During President Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, he popularized the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid.”

The point of this phrase was to emphasize that, all of the irrelevant, marginal issues aside, the performance of the economy is the central engine that drives everything else, especially politics.

I think a similar wake up call might benefit those who are concerned about inequality, poverty and social injustice.

It’s not poor education that primarily causes these social ills. It’s not low taxes that primarily causes them either. It’s the wages, stupid.

In the past 15 years, the percentage of national income paid to the bottom 80 percent of wage earners has decreased 9.5 percent.

In the same time period, the percentage of national income being paid to the top 1 percent of Americans has increased by 8.5 percent.

Additionally, the latest census found that the income gap between the rich and the poor is the highest ever recorded. Perhaps contributing to this fact, in the last 40 years, the minimum wage when adjusted for inflation has declined by more than 28 percent.

The poor are getting poorer, their wages are declining and inequality is increasing. This creates a whole cocktail of problems that most are probably familiar with by now.

Poverty often leads to addiction, crime and violence, as well as low and unstable standards of living.

Beyond that, rising inequality in income negatively impacts social programs funded through regressive taxes, such as Social Security.

The recent Social Security Trustees’ Report provided data that showed rising income inequality has caused nearly half of the projected Social Security shortfall.

So, we know inequality and poverty are increasing, but what does anybody propose to do about it? This is where the real disappointment begins.

College students, even some attending this university, are often among the group of people that pretend to care about these issues, and think that something should be done about them. But what most of them end up doing in response is pointless at best.

Take Teach for America for example. College students from across the country sign up to waste their time for two years making fruitless attempts at closing the education gap. I say fruitless because the program makes no effort to actually solve the problem.

We know that schools in low-income communities are underfunded because the tax base of the area is poor. We know that students from low-income families have a harder time excelling in school due to unstable households, neighborhood effects and other poverty-related causes.

The cause of the education gap then is not largely bad instructors in the schools. It is not because the school does not have enough charitable 22-year-old teachers right out of college. It’s the wages, stupid.

If we improve the wages of the poor parents, we increase taxable income in poor areas and we decrease poverty-related distractions.

This approach would not just help improve the education of those living in poor areas and households, but would also likely contribute to solving other problems caused by poverty as well.

That’s right: reducing poverty might actually be a good way to solve poverty-related problems.

While that seems obvious enough, you would not be able to tell by the droves of students dedicating themselves to programs like Teach for America that encourages people to sloppily contend with the consequences of poverty instead of working to eradicate poverty itself.

If people are really serious about combating poverty, inequality and social injustice, then they need to keep wages a top priority.

Work on a living wage campaign or help organize a union and address the root problem.

— Matt Bruenig, philosophy senior