In Baltimore, as in so many places in America, people are struggling to get by. At a time when millions of Americans are millionaires, how many are just getting by?
The rising level of wealth inequality in the US has received a lot of press coverage in the last few years. We certainly have our share of rich people. But what is it like to “get by” in the US?
For years, I have had this conversation with my classes. What is the monthly budget of a family of four, living in Chicago, two working parents, neither with college degrees, but with steady jobs, and two children, maybe 8 and 10? We have had fun arguing about what it really takes to house, feed, clothe and educate a working class family. Not a poor family, but one that is “getting by.”
Most of my students were upper-middle class, privileged. That is the dominant group that makes it to grad school, even in something as “anti-investment” as getting a public health degree. But a sizable number of our students were from less privileged backgrounds. And these students were often surprised at the figures that their classmates threw out during the discussions.
How much rent would this family pay? The most common guess was around $2,000, a figure that is way too high. How much would they pay for food? To clothe two growing kids? Would they be able to afford two cars? Do you get smart phones for 8 and 10 year olds?
Remember, we are not asking what it means to be “poor.” We are trying to figure out how much money it takes to get by in America.
Try this
Here is a list of possible budget items. What would you estimate as the monthly needs for this family? If you want to duplicate the experience from my class discussions, ask a group of friends to participate.
When you add up your estimates, multiple the monthly bills by 12, to get a year’s expenses. Then multiple that yearly number by 133% (to account for tax and Social Security withholding). The number you get is the gross income that the family needs to “get by.”
Try this exercise before you read on.
Almost every year, the class arrives at a yearly gross income of about $75,000. (Of course, I usually had to intervene to keep down the more outlandish estimates.) Is that close to what you got?
The problem is that the median income in Chicago for a family of four in 2013 was only $64,000. That means that a good deal less then half of the families in Chicago are “getting by.” And the median in Baltimore was just a touch over $60,000, so even fewer families in Baltimore are “getting by.”
At a time when the rich of America enjoy wealth so fabulous that they can’t possibly spend the $50,000 they are handed every day, the majority of our families are not even getting by. Something is very, very wrong with that reality.
Nothing new
But this is not a new phenomenon. Since we started keeping figures on the distribution of wealth in this country, back in the early part of the last century, the bottom quintile (20%) of Americans have had almost none of the wealth, and the top quintile have had almost all of the wealth. And from the start until around 1980, this didn’t move all that much. The entire wealth of the population went “up” (it was better to be near the bottom in 1980 then it was in 1920), but the distribution was resolutely uneven for decades.
If “progress” in equity would be measured by the lower quintiles getting a larger share of the wealth, for the almost 100 years that we have been keeping these data, there has been no progress of note. The rich have, for decades, been very rich, the upper-middle class live comfortably, and the rest are struggling to get by, or worse.
These gaps worsened in the early 1980's (under the Reagan administration), got a bit better in the 1990's (under the Clinton administration), and have been slowly getting worse since then.
It is simply beyond the everyday experiences of too many Americans to understand what it means to be “rich,” and how many of us can’t even “get by.”
But it is completely within the experience of the residents of Baltimore to know how few are getting by. And the residents of Oakland. And Watts. And Detroit. And the Englewood neighborhood, in my home town. As many have pointed out, even though the Baltimore Orioles play their home games in the neighborhood where Freddy Grey grew up and died, few of his neighbors ever go to Camden Yards, the Orioles’ stadium. Paying more than $200 to take a family of four for “fun at the old ball park” isn’t in the budget of people struggling to get by.
Leading a meaningful life
What is the message we give to a young African-American boy living in these neighborhoods about what is meaningful in life? I think the main message he gets, from the signs he sees and the commercials he watches and the songs he listens to, is that life is meaningful in American if you have “stuff.” Your life is meaningful if you have lots of stuff.
And yet, we give that kid no hope to get stuff. He sees little chance of getting a job. (Unemployment for black males in his area is 60%.) And even if he does get a job someday, he knows that it will be a struggle to get by, with no reason to expect that he can accumulate “stuff.” How hard is it to understand his depression? His hopelessness? His anger?
And if a group of slightly older kids comes along and offers him a chance to “be somebody,” to belong to something, to get stuff, and all he has to do to get this is to be a part of the gang, why wouldn’t he join? A chance to lead a meaningful life, albeit one purchased by violence.
And, at some point, if that violence and anger bursts out, and overflows into the community, isn’t that predictable, too?
What is most noteworthy about the Baltimore experience of the last few days is not the small amount of violence caused by strangled hope, but the huge number of its residents who have taken to the streets to renounce violence, to condemn destructive behavior. Imagine how difficult it might be for you and me to find the strength and composure that it would take to maintain that poise and dignity in the face of anger and an affront to the meaningfulness of our lives. That behavior demands our respect. But it also demands our action.
The rich have unimaginably too much of the country’s wealth. And too few of us are able to get by. More pressingly, too few of us have hope of ever getting by. Yes, the problem in Baltimore is police misconduct. And, yes, racism is or should be impossible to ignore. But without all of us having an understanding of the extreme economic inequality of our country, problems like this are not going away.
It must be time to change.
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