Coronavirus reveals, exacerbates US inequality

Just three weeks ago, Miguel Rodriguez was enjoying a pleasant life, working as a waiter in a Maryland restaurant in a job he held for 20 years.

According to Press TV, the American economy was purportedly going strong and he had a comfortable living situation.

Everything changed overnight when La Ferme, a French restaurant in the upscale Chevy Chase suburb of Washington, was forced to close amid statewide shutdowns to try to contain the coronavirus outbreak.

His wife, a waitress at another restaurant, also lost her job.

The pandemic instantly threw millions of US workers off the payroll and into poverty, in a crisis that is revealing and further exacerbating inequalities in the world's largest economy.

Low-income and middle-class households will be the first and hardest hit, and they have little in the way of savings.

"This is an extraordinary blow to millions of Americans who had barely recovered from the 2008 financial crisis," said Edward Alden, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Real wages took eight years to recover after the crisis, and had only accelerated for lower-paid workers in the past two years, he said.

Wages in 2019 rose at the fastest rate in 20 years partly thanks to some states increasing the minimum wage.

"This crisis, with the huge increase it is bringing in unemployment, will erase those gains," Alden said.

A decade of employment gains came to an abrupt halt in March, as the economy jettisoned 701,000 jobs and the unemployment rate posted the biggest increase in 45 years, rising to 4.4 percent.

President Donald Trump, who is running for re-election in November, regularly touts the record low unemployment among Hispanics and blacks.

But the jobless rate for both groups surged last month.

Even during years of economic growth, inequalities have continued to widen between wealthiest Americans -- who accumulated substantial gains on Wall Street -- and the bottom 90 percent.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the global economy into recession and the downturn "will exacerbate inequality," said Gregory Daco, Chief Economist at Oxford Economics.

Nearly 10 million workers filed for unemployment insurance in the final two weeks of March, and those "sudden job losses are concentrated in the low-income service sectors" in a country with few social safety nets and an extremely low savings rate of around eight percent.

ME