The Ladder To Nowhere
What it really means when the American Dream goes away
I spent a lazy Sunday watching “Evolution Of The Black Quarterback” and marveling at how things have improved and yet stayed the same. Fifty years ago, Black quarterbacks weren’t really considered NFL material for reasons based not in reality but in racism. It takes a long time for things to change, even when they are wrong.
We know the middle class has eroded, but we don’t often consider what that really means. In The Middle-Class New Deal, A. Mechele Dickerson looks at the current state of the middle class across key areas, including home ownership, education, savings, career, and debt. By any measure, we as a nation are losing ground. While it’s currently fashionable and not entirely inaccurate to blame it on the Boomers, they are really the noise, not the signal. The issue is more that many of us grew up in The Great Compression, that period of time when unions thrived, manufacturing jobs supported an entire family, and while you might know a few wealthier people in your community, they weren’t super rich.
I grew up in a single-parent household for my formative years in the 1970s and early 1980s. We didn’t have as much as other families in the neighborhood, but it was a gap, not a chasm. It didn’t close every single door. Now the difference between lower-income families and those with more is vast, especially when it comes to areas like education. Part of this is also a shift in mindset. People watching “Stranger Things” are surprised by the free-roaming lives that most kids had in the 1980s. Many of us were latchkey kids, responsible for feeding ourselves and coming home sometime before the sky turned dark. Today’s children are trained like thoroughbreds, scheduled and tutored and monitored. This is supposed to make sure kids don’t fall through the cracks but instead what it has created a sharper division between kids whose parents have enough money to succeed and those who don’t.
Dickerson also looks at the unraveling of defined benefit plans. Over the next few decades we will see how people will fare in retirement without pensions. While 401(k)s and IRAs are important ways to save, they are often inflexible and confusing for today’s frequent job changers, not to mention gig workers. Many people can’t afford to put money aside for retirement anyway, there are far more urgent concerns. These tax-advantaged accounts benefit those with the ability to contribute and the wherewithal to understand the intricacies of rollovers, Roth IRAs, SEP IRAs, and other types of accounts. Much of the narrative about lower-income people is often punitive, that they just don’t know how to save.
The most important part of the book is the last chapter, the how-do-we-fix-it section. But even before that, we have to ask a simple question: do we care? Do we care about the people around us or only our own financial state? Ideally we should want our entire community to survive and thrive but as this country becomes more polarized a winner-takes-all (or at least most) attitude prevails.
Many people believe that in order to succeed someone else has to fail. We see this not just with the competition in raising kids but in the compulsive consumerism rampant on social media. It’s present in the NIMBYism that dominates in many areas where property values have increased. As Dickerson points out, most change has to be implemented through governmental programs, but that only comes if we push for it. The idea of government as a safety net only works if we agree we want that, we are willing to advocate for it, and we want our tax dollars to support this. It has to come from us. That was how the ladder was built last time, by the government yes, but by the people first who said this will not stand.
Wanting the best for the majority of people shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It shouldn’t be subject to the whim of party politics. The middle class grew because we elevated our standards as a nation, because innovation and business growth combined with policies that supported wealth generators like college education, healthcare, and home ownership. We created a middle class that wasn’t fully fair or just but it was a ladder, for all its broken rungs. I believe, I hope, we can do it again.
I wonder whether some of this also has to do with people in leadership positions who never really experienced any personal sacrifice? So many of the leaders during what many people think of as our "golden era" had first hand experience of the Great Depression and fought in one or more world wars.
Not to blame boomers but most of our leaders (many of whom are also uber wealthy) never served in the military and never experienced living hand to mouth. It's a lot easier to scorn people who don't have much money or opportunities when you've never had any experience with those people either first hand or as neighbors.