In fact, as Katherine McIntire Peters reported on GovernmentExecutive.com, President Obama is “on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II.”81 In that time we’ve had Korea, Vietnam, the massive military buildup under Reagan, and Bush’s funded-by-tax-cuts invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the most trying economic times since the Great Depression, Obama’s outgunning them all.
This is not about ignoring the threats to our national security. And it’s certainly not about pacifism. To quote then Illinois state senator Barack Obama in 2002, “I don’t oppose all wars.…82 What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” Iraq was never about making us safer. And the original rationale for going to war in Afghanistan—taking on al-Qaeda—has been accomplished, with fewer than one hundred members of the group still operating in the country.83 The irrationality of continuing to spend precious resources on wars we shouldn’t be fighting is all the more galling when juxtaposed with our urgent and growing needs at home.
According to the Los Angeles Times, before the summer 2010 surge in Kandahar (cost: $33 billion)—a surge the military claimed was as important to Afghanistan as securing Baghdad was to Iraq—Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen told an Afghan leader that the goals of the surge, as well as defeating the Taliban, included, in the words of the Times, “reducing corruption, making local government work and, eventually, providing jobs.”84 Talk about “mission creep”!
Is that why we are still fighting a war there nine years later, spending American blood and treasure—to provide jobs for the people of Kandahar? It’s like a very bad joke: “The good news is, the Obama administration is ramping up a multibillion-dollar program that will create a host of new jobs. The bad news is, you have to move to Kandahar to apply.”
The Bush-era rationale for these overseas misadventures was always “We’ll fight ’em over there, so we don’t have to fight ’em over here.” Today, it seems, we’re fighting to create jobs for ’em over there, while we don’t have enough jobs for our people over here. At a time when so many middle-class families are reeling from the economic crisis—and our country is facing the harsh one-two punch of more people in need at the exact moment social services are being slashed to the bone—that seems like the most perverted of priorities.
Berkeley professor Ananya Roy defines the troubled state of America not so much as a fiscal crisis as “a crisis of priorities.”85 And Representative Barney Frank, who has been one of the few in Washington arguing for the need to cut military spending, says that our military overcommitments have “devastated our ability to improve our quality of life through government programs.”86 Looking at the money we’ve spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, Frank says, “We would have had $1 trillion now to help fix the economy and do the things for our people that they deserve.”
The National Priorities Project (NPP) provides a useful online tool that brings this budget trade-off to life by showing—specifically—all the things that could have been done with the money spent on Afghanistan and Iraq. For example, according to the NPP, since 2003, more than $747 billion of taxpayer money has been spent in Iraq.87 That could have provided:
115 million people with low-income health care for a year;
or 98 million places in a Head Start program;
or funding for more than 11 million elementary school teachers;
or 11 million police officers;
or 13 million firefighters;
or 94.7 million college scholarships.
While unaffordable college tuition prevents many qualified young people from achieving the American Dream, we are continuing to spend billions on outdated and redundant military defense programs, including pricey relics of the Cold War, such as the F-22 fighter, the Osprey transport helicopter, and America’s hugely expensive nuclear triad—bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles—designed to annihilate a Soviet empire that no longer exists.
If we don’t come to our senses and get our deeply misguided priorities back in order, America could find itself a superpower turned Third World nation—dead from our own hand.
BRENDA CARTER
I was a manager of information systems at the same company for thirteen years. I thought my job was secure. All the purchasing approval and budget monitoring went through me. I attended weekly board meetings. I was well liked.
One day the chief operating officer gave me a high-priority project. I never suspected I would be laid off the next day. When I arrived and said my “good mornings,” my co-workers in finance and administration looked a little sad and they did not respond to my greeting in the normal fashion. I shrugged it off, went to my office, and put down my briefcase.
My phone rang. It was my boss. He told me to come to his office. He told me I was being laid off due to budget constraints. He said he was sorry but his hands were tied. He told me that since I was a longtime employee I would not be escorted immediately out of the building, and I could take as much time as I needed to remove my belongings.
Since I was at my office most hours of the day, I’d made it feel like home, with plants, pictures, and other personal items. As the manager of information systems, I was the one called to terminate employee user names and passwords. To allow me to clear my office knowing I had access to that information told me my boss trusted me and didn’t want me to be humiliated in front of my co-workers.
Imagine getting up every day for thirteen years to go to the same job and suddenly that part of your life just ceases. I cried and cried and cried. I just could not believe it. I did the jobs of three people. How will they make it without me? Some days I did not get out of bed. I wondered why I wasn’t given the option of demotion. My seniority should have counted for something.
Now I spend my days searching for work. It’s hard to compete for jobs at my age. I hate putting my previous salary and age on applications. They are red flags. I developed a wall of rejection letters. I took it down because it started to depress me.
To broaden my opportunities and keep my mind fresh, I began taking technology courses in college. I also passed the real estate exam. I’m trying to make it by any means necessary, even selling my homemade candy door-to-door. The candy sold well, but it takes gas to travel. I have had only good feedback about the candy so I’ll continue to pursue this dream, moving my sales online.
I applied for unemployment, and am back in the role of housewife. My children are adults now. They think the world of me. They cannot believe I have been out of work for so long. In their minds I was the one who was going to be a millionaire. I sometimes feel that I let them down.
I have been out of work since 2007. After all the years I have worked and raised a family, I’m now dealing with threats to turn off my utilities and repossess my car.
What have I learned from being unemployed? That it’s frustrating and demoralizing. I have learned that I don’t want to be dependent on a Congress that obviously does not have America’s best interests at heart. I have learned to have more compassion for people who are in this situation.
I know there are many stories out there and mine is not the worst, but at times it feels like it is. It’s like waking up in the same nightmare every day with no way out. There is a scripture I hold on to and say to myself when I open my eyes in the morning: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” My response is, “Lord, I am asking for Your help, knocking on the door, asking you to open it and find favor on my family this day.”
2
NIGHTMARE ON MAIN STREET
America has long been known as the land of opportunity. So what happens when that opportunity vanishes, when the jobs that served as the gateway to the American Dream disappear, never to return? What happens when educational opportunities and the historical underpinning of our vision of ourselves as a nation give way? What steps into the void?
In a word: fear.
The fea
r that America is in decline—that our greatest triumphs are behind us. The fear that the jobs we have lost are gone forever. The fear that the middle class is on an extended death march—and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become as outdated as an Edsel with an eight-track player.
We look at our obliterated 401(k)s and dwindling pensions, and hear the whispers about Social Security going broke, and we wonder if we will ever be able to retire—let alone maintain our standard of living into our sunset years. Golden visions of post-work leisure time have been replaced by dark, fevered flashes of deprivation—of having to decide between eating and paying for the medicine we need. Of letting our homes go into foreclosure to scrape together the money to live on.
The void is filled by the fear that America is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots—and that millions are in danger of becoming permanent members of the have-nots. Forget Freddy Krueger. The real nightmare is not happening on Elm Street. It’s happening on Main Street. And it’s not scantily clad teens being slashed—it’s jobs and incomes and stability and quality of life.1 It’s our future.
And we’re afraid—very afraid—that the worst may not be over, and that the real economy, as opposed to the one on Wall Street, is still melting down. The housing crisis is still raging. The first run of foreclosures was because of subprime loans; the second run is because of people thrown out of work. And the government’s loan modification programs won’t be of any help with this round of foreclosures. As Newsweek’s Nancy Cook pointed out, “If you’re unemployed, you don’t qualify for a loan modification.” And then there is the coming commercial property crisis and a potential credit card meltdown.
So we look at the suffering all around us, at the shuttered factories and stores, and worry that it is just the tip of the iceberg—or the tip of the tip of the iceberg. We try to fight off the fear that if things don’t change—and in a big way—we may find ourselves working at Walmart or McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts for minimum wage.
We are fast becoming a nation collectively waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Washington is filled with talk about national security: troop levels, airport screenings, Pentagon budgets, and terrorist threats. But there is another kind of national security: the one that keeps us feeling confident that the economic rug isn’t going to suddenly be pulled out from under us, and that our way of life isn’t going to suddenly implode—the kind of national security that gives us hope for the future. For that national security, especially when it comes to America’s middle class, the threat level has definitely moved from yellow (“elevated”) to orange (“high”)—and we are afraid that red (“severe”) is looming up ahead.
For more and more of its citizens, America has become a national insecurity state.
THE BROKEN BACKBONE OF AMERICA
In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, his observations on the nature of our country. The opening line speaks volumes: “Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people.”2
Looking across the vast expanse of this developing country, the thing that most drew his attention was a vision of America as a level playing field, a place where the same rules applied to everyone. “Democratic laws,” he noted, “generally tend to promote the welfare of the greatest possible number; for they emanate from the majority of the citizens, who are subject to error, but who cannot have an interest opposed to their own advantage.”3
America’s enlightened elites have always understood that their long-term well-being and security depended on the middle and lower classes having an equal stake in the nation’s prosperity and political institutions. They knew that this great democratic experiment would be defined not by breeding or religion or language, but by a unifying idea—“All men are created equal”—and by an ideal: the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. In the infancy of our nation, Tocqueville saw the power of this idea and its centrality to the American experiment.
He traveled across America before the industrial revolution transformed the country. Once it did, manufacturing jobs helped turn the working poor into middle-class Americans, liberating them from the shackles of a hand-to-mouth existence and moving them closer to enjoying a “general equality of condition.”
So, is America still a nation where its citizens enjoy a “general equality of condition”? Are we still promoting “the welfare of the greatest possible number”? It’s hard to imagine a modern Tocqueville taking in the grand sweep of our current political and economic landscape—with its shrinking middle class, disappearing jobs, growing economic disparity, banking oligarchy, and public policy sold to the highest bidder—and reaching the same conclusions.
Tocqueville’s words are deeply at odds with the reality of modern America. For decades our political leaders have systematically squeezed the nation’s middle class in order to promote the corporate interests paying for their reelection. America’s middle class has been the country’s economic backbone. It is our vast, energized middle class that has done the heavy lifting and inspired the most innovation. Where the middle class heads, the rest of the country follows. So when the middle class is systematically worn down—when too many of its members become downwardly mobile, unable to keep their jobs or their homes or buy as many goods and services and drive market innovations—can a diminished America, a Third World America, be far behind?
MIDDLE CLASS: I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT
The crippling of America’s middle class didn’t happen overnight—and it wasn’t the result of the bad bets made by the game-fixing gamblers on Wall Street (although they sure did their part). It’s actually been decades in the making. But before we look at who set the roadside explosives along the middle class’s road to the American Dream, it might help to define exactly what the term means.
What makes someone middle class? Is there a base income level (fall below it and you are officially poor), or a top-line figure above which you instantly ascend to the upper class (with a quick rest stop at upper middle class)? Does it depend on the size of your house (do you even need a house—can renters be middle class?), the kind of car you drive, the amount of rainy-day savings you have squirreled away in the bank?
In truth, pinning down a hard-and-fast definition of “middle class” is tricky business. It’s a lot like Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s famous assessment of what constitutes pornography: “I know it when I see it.” (Indeed, with both porn and the modern middle class, someone is usually getting screwed.)
There is no tidy formula.4 Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, asked during his testimony to the Senate Finance Committee: “Is a $30,000-a-year doctor doing his residency in brain surgery lower class? Is a $100,000-a-year plumber upper middle class?” Or are they both part of the great middle class?
According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of American adults (53 percent) define themselves as middle class.5, 6 But behind this assertion, Pew discovered a host of caveats: “Four-in-ten (41%) adults with $100,000 or more in annual household income say they are middle class”—as do 46 percent of those with incomes below $40,000.7 At the same time, a third of those with incomes between $40,000 and $100,000 don’t believe they are middle class.8
For purposes of its research, Pew defined the middle class as those adults “who live in a household where the annual income falls within 75% and 150% of the median” gross income for a family of three in 2006 (the latest year data was available).9 In dollars and cents, that meant an income of between $45,000 and $90,000 made you middle class.10
But, in the end, in a very American way, it all comes down to self-definition: If you consider yourself middle class, you are middle class.
THE MIDDLE CLASS’S LONG MARCH TO THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF
From 1945 to the 1970s, a period characteriz
ed by widespread economic prosperity, the wealthiest Americans grew richer at a rate almost identical to that of America’s lower and middle classes.11 From factory employees to chief executives, Americans experienced a doubling of income.12 By the end of the 1980s, however, things had changed drastically, with the income of the wealthy skyrocketing while the rest of the country lagged far behind.13
What happened? Did middle-class Americans lose their mojo? Or had rich Americans unexpectedly come upon the economic equivalent of the Fountain of Youth—a Fountain of Wealth? They had, but rather than Ponce de León, it was Ronald Reagan who led the income-boosting expedition, marching into Washington under the banner of lowering the taxes of America’s moneyed elite.14
But, the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s was about more than shifting the tax burden—it was about shifting the way America looked at itself. In short order, government was no longer seen as a solution—it was fingered as the problem. Tocqueville’s “welfare of the greatest possible number” was replaced by the notion that the invisible hand of the free market could best determine society’s winners and losers—until, that is, the winners got into trouble in 2008 and the government rushed to the rescue in the name of preventing Armageddon.
In books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, the high priestess of free-marketeers such as Alan Greenspan, championed the notion that by doing what is best for yourself, you end up doing what is best for everyone. But, as put into practice by corporate America over the past thirty years, that equation has been flipped upside down. It turns out that an unregulated free market is sooner or later corrupted by fraud and excess. In other words, it isn’t free at all. In fact, it’s as fixed as a street-corner game of three-card monte. And the interests of the elites have become disconnected from the public interest.
Third World America Page 4