Dear David:
Last week, you wrote glowingly about Third Way’s report, "The New Rules Economy," that attempts to debunk those of us you sneeringly label as "neopopulists." Calling the report "remarkable," and employing a kind of "even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while" awe that you might actually agree with something a bunch of folks calling themselves Democrats wrote, you hail their attempts at "myth-busting" about the declining middle class.
Your take-away from the Third Way report is that Dems, and I’m quoting you here, "tend to lose when they are relentlessly grim and when the reality they describe is detached from the reality most Americans experience."
As one of the middle-class Americans in economic decline that you’re so willing to gloss over, I want to welcome you to the "American reality" of my middle-class world. Join me, David, for a reality check below the jump:
David, the reason "neopopulists are good at describing the suffering in towns like Mansfield, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan" is that they’ve taken the time to meet people from those towns and know what hell-holes they really are. And if they’re not talking about the office parks shooting up in places and Charlotte and Phoenix, it’s likely because they know, as many of us in Texas do firsthand, that while construction sometimes signals economic growth, these days it can also signal the glut of an overdeveloped real-estate market.
If John Edwards sounds, in your estimation, like he’s running for the Democratic nomination of 1932, it’s because he’s signaling the reality of what’s going on here on the ground for so very many of us – and I’m here to tell you, David, that it’s not a big go-go world for the vast majority of Americans.
Since you seem not to know any actual, middle-class Americans, David, here’s the reality of my world. I’m a 43-year-old single mother with a modest home and mortgage and a 2003 Honda Element. I’m self-employed, I work hard, and I earn every penny that I take in. I receive no child support, so it’s me and the kid against the world. That’s a grown up’s job, and I’m happy and proud to do it.
You mention motherhood as the single biggest driver of income volatility with a kind of how-dare-you-women-procreate breathiness. My single motherhood is why I work for myself so, for the record, I’m not entering and re-entering the mainstream workforce, causing further labor volatility. (While you’re decrying motherhood, I’d love to see the same indignation from you on the subject of deadbeat dads. Just sayin’.)
Because I work in PR and advertising, my income has taken some serious knocks in the wake of 9/11, but, in an average year, I typically make before taxes in the neighborhood of what you quote as Third Way’s median single head of household income of $61,000. It’s no mean feat these days, given how much smaller the budgets are becoming for advertising and PR, so I scramble much harder to make the same money.
No complaints, just the reality, David. And, based on talks with my friends who are surviving in corporate jobs, forced by downsizing to work longer and longer hours for the same pay, my story seems to very much match those of the people around me. So, me and my friends are working harder for the same money.
Ok, a little hard work never hurt nobody. But, now, that same money stretches much less far than it did before. My insurance premiums, for example, have risen from $348 just four years ago to $920 this year. And I’ve just received a letter stating that the cost will go up still further, to close to $1,000, in three months. And they’re removing, once again, some key items from their basic coverage package. I get to decide now whether I want to pay even more than $1,000/month, or drop either my chemotherapy or care flight rider. So, unless I want to bust through that thousand-a-month ceiling, I’ve got to decide whether there’s a greater chance that I’ll get breast cancer or my kid might be so badly hurt somewhere that she’d need to be flown to Parkland. Good times.
I’d resent the whole insurance thing less, by the by, if the company actually paid out when claims were submitted, but getting the payments I’m owed takes something of an act of Congress. Even better, David, insurance providers have layered on so many qualifications for various standards of coverage that most of us are forced to make a Hobson’s choice about seeking care.
Last month, for example, my daughter was holding her left ear and screaming in pain. Turns out, the ear was so infected that even the motion of putting her foot down to walk jarred enough to hurt. Trouble was, her pain – and the infection – presented themselves after 5 p.m. Her regular pediatrician was gone for the night and, given the apparent severity of the infection, she needed treatment immediately.
If we were to go to the emergency room, though, I would bear the total cost of her treatment unless the doctors were to decide to admit her. So...daughter writhing pain and possibly perforating an eardrum vs. a $1,000 tab for care that my $1,000/month insurance won’t cover. Suffice it to say, I’ve added most of that thousand to the stack of thousands of dollars of hospitalization and surgical bills still unpaid from a car wreck in which I was the victim of an uninsured motorist. I say "most," because, like many middle-class Americans, I was forced to pay at least a deposit to the hospital at the time of her treatment, so I put that on my credit card. Credit cards, David – the health plan for tens of millions of middle-class Americans.
On the wreck front, my own uninsured motorists coverage denies that they’re on the hook, so I’ll have to sue to get them to pay the remaining $21K in medical bills that my own health insurance is refusing to pay. Until such time as I receive a settlement, if ever, I now – due to no action or fault of my own – have the joy of paying several hundred dollars a month to Parkland Hospital in a bid to stave off collections action.
The City of Dallas has also both raised taxes and reappraised my property every year since I’ve lived here, so my property taxes have risen from about $1,800 when I first moved in to north of $3,800 this year. Scratch a homeowner just about anywhere, and they’ll tell you the same story. The other component of my mortgage payment, my homeowners’ coverage, has gone up significantly, too – it’s now north of $1,500, since, for some reason, Texans pay about the highest homeowner’s insurance rates in the nation.
Then there’s the matter of utilities. My electricity costs have doubled over the last four years. In fact, under deregulated TXU, energy rates are so high that, even with average monthly billing, my electricity costs now run close to $300/month. Add in last year’s gasoline and natural-gas prices, and I can say with a straight face that my total energy costs have more than doubled, too.
(By the way, that’s setting aside the unilateral decision by Atmos Energy to replace the main natural gas line to my home so they could move the meter from the back yard to the front for ease of reading. They told me that they’d cover the costs of moving the line. After they had dug the trench and laid the line, however, they turned off my gas to test my home line, claimed they found a tiny leak somewhere in my home’s gas lines – although they couldn’t say where, and refused to turn them on until new lines were laid. So, for the sake of Atmos’ convenience, I’m currently without heating or hot water while a plumber installs $1,800 worth of new gas lines for a leak that my own plumber simply couldn’t find.)
UPDATE: I'm back now from my daughter's scheduled appointment for major dental work, and the bill went up from the estimated $1,721 to a total of about $2,500, which will include some additional work now set to be continued next month.
This means, then, that our long-planned, three-day weekend trip to Sea World over Spring Break -- the first vacation we had hoped to be able to afford in three years -- is likely off the table.
Fun times, David. Any chance you've got a spare bedroom you could put us up in in New York City? Call me?!
That’s my story in a nutshell, David. Do Democrats really "tend to lose when they are relentlessly grim and when the reality they describe is detached from the reality most Americans experience"?
You tell me.