therapies, as well as for speech and hearing ser vices.
• Michigan, Nevada, California, and Utah have eliminated coverage of dental and vision services for those receiving Medicaid.
• Alabama has canceled services that allow 1,100 seniors to stay in their own homes instead of being sent to nursing facilities.
• Georgia has cut $112 million from an initiative designed to reduce the gap in funding between wealthy and poor school districts.
• Arizona has cut cash assistance grants for 38,500 low-income families.
• Virginia has decreased payments for people with mental retardation, mental health issues, and problems with substance abuse.
• Illinois has cut funding for child welfare and youth services programs.
• Connecticut has cut programs that help prevent child abuse and provide legal services for foster children.
• Massachusetts is making cuts in Head Start, universal pre-K programs, and services to prepare special-needs children for school.
Keep in mind, all these services are being cut at a time when more and more people are finding themselves in need of them. It’s a perfect storm of middle-class suffering.
And yet the human consequences of the financial collapse are largely missing from our national debate. I’m referring especially to the people who had steady jobs; people with college degrees; people who were paying their bills, saving for retirement, doing the right thing—and who have, in many instances, lost everything. The daily miseries being visited upon them are unfolding across the country.
So why is there no sense of urgency coming out of Washington?
Perhaps the reason can19 be found in the stunning results of a study conducted by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies that broke down the unemployment rate by household income. Unemployment for those making $150,000 a year, the study found, was only 3 percent in the last quarter of 2009. The rate for those in the middle income range was 9 percent—not far off the national average. The rate for those in the bottom 10 percent of income was a staggering 31 percent.
These numbers, according to20 the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Frank, “raise questions about the theory behind what is informally known as ‘trickle down’ economics, since full employment at the top doesn’t seem to be translating into more jobs below.”
In fact, these numbers do more than raise questions—they also supply the answers.
Does anyone believe that the sense of urgency coming out of Washington wouldn’t be wildly different if the unemployment rate for the top 10 percent of income earners was 31 percent? If one-third of television news producers, pundits, bankers, and lobbyists were unemployed, would the measures proposed by the White House and Congress still be as anemic? Of course not—the sense of national emergency would be so great you’d hear air-raid sirens howling.
Instead we get policy Band-Aids—timid moves that will do little to abate a crisis that threatens to change the very fabric of our society. For much of our history, America was known for its promise of upward mobility. That promise has been called into question over the past three decades, and an extended run of high unemployment could be its death knell.
“These are the kinds21 of jobless rates that push families already struggling on meager incomes into destitution,” wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. “And such gruesome gaps in the condition of groups at the top and bottom of the economic ladder are unmistakable signs of impending societal instability. This is dangerous stuff.”
The lack of urgency we are seeing in Washington—and the lack of focus on real people—is stunning considering that the consequences of our failed financial system are everywhere you look. Putting flesh and blood on the cold, hard statistics means putting the spotlight on the people whose lives were turned upside down as a result of our out-of-control financial system.
Ron Bednar and Mary McCurnin of Rancho Cordova, California, are a loving couple that got divorced last year, not because their relationship wasn’t working but because it was the only way to make ends meet. Due to unemployment and a bankruptcy caused by a prolonged illness, they found themselves with only $300 in the bank. By getting divorced, McCurnin was able to collect Social Security widow’s benefits from her first husband, who died in 1989. “We literally live from week to week,” she says.
Kimberly Rios of North East, Mary land, sold her wedding ring on Craigslist so she could pay her utility bills. “This is no joke, please be a serious buyer,” her ad read. “It is too cold for us to be without electric and heat so if you have been looking consider my deal.” After selling her ring, she locked herself in her bathroom, pretending to take a shower, so she could cry without upsetting her family. “I just felt like it was the last piece of what little I had left,” she says. “I came out smiling as usual and tried to get my husband and daughter excited that this was a good thing.”
Faye Harris was laid off from her accounting job at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta last year. She had been diagnosed with cancer and was fighting it successfully. But as soon as the time off she was guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act expired, she received a letter of termination and her health insurance was canceled. “Do I just lie down and die? Am I not worthy anymore?” she asked herself. “I’ve worked all my life. Put myself through school, raised four children, played by the rules, saved money, and this one illness has just wiped me out.”
Ricky Macoy of Quinlan, Texas, is a fifty-two-year-old electrician who found himself among the long-term unemployed. With little work since late 2008, he began pawning his possessions, including his tools, and holding yard sales to get enough money to feed his family. “The thing that hurt the most was we had to hock my son’s PlayStation 3, his Wii, his electric guitar,” Macoy says. “We lived a good life. Middle-income America, man. I’m used to construction, the booms and the busts . . . [but] I was not expecting to be laid off this long.”
Heather Tanner of Pacifica, California, put herself through law school, working during the day and attending classes at night—dreaming of one day being able to move her family out of their apartment and buy a house. In August, she was laid off from her $100,000-a-year job as an attorney—and then struggled to find a new position. “I applied for jobs at Target, Macy’s, as a camp counselor,” she says. “I’ve been on many interviews, but the comments I get at nonlegal jobs are, ‘Why do you need this kind of job?’ I mean, I have a family to support.” She and her husband cashed in their 401(k)s and used their savings to pay off bills. “The kids don’t understand,” she says, explaining that the thing that hurt the most was having to disappoint her children when it came to things such as birthday visits to Disneyland the family could no longer afford. “I’d love to make their dreams come true, but right now we just have to focus on getting by.”
There are, sadly, millions of these stories. Stories crying out to be told. Stories that, if told often enough, will bring the human element to the fore of the debate—and grab the public’s imagination.
In the last chapter of22 Michael Herr’s Dispatches, he speaks of conventional journalism’s inability to “reveal” the Vietnam War: “The press got all the facts (more or less). . . . But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all about.” And Tom Wolfe23, in “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’: Eyewitness Report,” discusses conventional journalism’s inability to capture the turbulence of the 1960s: “You can’t imagine what a positive word ‘understatement’ was among both journalists and literati. . . . The trouble was that by the early 1960s understatement had become an absolute pall.” Well, it’s happening again—we are failing to capture the turbulence of our times with narratives that allow the public, and force