Fresno, CA

During a mid-July press conference Fresno Mayer Alan Autry said the Running Horse Project will spur development in West Fresno, an area long neglected by developers. In other words Autry is advocating Reagan style “trickle-down” economics. The present president George W. Bush also believes in and practices trickle-down economics. In an interesting bit of irony, Bush’s father, the former president George H.W. Bush, disparagingly called it “voo-doo economics.”

The problem with trickle-down economics is that it does not trickle down. Since President George W. Bush took office in January 2001 the income disparities between the richest and the poorest have increased. For the first time, everyone on the 2006 Forbes 400 list was a billionaire. The 2005 Forbes 400 list contained 374 billionaires, with a combined net worth of $1.13 trillion. No new editions were added to the 2005 list. Steve Forbes, Forbes magazine publisher, did not make the list because his net worth is only $400 million.

According to the National Poverty Center, poverty has increased over the last four years. Data from the Internal Revenue Service on 2005 income revealed that the bottom 99 percent of wage earners gained less than one percent, and the top one percent gained 14 percent. A December 2005 Congressional Research Service report found that per capita income in the San Joaquin Valley is lower than in Central Appalachia.

The U.S. Census Bureau revealed that between 2000 and 2005 the percentage of Americans living at half of the poverty level income increased by 26 percent. The poverty-level income for a family of three (two adults and one child) is $6,922. For a family of four it is $10,222, and for an individual, $5,250.

A 2004 study by UC Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez reported that the income of the median household in 2004 only increased by 1.6 percent. During the 1998 to 2001 period it increased by 9.5 percent.

The industrialized nation with the most unequal distribution of income is the United States, according to a 2003 article in the journal Vital Signs. Only 1.8 percent of the wealth in the U.S. goes to the poorest 10 percent. After adjusting for inflation, the tenth percentile of family income is almost the same today as it was in 1979: about $13,500. Thirty million Americans live on less.

In the words of West Fresno developer Donald Sims, “All that’s going to benefit [from Running Horse] is the affluent. It’s not going to benefit the poor black guy, the poor Mexican guy, the poor Hmong guy, and when they have the little PGA tour over there, who’s gonna go to it, but the affluent?”