inspector at a nuclear power plant, can still comfortably support a family of five on a single income?
A more accurate snapshot139 of a modern middle-class family can be found in Nan Mooney’s book (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents. One person profiled in the 2008 book is Diana, thirty-six, a licensed psychologist with a doctorate in clinical psychology. Her husband, Byron, is a trained engineer who makes his living as a technical writer for a patent attorney. The couple has two young children. Besides bringing up her kids, Diana holds down two part-time jobs, one as an assessment director for a nonprofit organization that places school counselors, the other building her private practice as a psychologist. She makes $35,000 a year. Her husband, a contract worker paid on a per-project basis, makes $40,000. When interviewed by Mooney, their credit cards were loaded with debts totaling $17,000. Their mortgage cost them $1,150 a month. Diana was paying $450 a month on her school loans, but that figure was about to get bumped to $550 a month. Rent on her office, plus condo fees, added another $750 a month. The couple had little equity in their property and had wiped out their savings.
“I feel like we’ve cut every corner we can cut,” Diana told Mooney. “We don’t take vacations. We never go out. Right now, I just keep my fingers crossed that nothing breaks. We need a new roof and new tires for the car. And we’re going to get hit hard by taxes this year.” At that point, Diana’s voice began to crack. “I’m scared. I’m scared we’ll never be able to retire. I’m scared we won’t be covered for health care. I’m scared we won’t be able to send our kids to college. We’ve never had much, but before I always felt like we were doing our time. We were working our way toward a more comfortable future. That doesn’t seem true anymore. At this point, I see no way out at all.”
Diana and Byron’s tale is an increasingly common one. Their high-priced college education—the kind many see as a safeguard against economic hard times—is no longer enough at a time when the jobless rate is almost 10 percent140 and twenty-six million people141 are out of work or underemployed.
Troy Renault is one of them142. In August 2009, Troy, his wife, Tammy, and their five children were living in a three-bedroom home in Lebanon, Tennessee. Two years earlier, Troy had lost his construction job. Ultimately, as the Huffington Post’s Laura Bassett reported, they lost their home and had to move into a donated trailer on a local campground. They downgraded from a 1,900-square-foot house to a 215-square-foot trailer.
Says Troy143, “You wind up starting to think to yourself, ‘Okay. Do we go ahead and make the house payment and keep a roof over our head but have no lights and no water, or do we go ahead and keep those utilities on and forgo the house payment, and hope that you can get caught up?’ ”
Rebecca Admire is another144 of the more than eight million people who have lost their jobs since December 2007. A single mom with two kids, Admire was laid off from her job at the Family Guidance Center for Behavioral Healthcare in St. Joseph, Missouri. After several months of struggling to pay her rent, she invited her cousin and two children to move in with them and share costs. There are now eight people living in Admire’s two-bedroom house. The four children sleep in one bunk bed, two to a mattress. But with so many in the house, the utility bills have gone through the roof. “I cry every time a bill comes in the mail,” Admire says.
In some cases, entire towns are falling into permanent decline when their central industries disappear. Mount Airy, North Carolina, for example145, which has a population of just 9,500, historically relied largely on the textile industry for jobs. But, as Paul Wiseman reported in a March 2010 piece in USA Today, one after the other, the city’s textile and apparel factories shuttered, shedding more than three thousand jobs between 1999 and 2010. It’s a trend bound to continue: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, openings in textile and apparel manufacturing will nearly halve by 2018, as work is increasingly outsourced overseas and replaced by technological advances.
And in Mount Airy—the city where Andy Griffith grew up146, and the inspiration for Mayberry, the epitome of small-town America for TV viewers for half a century—the transition has rattled an entire generation that had banked on the security of manufacturing jobs. “When you started work, you thought you’d be there until you retired,” Jane Knudsen, who began working in a textile mill in 1973, told USA Today. But Knudsen’s mill closed down, and now she works as a part-time cook at the local jail for two dollars less per hour. Another local, Steve Jenkins, opted to skip college and go straight into apparel manufacturing. He worked at Perry Manufacturing for more than thirty years, advancing through the ranks to earn a salary of $103,000 as director of purchasing. But Perry shut down in 2008. For Jenkins, who received no severance and had few other skills, life was suddenly upended.
“We were not prepared147,” Mount Airy City Council member Teresa Lewis conceded. “We’ve had a huge loss of jobs in the textile industry. A lot of those people had devoted 30, 35 years to one particular company, and they found themselves in their early to mid-50s without a job or without the skills to go into something else.”
The aggregate effect of these stories—and tens of thousands more like them—is deeply troubling for our country. Through an enviable mix of jobs created by innovative American businesses and a national culture based on self-reliance, America has always had unemployment rates far lower than other developed nations. But this historic advantage is coming to an end. By the end of 2009, the unemployment rate148 among sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds was 19.1 percent. And 19.7 percent of American men149 aged twenty-five to fifty-four (prime working years) were unemployed—the highest figure since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking this data in 1948.
“Every downturn pushes some people150 out of the middle class before the economy resumes expanding,” wrote Peter Goodman in the New York Times in February 2010. “Most recover. Many prosper. But some economists worry that this time could be different. An unusual constellation of forces—some embedded in the modern-day economy, others unique to this wrenching recession—might make it especially difficult for those out of work to find their way back to their middle-class lives. . . . Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives—potentially for years to come.”
OPEN SEASON: SETTING A TRAP FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS
There are those in our country who look at the struggles of the middle class—mortgages underwater, foreclosure notices on the door, mounting credit card bills in the mailbox, bankruptcy on the horizon—and think, “They got into this mess of their own free will; they’re just getting what they deserve.” Who told them to buy that house they couldn’t afford, sign that mortgage without reading the balloon payment fine print, and run up those balances on a credit card that came with a teaser interest rate that is now 30 percent? Why should the rest of us, who were more prudent, be expected to carry the burden of the irresponsible?
This response ignores the ugly truth of what brought about this crisis. It wasn’t a sudden spike in irresponsibility on the part of middle-class Americans. It was the inevitable by-product of tricks and traps deliberately put in place to maximize profits for a few while creating conditions that would soon maximize misery for millions.
