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Too often an election will be dramatically characterized as the “election of the century,” or “the most important election in our lifetime.”  But this time it may be true. 
    In the past eight years, the U.S. has gone from record surpluses to record deficits.  We are at war in two countries with no end in sight.  Gasoline prices have doubled since 2000.  Our country has been flooded with contaminated consumer products, including the toys our children play with, and our food supply is becoming less safe.  Climate change is threatening the planet, yet the government is unresponsive. 
    But most importantly, women’s rights, for which we fought so hard in the 20th century, have been steadily eroded since 2001. The first federal abortion ban in history became law in 2007. Title IX, the law requiring equal educational opportunities for girls and women, has been weakened. A woman-hostile Supreme Court has seriously curtailed our right to challenge employment discrimination. The wage gap remains, and we are the only industrialized country without some form of paid pregnancy or family leave. The childcare system in the U.S. is a patchwork of “make-do” arrangements that leaves families struggling, and the few federal anti-poverty programs that exist have been cut to the bone. Social Security, women’s main retirement program, remains under pressure, and long-term care is an increasing problem that families must solve on their own. 
    There are many other pressing national issues we don’t normally think about as “women’s” issues, but that is indeed what they are. The economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health-care crisis, tax policies—all affect women in different ways than they affect men, and all are growing concerns.
    If this sounds like a doomsday scenario, it’s not—though it is a challenge.  Women have the opportunity in 2008 to take control and make the changes needed in the elections and beyond, but having the opportunity is not enough.  We must also have the will, firmly grounded in essential knowledge.

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Women have the numbers and the voting power to control any election, and we have the numbers to affect the national agenda after elections are over. The gender gap—the difference between women and men in their levels of support for a given candidate or issue—first discovered and named by feminist leaders in 1980. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was pending before the states, and the right to abortion had been upheld by the Supreme Court only seven years before.  Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for president, ran on a platform that included opposition to both abortion rights and the ERA.  His opponent, Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, was pro-choice and a strong ERA advocate.  Reagan won the election, but his support split along gender lines, with 54 percent of men voting for him vs. 46 percent of women. That gender gap has never gone away, and neither has women’s majority in the ranks of voters—and that’s why women-generated change is possible. 
    Women’s votes have made the difference in many close elections, most recently contests in 2006 that turned over control of the Senate and the House of Representatives from majority Republican to majority Democratic. If only men had voted, the Senate would still have a Republican majority.
    Voting is not the only place where gender gaps have developed.  There are also gender gaps on issues, with women having different priorities than men. Looking at what women and men tell pollsters is one way to get behind the voting numbers and see what drives the gender gap in the voting booth.
    The economy has been increasingly cited as a major concern by women since early 2008, when it started to sour on the heels of the subprime mortgage crisis and began dominating the news. Though not many people rated the national economic situation “excellent” overall, twice as many men did so as women. Significantly fewer women rated the economy even “good.”  Women also rated their personal financial situations worse than men did, and  far fewer women said their own money situation was “excellent.”
    These results are consistent with earlier polls going back to 2006.  An election-eve poll conducted that year by Lake Research Partners for Ms. magazine and the Women Donors Network asked people to assign a number of 0 (very low priority) to 10 (very high priority) to a number of issues. Forty-one percent of women rated the economy and jobs a very high priority, compared to only 30 percent of men.
    We know that women are the majority of voters, and can control any election. And we’ve seen what women care about. But do candidates and parties listen? Too often the answer is no.
    In the economic realm, candidates like to ignore issues such as high poverty rates (particularly among women of color), low wages, and lack of health insurance, and instead posture on the “death tax”—a   term used to describe the estate or inheritance tax.  They would have us believe that we are all going to die paupers, unable to leave any of our hard-earned dollars to our children and grandchildren. In reality, the estate tax is relevant to less than one third of one percent of all U.S. estates—33 people out of every 10,000. While very wealthy families may care about inheritance taxes, it never gets mentioned by ordinary Americans when talking about their concerns and priorities, particularly not by women. Don’t let candidates get away with talking most of the time about fake economic issues such as the “death tax” when there are very real problems in the economy that affect women—like the subprime mortgage crisis taking us into a recession.

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To understand subprime lending and that mortgage crisis, we have to know how interest rates affect our personal economics, and how the federal government influences these rates.
    The government’s primary agency for controlling interest rates is the Federal Reserve Bank  (the Fed), which can be thought of as a bank for bankers. To keep the money supply flowing smoothly, the Fed loans money to other banks at a certain interest rate (the discount rate) for short-term loans. As the discount rate goes up, banks have to pay more for money they borrow from the Fed, and in turn charge more to businesses and consumers who borrow from them. When borrowers have to spend more on interest, this effectively increases the cost of every purchase financed through debt (cars, houses, student loans), so overall spending drops.
    In a shrinking economy, the Fed will often lower interest rates to induce both businesses and individuals to borrow and spend, thus stimulating economic growth. Interest rate is a big determinant of the monthly payments on credit cards, mortgages and auto loans, so if payments are “locked in” (meaning they stay the same for the life of such loans) fluctuations don’t matter much.  But if interest rates go up on your big loan, and payments greatly exceed the amount you’ve budgeted, you may be in trouble. That is exactly what happened in the subprime mortgage crisis.
    Subprime mortgages are high-interest-rate loans made to borrowers with low incomes or low credit scores—predominately women. (Subprime refers to the credit status of the borrower, not to the interest rate, which is very high.) The loans now make up 13 percent of existing home loans, but account for 55 percent of foreclosures. And although women and men have roughly the same credit scores, women are 32 percent more likely to be targeted for subprime loans than men. Though this gender gap exists in every income and ethnic group, African-American women have been especially victimized by the loans.
    Women do have less wealth than men, and that probably increases the likelihood they will be channeled into these loans.  But plain old sex discrimination plays a role too.  Institutions that buy loans from mortgage companies estimate that up to half of the subprime loans went to borrowers whose credit was good enough for standard rate loans.
    In the years leading up to the mortgage crisis, some lenders marketed subprime loans aggressively with initial low teaser rates—which increased greatly after a few months or the first year.  In many cases, house payments doubled. Borrowers could no longer make the payments, so they defaulted on the loans and lost their homes. Through fall 2007, mortgage defaults were up 94 percent over the previous year, with entire neighborhoods virtually abandoned. This, in turn, affected local and state tax revenues, forcing cuts in public services.
    As news coverage of the crisis exploded, people became more pessimistic and curbed spending, and recession talk in the news media increased. This prompted the Fed to lower interest rates drastically in January, 2008, in an effort to restore confidence and stop the slide. But it was not enough to convince people: A month later, nearly two-thirds of the public felt that the economy was suffering through its first recession since 2001.

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Since he took office in 2001, President Bush has had one solution to virtually every economic problem: tax cuts primarily benefiting the wealthy. His philosophy is a simple-minded version of conservative arguments in general—if  corporations and the wealthy individuals who fund them through investments pay lower taxes, they will invest those tax savings in ways that will create jobs, such as building new plants, acquiring new subsidiaries or expanding product lines. This theory has been generally referred to as “trickle-down,” or “supply side economics,” meaning change made at the top of the wealth pile eventually makes its way to workers at the bottom.
    This theory sounds pretty good—if you believe the tax savings really will be spent on creating jobs instead of multimillion dollar bonuses for CEOs, fines and legal judgments for various corporate abuses or fatter dividends for stockholders. As for expanding facilities and building new plants, that might  work as advertised—unless the facilities are already in China and the new plants will be in Mexico.
    Progressives believe that putting money in the hands of those who actually need it to live on is a better plan to keep the economy going, because they spend more of what they have instead of just adding it to stock and bond accounts. Very-low-income people, including many women of color, have to spend it all, every month, just to buy the basics. Progressives also believe that the government can have a positive influence on economic growth through spending tax dollars, and that in a recession money should be injected into the economy as fast as possible.  They would create some jobs by repairing infrastructure such as roads and bridges, funding green energy research and development and restoring government services that have been cut.
    We saw the contrast in these approaches in the debate over the stimulus package President Bush signed in February. Democrats wanted to implement one-time tax rebates to working families, expanded unemployment benefits, money to prevent home foreclosures and assistance to state and local governments. Republicans at first insisted that making the Bush tax cuts slated to expire in 2010 permanent was the only fix needed. But as public pressure for a solution mounted, they agreed that a short-term stimulus was warranted, and Congress passed a relief package. The entire House and one third of the Senate is facing re-election—Bush isn’t. 
    The agreement reflected priorities of the Democrats (rebate money directly to people who would spend it) and priorities of the Republicans (tax incentives for business). Democrats also wanted to extend unemployment benefits and increase food stamp aid, and Republicans wanted to remove the eligibility cap for the rebate payments (give checks to the wealthy) and make the 2003 tax cuts permanent.  Neither side got these additional provisions, but Republicans were allowed to insert language prohibiting illegal aliens from receiving any benefits.
    Women were both winners and losers in the stimulus package.  A last-minute provision adding benefits for the elderly who live solely on Social Security benefited more women than men, because women are the majority of the elderly poor. Including rebates for low-income workers with children who earn too little to pay taxes was also good for women, as this group is predominately single mothers. 
    Where did women lose?  While there was much talk about the subprime mortgage crisis, and indeed it was the initial impetus for the stimulus package, nothing was done to help. In fact, the “fix” will probably hurt those that need it most.  Incredibly, it permits the federally-chartered mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to divert money away from low-priced housing into very high-dollar mortgages held by the rich. This means women at the low end will continue to lose their homes in disproportionate numbers as the mortgage interest rates reset to levels they can’t afford. Women of color will likely be hit the hardest.
    The failure to include an increase in food stamp benefits was also a loss for women.  Nearly 70 percent of adult food stamp beneficiaries are female.  More money for food stamps would have been particularly effective way to target the poor and boost the economy at the same time.  Benefits could be quickly deposited on debit cards and used almost immediately at grocery stores, providing an economic jolt while aiding women.
    Women further lost out when Congress failed to include an extension of unemployment benefits—but they didn’t lose as much as men, because women already get less unemployment insurance. The system was designed during the Great Depression, when men dominated the labor market. Unemployment benefits were crafted as a safety net for those who worked fulltime, met a certain income threshold and lost their jobs solely because of an employer's decision. Though women are now a permanent part of the labor force, fewer women than men meet these criteria because they are more likely to work part time or hold lower-wage jobs. And women are more likely to leave their jobs because of domestic violence, harassment or stalking, to follow a spouse or to take care of their families.  None of these reasons for job loss are covered by unemployment insurance.

Whether the economy improves in the short run or not, women must hold candidates and elected officials accountable for long-term solutions. Read their records. Go to town hall meetings and confront them.  Call in when you hear them on the radio.  If they don’t mention women, ask why not. Spread the word when they say something about our issues, good or bad. Email. Blog. Raise hell. Forget fancy speeches and red-hot rhetoric: Arm yourself with knowledge and vote your own interests. 


Copyright © 2008 by Martha Burk

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