Third World America - Arianna Huffington [22]
But the two sets of rules—and the clout of corporate lobbyists—leave even commonsense, who-could-argue-with-that proposals in doubt, and leave the middle class shouldering an unfair share of a very taxing burden.
Indeed, the double standard was famously ridiculed by Warren Buffett in 2007 when he noted that his receptionist paid 30 percent of her income in taxes, while he paid only 17.7 percent on his taxable income of $46 million.49
HOMER SIMPSON HAS IT TOO GOOD: SNAPSHOTS FROM THE MIDDLE-CLASS BATTLEFIELD
The numbers don’t lie: We increasingly live in a “winner take all” economy. Indeed, we’ve arrived at a point where even Homer Simpson—created as a classic American Everyman character—is now living a middle-class fantasy. After all, how many American middle-class families do you know where the family’s sole breadwinner, a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant, can still comfortably support a family of five on a single income?
A more accurate snapshot of a modern middle-class family can be found in Nan Mooney’s book (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents.50 One person profiled in the 2008 book is Diana, thirty-six, a licensed psychologist with a doctorate in clinical psychology. Her husband, Byron, is a trained engineer who makes his living as a technical writer for a patent attorney. The couple has two young children. Besides bringing up her kids, Diana holds down two part-time jobs, one as an assessment director for a nonprofit organization that places school counselors, the other building her private practice as a psychologist. She makes $35,000 a year. Her husband, a contract worker paid on a per-project basis, makes $40,000. When interviewed by Mooney, their credit cards were loaded with debts totaling $17,000. Their mortgage cost them $1,150 a month. Diana was paying $450 a month on her school loans, but that figure was about to get bumped to $550 a month. Rent on her office, plus condo fees, added another $750 a month. The couple had little equity in their property and had wiped out their savings.
“I feel like we’ve cut every corner we can cut,” Diana told Mooney. “We don’t take vacations. We never go out. Right now, I just keep my fingers crossed that nothing breaks. We need a new roof and new tires for the car. And we’re going to get hit hard by taxes this year.” At that point, Diana’s voice began to crack. “I’m scared. I’m scared we’ll never be able to retire. I’m scared we won’t be covered for health care. I’m scared we won’t be able to send our kids to college. We’ve never had much, but before I always felt like we were doing our time. We were working our way toward a more comfortable future. That doesn’t seem true anymore. At this point, I see no way out at all.”
Diana and Byron’s tale is an increasingly common one. Their high-priced college education—the kind many see as a safeguard against economic hard times—is no longer enough at a time when the jobless rate is almost 10 percent and twenty-six million people are out of work or underemployed.51, 52
Troy Renault is one of them.53 In August 2009, Troy, his wife, Tammy, and their five children were living in a three-bedroom home in Lebanon, Tennessee. Two years earlier, Troy had lost his construction job. Ultimately, as the Huffington Post’s Laura Bassett reported, they lost their home and had to move into a donated trailer on a local campground. They downgraded from a 1,900-square-foot house to a 215-square-foot trailer.
Says Troy, “You wind up starting to think to yourself, ‘Okay.54 Do we go ahead and make the house payment and keep a roof over our head but have no lights and no water, or do we go ahead and keep those utilities on and forgo the house payment, and hope that you can get caught up?’