By Deena Sherman –
My parents were married right out of high school in the early 1960s. With a union job at a steel mill and a license to operate a beauty shop, they quickly saved enough to buy a house and enter the middle class.
Fifty years later, two of my children are teachers. Even with a bachelor’s degree, multiple certifications, and jumping extra licensing hoops as rules changed, their pay is so low that they struggle to make ends meet. One works a second job to afford the house he bought and the other wonders if she ever will pay off her student loan debt and save money to eventually liberate herself from apartment life.
For the record, I personally define middle class as those whose income is below a quarter-million dollar a year and above the poverty line, which is currently just more than $21,000 per year for a family of three.
It feels as though we’ve constantly watched America take one step forward and two steps back in sustaining its middle class. With initiatives such as president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s GI Bill in 1944 and the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (later called Pell Grants) in 1972, many were given a leg up. Yet, through the decades, tax cuts and other legislation have disproportionately benefitted the most wealthy. Union-busting efforts mean less family-supported jobs for those who prefer to learn a trade than earn a four-year degree, and lack of funding has meant that even academic degrees do not guarantee a decent wage for teachers, social workers, and others who work hard in white collar jobs.
Lately, we see a trend to cut jobs that allow workers to support families, in favor of hiring more part-time workers who are offered neither pension nor benefits. For too many Americans, it means a collection of part-time jobs rather than a career. I was recently introduced to a website called “When I work” that helps individuals track their changing shifts, and multiple jobs. These past few years I have worked jobs that pay half as much as I made 20 years ago, so I feel the pain of millennials who struggle under this ugly paradigm.
According to the Pew Research Center, 2015 was the first year middle income families were no longer the majority in this country. This was the same year that life expectancy, which had been climbing for decades, began to decline. My personal conclusion is that Americans are more stressed, work more hours for less money, and many cannot afford to see a doctor regularly.
As we look to the 2020 election, we need to look past labels and mud-slinging to see which candidates actually have a plan to support a strong middle class. Who has a plan to make education affordable? Which candidates are fighting to lift up those who are falling behind rather than return favors to wealthy businesses and individuals who stuffed their campaign coffers to saturate the airwaves with misinformation? I hope you will be watching with me in the coming year, to sift through the rhetoric to look for facts and answers.
Informed voting needs to cross all demographics. Let’s pay close attention all the way to November 2020. It’s time to put the American Dream back into the hands of the many, not the few.