CNN calls John D. Sutter’s “Change the List” article an opinion piece. It reads more like an indictment of the current U.S. economic system. Opinion or not, “The Most Unequal Place in America” is actual news. Not to those who have lived it, but to those who haven’t. Because if you’ve never been in this place, you have the capacity to know what it’s like, but you will never understand the life or the culture that comes out of it.
One of the few things I don’t have in common with the people I hang out with right now is the issue of middle class poverty. I use this term very deliberately. When these people think of poverty, they have images of homeless guys, feet sticking out of cardboard boxes, hands wrapped around a paper-bag-disguised bottle. Or starving kids in Africa with distended bellies, surrounded by bugs and living in huts. It never occurs to them that the family living down the block might be middle class poor.
I define middle class poverty as the family who, at one time, could have been considered part of the middle class. They have a reasonably secure roof over their head. They’re not starving. They have clothes. But honestly, that’s about all they have. The roof may be leaking in spots, the fence falling down, mold and mildew are attacking the doors or termites have gotten into the walls. But for all that, the house is not a shack or a ramshackle dwelling. Dinner consists of the leftovers from the last cooked meal, breakfast is the cheapest cereal in the grocery store, snacks consist of a slice of buttered bread with sugar sprinkled on top (candy is too expensive, you see). Casseroles are a big thing in these households because a casserole can be made with whatever the heck is lying around in the cupboards.
The family may be on food stamps, if they manage to qualify. If there are two parents, both are working (or trying to). If there is one parent, that parent has multiple jobs. The family saves anything recyclable and tries to cash it in at the local recycle plant (soda cans, steel bits, glass bottles, etc.) because every nickel and dime counts. If the family has a car, it’s a used vehicle purchased without a loan that is gassed up a gallon at a time because they can’t afford to fill up the whole tank. If the car breaks down (which happens frequently), everyone walks. In fact, the car is only used by the working member(s) of the family, generally the one who has the farthest to go.
And clothes? No brand names here unless they came from a cousin. That’s the great thing about big families. Hand-Me-Downs. Shoes are about the only thing that truly need to be bought new (or used from a thrift store) because they don’t hand-down as well given that the cousins rarely wear the same size. The jeans are probably an inch or two too short, the shirt a size too big, and the styles completely out of date, but who cares? The clothes are free, warm, and frees up the family budget for more important things like food, toilet paper, etc.
Electricity is necessary for the cooking and the heating of house and bath water. Phone service is a hit-or-miss thing. It would be good to have a phone all the time for those job offers and emergency contact needs, but the truth is that long distance and even local calls aren’t as important as food and basic utilities. Both cell phones and internet are luxuries. Sometimes a kid will become a teen, get a job, and think “YAY! I can buy a cable / internet subscription for the family with my new paycheck.” The joy and the subscription lasts six months to a year and then the family is back to doing without. Maybe it’s because the kid lost the job or because the extra paycheck is needed to pay for medical bills.
Oh, yes. Medical bills. Did I forget to mention those? Because now they hit the credit reports when they’re unpaid (unlike when I was younger) which makes it even more difficult for a family to pull itself out of the hole. The worse the credit, the harder it is to get approved for a home loan, an apartment rental, insurance, utilities service, or even a basic bank account (checking or savings). Credit cards are a pipe dream around here, unless they are of the pre-paid variety.
Every other weekend, the family moneymakers huddle around a table, bills splayed around them as they pick and choose which one needs paid, which one can “float” until next payday, and which services need to be outright cancelled. If things need to be cut, the luxuries go first, then the not-quite-essential things (phone, car), until the family is down to the bare bones of necessary items.
Does the kid want music lessons? Sorry, no money for instruments or a band uniform. Unless the school (or teacher) is willing to subsidize, that’s out. What about that vacation the family wanted to take? Um, what’s a vacation again? Let’s play in the backyard instead. House repairs can wait. How much mac & cheese or pasta can the family live on for a week? Fruit and vegetables are exorbitantly priced so those are special once-a-month treats if the family is lucky. And the food bank (if the family qualifies) is overloaded with everything that the family hates to eat while having nothing of what the family actually enjoys. So, there’s that too.
But there’s a roof. And some food in the cupboard. The clothes sorta fit, even if the kids at school are teasing the poor kid who has no other choice but to wear the non-brand name “high tide” jeans. A paycheck is coming in every two weeks or so and the heat & A/C are still functional. Sort of. Wait. Did we pay the electricity this month or last month?
This, peeps, is middle class poverty. It is a hole filled with hope, desperation, depression, and uncertainty. Just when things start looking up, just when all the bills have been paid two or three months in a row, the engine falls out of the car or someone ends up in the hospital. Then everything goes back to square one.
There is a great big wall blocking the path to financial success. What people call “living wages” aren’t livable and are barely wages. Career advancement for better pay takes training, which usually costs money (college, certification classes, etc.) Training usually requires time off which means no paycheck in addition to the cost of the training. Most families can’t afford that risk, so don’t even try. They just survive paycheck to paycheck and hope the kids have better luck than they did. Which seldom happens because the kids learned all the wrong lessons about money management (if they learned anything at all). The kids can’t afford college or, if they can, build a mountain of their own debt because no one properly explained financial aid and now they have loans they can’t repay. All the high paying jobs have been downsized or taken by older people willing to work on the cheap and the kids end up in the same fast-food / department store clerk job as their parents did.
And the cycle continues.
I learned better money management skills than many in my situation. I also had a guardian angel who bought about $1000.00 worth of computers and books for me to self-train into a better career with a higher paying job set. That same guardian angel persists in believing that it was my hard work that got me where I am today and he’s not entirely wrong. But he’s not entirely right either. Without those books and those used computers I would not have been able to train for my database administrator job. As smart as I am, as driven as I am, I would have spent the rest of my life stuck in low-paying clerk jobs. That $1000 was my opportunity cost, the barrier between choosing food or toilet paper for the month and being able to pay all my bills without sweating the issue. And I could not afford that opportunity cost alone, no matter how much I tried to save.
Every day I listen to my coworkers talk about when and if they’re going to buy the latest iPhone or where they’re going to spend their next vacation (in the States or the Bahamas). I hear discussions about private school for the kids or public. My gaming buddies work their budgets based on the latest releases, saying they can’t afford the special edition X game because they’re going to buy the mondo minatures game release. What I don’t hear are the comments about how to clothe the kids, that they’re brown bagging their lunches every day because they can’t afford the dollar menu at the local fast food joint, that they can’t be reached by phone (oh, no, they’ve all dropped home service because their new cell phone is shiny and cheaper despite what they’re paying for data usage and all the pretty apps).
Yes, they know about income disparity. Yes, they know the economy is bad. But none of them really understand it.
They can’t understand, you see. Because they haven’t been there, teetering on the edge of solvency, wondering if that extra nickel from the Coke bottle will give them enough change in their pockets to buy the Kraft mac & cheese that went on sale yesterday for a dollar off and for which you have a .50 cent off coupon you clipped out of the newspaper ads that your neighbor just discarded.
Anyway, that’s my two cents on the issue. What’s yours? Tell me what Middle Class Poverty or just plain income disparity means to you.
