second job in the evening, and then fold a pile of laundry late at night so they can accomplish that one last thing before they fall into bed. We see men and women who work as hard as they possibly can and still fall behind a little more every month. We see lives that look nothing like those lived by billionaires in eighteen-thousand-square-foot condos, because these people don’t live in some fairy tale—they live in today’s reality.
NOT LONG AFTER I started writing this book, I talked with a woman I’ll call Gina. She is fifty—the same age my mother was when she headed off to Sears. Gina wanted to tell her story, but she asked for her name and some details about her life to be changed in the book so her neighbors and her employer wouldn’t recognize her, and I promised to do that.
Gina is full of nervous energy—quick bursts of laughter, quick flashes of anger. Short, compact, and sandy-haired, she’s the kind of woman who talks to people around her in the grocery store line and who knows every clerk by name. She’s a loyal friend and a proud American.
Gina grew up with four sisters. Her dad died when she was a teenager, and from then on her mom ran the family business, a local bar. Gina gives a throaty laugh as she claims that “her mother knew every single dirty joke” ever told.
Her story starts out well. Gina went to college and got a business degree. She met Darren and fell in love. They had both lived all over the country, and they decided to settle in a small town in North Carolina because it seemed like such a nice place to raise a family. Soon they had two boys, but for Gina and Darren, the grown-up, we-have-found-our-place-in-the-middle-class moment arrived when they bought their home. It was a tidy, almost-new mobile home, permanently set on a large lot with a long gravel driveway.
Gina speaks in a rush, wanting to make very clear the importance of this house—what it says about who she is and what she has accomplished. “I love the house,” Gina says. “We keep it immaculate. We live on the corner here. The whole world sees us.”
Gina had a good education, but when their two boys were small she decided to stay home with them. She volunteered at the boys’ school and took up scrapbooking, making little treasures out of bits of nothing. It was a good time for their family.
One of Gina’s artistic handiworks, a Christmas decoration.
Once both boys were in school, Gina headed off to work. She got a job as a sales rep for a big national company, making calls on retailers across a three-county area. Darren was doing well as a roofer. He owned a truck, Gina had a car, and by the late 2000s, they were bringing in about $70,000 a year.
Their income put Gina and Darren smack in the middle; they earned more than about half of all four-person families in America and less than about half—which is about as solidly middle-class as it gets. But even with a good, solid income, Gina and Darren were mostly stay-at-home people. They shopped at discount stores. An occasional meal out usually meant Denny’s or Chili’s. Most of all, Gina and Darren were careful people. They contributed to their 401(k), bought a few stocks, made extra payments on their mortgage, and put away some cash savings. They were a perfect picture of what it meant to be a member of a huge tribe: solid, middle-class America.
Today, Gina is still married to Darren, still living in the same house, still gluing buttons and bits of lace into her scrapbooks. Is she still middle-class? Her answer is short and bitter:
“I don’t think there is a middle class anymore. If there was a middle class, we wouldn’t need to go to a food pantry.”
Darren’s work as a roofer has been spotty, and he’s had trouble with his back and knees. Gina works at Walmart now, and that’s what keeps them going.
Their stocks and their savings are gone, used to fill in during the stretches when one or both of them were out of work. The small 401(k) has nearly disappeared. There was no money to help either of the boys pay for college, and now their sons are nearly grown men. Both work odd hours and live at home because neither one can afford a place of his own.
Gina’s car is now seventeen years old. She and Darren have talked about selling their home, but she says their mortgage is less than they’d pay in rent, and a mobile home like theirs—even though it’s on a big lot—doesn’t appreciate much. They have a stack of bills that, in her quietest moments, Gina admits to herself they will never pay off. Why? Because today Gina and Darren’s combined income is less than $36,000.
What happened? What’s the tale of shocking personal tragedy and extraordinary misfortune that landed a solidly middle-class woman like Gina at the doorstep of the food pantry?
Nothing.
No crisis. No accident. No tale of woe. Just the grinding wear and tear of an economy that doesn’t work anymore for families like Gina’s.
And that’s the part of this story that makes me want to pound the table in frustration. What happened to Gina and Darren is the modern economy—the one that produces all those bubbly stock market records and corporate profits and private concerts with Katy Perry. What happened is an economic boa constrictor that is squeezing working families so hard they can’t breathe.
Gina’s basic story could be repeated in millions of households across America with only small variations. Could be? Shoot, it is repeated, again and again and again.
But the part of her story that bothers me the most is that Gina did everything just the way she was supposed to. She worked hard—no, she worked herself into the ground for years, getting up for a two-and-a-half-hour commute to work and stretching her food budget so they could pay a little extra on the mortgage. She played by every rule: savings, insurance, retirement. And now she’s fifty years old and on a long slide down. The family that used to eat out occasionally now needs to visit the food pantry to make it to the end of the month.
Fortune smiles on some more than others, and no one is guaranteed smooth sailing. I get that. But Gina is not alone. Instead, she’s part of the collateral damage of a mostly invisible dismantling of America’s middle class. She and millions of other once-middle-class families may keep up appearances, they may keep their lawns mowed and smile and wave to their neighbors, but their economic lives have become a new kind of hell.
When Gina talks, her voice says as much as her words. The pride in her home. The worry over her sons. The bravado, the gravelly I-can-take-whatever-life-dishes-out attitude. And the small tremor of desperation.
What comes next for Gina? What happens when Darren can’t work anymore? When they can’t hold it together? What will they do when the doctor thinks it’s time to start on a medication for high blood pressure that has a $50 copay or when the transmission finally falls out of the car? No wonder Gina talks fast and sometimes sounds like she can barely breathe.
Consider a few other facts—the not-so-smiley-face facts—about the American economy:
Nearly one in four Americans can’t pay their bills on time.
Nearly half of Americans would not be able to cover an unexpected expense of $400.
A lower proportion of Americans own their homes than at any time in the past half century—63.5 percent.
The typical man working full-time earns less today than his counterpart did in 1972.
Nearly one-third of the country’s adult population—76 million Americans—describe themselves as either “struggling to get by” or “just getting by.”
The overall economic statistics—the GDP, the stock market, corporate profitability, unemployment—are