The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [50]
The Myth of the Immoral Debtor may be little more than an ugly fairy tale, but it has the power to maroon families—both emotionally and financially—just when they most need support. The changes needed to increase the safety of the middle class aren’t radical, and they are not exorbitantly expensive. But they require a consensus that change is essential. So long as Americans can be persuaded that families in financial trouble have only themselves to blame, there will be no demand to change anything. In order to get on with the difficult business of making America once again safe for families to raise children, the Myth of the Immoral Debtor must be laid to rest for good.
5
Going It Alone in a Two-Income World
Gayle Pritchard taps nervously on the table as she talks about twelve years of marriage to Brad. The litany of complaints comes easily to her lips; she’s told this story before. Brad drank too much. He didn’t pick up after himself. He always forgot birthdays. But after a few more jabs, Gayle exhausts herself, and her face softens. “Brad loves his kids. On weekends he would lie on the couch for hours, with little Kaitlyn sound asleep across his lap, the drool just sliding all over his shirt and he never even minded. How could you hate a man like that?”
After more than a decade of marriage, their life together began to unravel. “They outsourced Brad’s job at the distribution center. No severance. Nothing.” Gayle was working hard, too tired to be very supportive. She dismissed Brad’s mood swings as nothing more than “a male ego type thing.” But then Brad started disappearing, spending his days and then nights away from home. The anger bubbles up again as Gayle recalls, “Money that was allotted for day care started disappearing.”
After a few months, Brad found a new job and his dark moods lifted, but the damage was done. Gayle learned the reason for Brad’s disappearances; he had been seeing another woman. Today Gayle looks back reflectively. “He felt like I didn’t need him. . . . He lost confidence in himself. He found somebody to cater to that lack of self-confidence.” She says it doesn’t matter so much now, but at the time all she could think was that he had found some other woman beautiful, had put his hands on someone else. “I swear I could smell her on him. It made me crazy.” She screamed, threw his clothes in the yard, and broke his baseball trophy. Brad didn’t hang around for more. He found a new apartment and invited his girlfriend to move in.
Gayle was worried about making it on her own with three children, but she figured that she was pretty well situated to make a go of it. Brad let her keep the house, and he didn’t intend to fight her in court over anything else they owned. He was hoping to keep the legal bills to a minimum. Gayle says with an embarrassed laugh, “We got one of those TV Guide divorces, the ‘We agree on everything’ kind.”
Besides, Gayle was a good provider in her own right. She had a degree in communications and nine years in the Human Resources department at Exxon. By the time Brad moved out, she had been promoted to manager, and, thanks to “an awesome raise,” she was earning $46,000 a year. In short, Gayle had about as much going for her as any modern middle-class mother starting her newly single life could hope for. She figured that she and her kids could make it.
The Best of Times . . .
Up to now, we have scrutinized, analyzed, poked, prodded, and otherwise expounded on nearly every aspect of the financial life of the modern middle-class family, but we haven’t addressed all middle-class families. Indeed, we have been silent about the families who are most often in the news for their financial woes, those who first come to mind when the phrase