight years of growing foreign trade deficits ($270 billion in I999).

* Consumer debt is at an all time high, totaling over $6 trillion. Personal bankruptcies are at a record level.

* Personal savings are dropping to record lows and personal assets are so low that Bill Gates' net worth is equal to that of the net assets of the poorest I20 million Americans combined.

* The tiny federal budgets for the public's health and safety continue to be grossly inadequate.

* Motor vehicle fuel efficiency averages are actually declining and, overall, energy conservation efforts have slowed, while renewable energy takes a back seat to fossil fuel and atomic power subsidies.

* Wealth inequality is greater than at any time since WWII. The top one percent of the wealthiest people have more financial wealth than the bottom 90% of Americans combined, the worst inequality among large western nations.

* Despite annual declines in total business liability costs, business lobbyists drive for more privileges and immunities for their wrongdoing.

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