A picture is worth a thousand words. The photo above, taken by a Farm Security Administration photographer in 1940 may be worth several thousand words. Want to know what it’s like to be a decent, hard working American struggling to provide for a family, but still coming up short? Want to know what it looks like to grow up proud, but poor? Look closely at the faces in this photo. A picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words.
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Several studies have shown that just about everyone, regardless of income, thinks of themselves as members of the middle class. Whether living on a modest Social Security disability check or living it up in a downtown penthouse, people self-identify as middle class. Someone suggested this may be because middle class equates to normal in the common perception, and almost everyone wants to be normal.
President Obama has promised not to raise taxes on middle class families. Having heard this promise, a friend of mine who earns $315K per year felt utterly betrayed when he learned that current White House plans might cause an increase in his taxes. After all, even with 315,000 greenbacks per year, my friend thinks of himself a member of the middle class, and the President promised not to raise middle class taxes, didn’t he?
All of this set me to thinking about my own family, the family in which I grew up. We seemed to have the same things that other people in our neighborhood had, so we considered ourselves to be a middle class family. It never occurred to me that we might live in a lower middle class or even poor neighborhood. Actually, we lived on federal penitentiary reservations in staff housing. Thinking back on my early childhood, we might not have been middle class.
My mother and grandmother made most of the shirts my brother and I wore, and I had more than one pair of jeans with patches in the knees. Some were sewn on, some were the newer iron-on patches. Both were used to cover holes in hard worn pants.
When we bought clothes, they were ordered from a Sears Roebuck catalog. An order was placed once each year in August, and I waited the arrival of my supply of new bluejeans, cotton briefs and athletic socks with dread. Their arrival meant it was time for school to begin again. When classes started I was dressed pretty much like every other boy in school.
There was one rich girl in our class. She lived in a four bedroom ranch just a couple of blocks from the junior high. Her family owned two cars, and their back yard was fenced. They even had air conditioning. The rest of us were middle class.
During our first year of marriage Mary Ann and I were college students. We lived on a grocery budget of $15 per week, and paid a monthly rent of $115 which included utilities. Our single bedroom apartment was clean and reasonably well maintained, but there was certainly nothing about it that said “solid middle class.” Prominent among our household furniture were our plastic parson’s tables and a large bookcase made from cinder blocks and unfinished plywood planks. My father’s old foot locker from his days in the employ of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) served as our living room coffee table.
Our second and third years of marriage were spent almost entirely on the road traveling around the country in our old VW bus. It’s hard to say what our income might have been. Whatever it was, it seemed to be enough. We weren’t missing meals, and there was always enough money for tuna sandwiches and gas to get us on down the road. We did okay.
I’ve always thought that one could determine one’s socio-economic class by answering one simple question: “Do I have enough?” If the answer is “yes,” then in my book you’re in the middle class. But, therein lies the rub—what constitutes enough? Let me try my hand at answering that question, and then I will get to my point.
The word “enough” implies that the thing being discussed is a necessity. While it is necessary that we have enough to eat, it is silly to think of having enough theater tickets. Though we may like the theater, we don’t really need theater tickets to get by. Theater tickets fall into the category of wants, not needs.
Following this reasoning, let’s make a list of a few things that are common wants, things some people may confuse with needs.
An annual vacation trip. A leisure trip lasting a week or more that requires expenditures for transportation, lodging, meals on the road, etc. Mary Ann and I once endured a span of 17 years without taking such a trip. No kidding. So, I can testify that annual vacations are not necessities.
A new car every three years. Unless you put 50,000 miles per year on an automobile, you do not need a new car every three years. On average, Americans keep cars four years, but almost a third of car owners are “rapid replacers”, buying a new car every three years, or even more frequently. These numbers may be going up a bit in the present economy, but not without considerable grumbling.
You may be surprised to learn what is possible, automotively speaking. I haven’t bought a new car since 1977, and I’ve managed to keep the used cars I’ve bought an average of 7 years. At the moment, I still have a 1978 Ford pickup that looks great and runs great. A car is a necessity—a new car is a want.
Cable/Satellite Television. I used to think I needed 395 channels too. I don’t. For reasons I won’t get into now I kept a log of all television watching done in my home last year. Because it was an election year, a more than usual amount of time was spent watching news broadcasts and televised presidential debates. Still, the television was on for a total of less than 45 hours all year long—that’s less than 4 hours a month, less than one hour a week. So, cable television service is history here. Don’t need it.
Eating in restaurants once (or twice, or three or four times) a week. It may shock you to learn that this is not only unnecessary, it is also ill advised. Did you know that eating in restaurants can kill you? In fact, I’d say that the chances of frequent restaurant meals contributing to serious health problems are quite high for most patrons.
Now, for the supporting testimonial. A lifetime of eating the high sodium, high cholesterol, high trans-fat, et cetera, et cetera fare served in popular restaurants ranging from fast food joints to the local seafood shack, Mexican diner and even an occasional rug joint rewarded me with coronary artery disease and a heart attack. It was my fault. I should have known better. But, wait… there’s more.
As I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s my parents never went out on one of those “parents night out” dates that are now so prevalent among the “married with children” demographic. The whole family might go to the local cafeteria once every couple of months. For the most part, we ate well, and we did it at home.
What’s more, Mom and Dad managed to carry on a rather robust romance right there at the house. Ours was a happy family.
iPods, GPS Units, Gimcracks And Geegaws. Need I say more? You don’t really need these things. They are, as we say in the legal business, wants per se.
Okay, now that I’ve set the table I’ll go straight to the point of this article.
People, just about all people, get sick from time to time. It doesn’t matter what level of fitness or lifestyle a person pursues, chances are that every one of us is going to get sick sometime.
You may be among the fortunate group whose worst illness is a short bout with a virus, or you may be among the unlucky folks who are afflicted with brain tumors, a heart attack, renal failure or any of a thousand other serious conditions. Sick people need medical care, and access to medical care requires health insurance. Health insurance is, then, a necessity—a need, not a want.
People who do not have health insurance do not have enough. They need help, and those of us who have enough need to help them out.
If this means paying more taxes, then let’s cut out some of our wants so that the needs of others might be met. It won’t hurt any of us to skip a vacation, drive our car a little longer, eat at home instead of at the Squat & Gobble, or to engage in meaningful conversation with our spouse and children in preference to watching cable television.
Which would bring you more satisfaction—watching another HBO series or seeing the relief and joy on your neighbor’s face as she tells you how the doctors saved her husband’s life, doctors he could never have seen without universal health care?
How would it make you feel to know that your unwillingness to contribute to universal care caused that pretty young woman at church, the one with the two cute young children, to forego the mammogram that might have detected her breast cancer early and allowed her to live?
The answers here are simple. President Obama says that universal health care achieved with a public option won’t cost middle class taxpayers a penny, but so what if he’s wrong? So what if your taxes go up a little? Tell Congress you’re willing to do your part. Generosity feels better than greed.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
America is the only modern country in the world without universal health care. I am sorry to say that I believe this is because we Americans don’t value life as highly as do people in many other countries. Here in America we value money above everything.
I am hoping you are wrong, Gary. We will find out in the next few weeks.
It is not the place of the government to tax me and tell me who I need to give my money to. Whether or not I want to give my money to help somebody who is sick and needs medical care is my business not theirs. The government and Obama need to keep there hands off my money.
I am afraid that Gary is right that Americans value money more than human life. Klinger surely does and there are millions more like him. It makes me sad for our country and for all of those who are sick and hurting but cannot even have the hope that medical care might provide them. A new president can’t do very much when people’s greed is working against everything he wants to do.. We need God to help heal the hard hearts of people like Klinger and others who are too stingy to help solve the great crisis we have in health care.
Don’t think you are ever going to change these people’s minds. The only way we are going to get universal health care legislation passed in this country is to do it without the Republicans and the bigoted money grubbing libertarians who bolster up the Republican party since Ron Paul stuck his wingnut foot in the door.