The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (5 page)

It was a strange scene, at once theatrical and also deeply depressing. The storage space was dank and chilly, an incubator of germs. Its occupants, wrapped up in heavy layers against the cold—she in lilac sweatpants and a thick white coat, he in workmen’s boots, jeans, a wool-lined blue jean jacket, and a woolen hat—were edgy, kind yet skittish, nervous that they were being judged for how they lived.

The Caros lost their mobile home in 2010, when they fell behind on their payments after Jorge lost his job. Now, despite the fact that Jorge had managed to get another minimum-wage job as a cleaner at a local company, and that Lorenza brought in a few dollars from her flea market sales, they lived in the storage room on the land that used to host their home. “We meet our necessities, we don’t have beyond our necessities, but we meet our necessities here,” explained Lorenza in a soft voice. “It’s very, very cold when I use the toilet seat. We have electricity, so we have little heaters right now. But when we run out of gas—the stove is propane and helps to keep the heat—it gets colder. Last January it was very bad for us. We had the freezer, didn’t have any water. I had colds. When we need medical care we drink whatever herbs we can, [take] Tylenol.”

During the toughest times, they had gotten food on credit from women at the flea market and made do on one or two meals a day. “In the morning we’d have a cup of coffee and a piece of bread; in the afternoon a burrito or gorditas—Mexican sandwiches. Nothing
in the evening. Sometimes we had those little instant soup cups out here.” On the rare instances they had spare money, they bought potatoes and beans in bulk and made them last for weeks.

The dreams the Caros had were impossibly modest. “I expect things to get better,” said Lorenza. “Now that Jorge has a full-time job we hope things will get better. I want to live in a house with an indoor toilet. A nice, big toilet.” She laughed, the nervous laugh of someone on the verge of tears. Jorge fiddled with a kettle of water on the propane stove. The sun was starting to go down, and already the mid-December evening was desperately cold.

Residents of the United States increasingly inhabit two economies. Prokop, the kids in Steinman’s class, the Caros—they are the denizens of the ill-starred half of this reality, of that “economic underworld” conjured up in Harrington’s writing.

Statistics from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations (UN) show that the United States has the lowest average life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rates of any affluent democracy with a population of more than ten million. “Back in 1987 only seven other countries had longer life expectancies,” wrote the UN health economist Howard Friedman in his book
The Measure of a Nation
. “Today we’re not even in the top twenty.”

Having posted huge increases in life expectancy in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the United States rested on its laurels. While other countries extended healthcare to all residents and provided decent antenatal care to all women regardless of income, America in the latter years of the twentieth and first years of the twenty-first centuries witnessed an epidemic of uninsurance, with tens of millions of Americans having no access to routine medical care.
²
The poor health outcomes, Friedman noted, were concentrated in particular parts of the population. Asian American women,
he wrote, had a life expectancy twenty years higher than that of African American men, living to nearly 90 years on average.
³
Well-off white women could also expect to live well into their 80s.
⁴
In stark contrast, several news organizations have reported in recent years that the life expectancy for African American men in New York’s Harlem neighborhood is lower than that for residents of Bangladesh.
⁵
And in August 2012, the journal
Health Affairs
published a paper showing that white women without a high school diploma had seen a catastrophic five-year decline in their average life expectancy since 1990. For white men in the same educational grouping, the decline was slightly smaller, at three years, but still highly disturbing.
⁶

The prevalence of low–birth weight babies and of infant mortality was far higher in the South—where a lower percentage of the population had access to healthcare and where, historically, the safety net was weaker—than in the Northeast, and was far more common among African Americans than among whites. Similarly, according to research carried out by a team funded by the Social Science Research Council, the eleven states in America with the lowest life expectancy were
all
in the South.
⁷
It wasn’t that American life expectancy was declining, or that infant mortality was going up; rather, it was that because of the huge inequalities in American society and the well of poverty at the bottom, other countries were now improving at a faster rate than was the United States.

In education, the same trends held. The poorer the family one was born into, the higher the likelihood that a child would struggle in school. Even if he or she did well in the classroom, there was a lower likelihood that the child would be able to attend college. Friedman noted that the most successful eighth graders from poor economic backgrounds had only the same chance of attaining a bachelor’s degree as the least successful eighth graders from the wealthiest echelon of society. When the literacy, math, and scientific knowledge of American schoolkids was compared to most other affluent democracies, America performed abysmally. But the numbers weren’t evenly
distributed. White and Asian American students, especially those from the middle classes, held their own in these international comparisons and as a result were disproportionately able to access many of the world’s top universities after finishing school. By contrast, African American and Hispanic schoolkids, and those whites far down the economic ladder, scored very poorly. Once again, the scale of inequity in America, as compared to most other first world democracies, was skewing the country’s education numbers downward vis-à-vis other nations.

At the top of the U.S. economy, highly educated, highly skilled professionals are in possession of an ever-greater proportion of the country’s wealth. Five percent of Americans live in families with annual incomes in excess of $180,000.
⁸
That’s enough to be very comfortable but not to buy Picassos, fly in private jets, or give tens of thousands of dollars to a political campaign on behalf of a chosen candidate. To get that level of affluence and influence, one has to go even further up the income chain. In fact, it’s at the very peak of the economy, among the wealthiest 1 percent, that incomes have truly soared in recent decades. Since the late 1970s, the real income of this group of privileged Americans has almost tripled. As of 2011,
Forbes
magazine found 412 Americans had assets in excess of $1 billion. According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook for 2011, of the nearly 85,000 people globally with a net worth of more than $50 million each, upward of 35,000 of them live in the United States.
⁹
Take it down even one more level and the 2011
World Wealth Report
estimated that the United States had 3.1 million millionaires.
¹⁰

Meanwhile, most Americans—whom the Occupy Wall Street movement, from 2011 onward, took to calling “the other 99 percent”—find their net worth is declining. In 2010, the median annual wage in America fell to $26,364, representing a 7 percent decline over the course of the first decade of the new century and a roughly 20 percent decline from 1973, when, in inflation-adjusted
dollars, the median wage was $33,000.
¹¹
What does that mean in practical terms? It means that half of all American wage earners bring home an amount that, at most, is only $4,000 a year over the poverty line for a family of four. If they’re lucky, they live in households with more than one earner, the two incomes combined keeping the family afloat; if they’re less fortunate, they work full time, and yet their families continue to sink ever closer to the poverty line.

“Our lives are living minute by minute, and we are scared,” said 59-year-old Sandy Struznick, describing the life on the margins that she and her husband, John, lived in Des Moines, Iowa. They stood ramrod stiff next to each other as I was introduced to them, looking like the couple in the classic Grant Wood painting
American Gothic
: austere, used to tough times, stoic. “We have no healthcare coverage, very limited income, are underwater with our mortgage. Don’t know if we’re going to keep our home. It’s discouraging on a day-by-day basis. Every program we apply to for help, we get denied.” An electro-mechanical worker, John had been in and out of work since the recession hit in 2008. When he found work, it was generally low-paid, and as often as not, the great bulk of his paycheck went to filling up his car’s gas tank to drive to jobs outside of town and trying to keep the mortgage payments up-to-date enough to avoid foreclosure. He still owed $27,000 in student loans accrued in midlife while he studied for an electro-mechanical associate’s degree.

“We’ll probably be without utilities soon,” Sandy confided, softly, as if she was imparting a dreadful secret.

We can go to a senior citizens’ center and eat lunch. Once a day. That’s our main meal. I can’t buy things for our grandkids; I can’t buy them any gifts. I can’t go to see them. We’re living in a crunch, feel like we don’t have any hope some days. I should be getting commodities, but I can’t because we’re told his employment is too much income. If I divorce him, I could get commodities. For dinner, we eat cereal or something cheap. We have meat just if they
have it at the seniors’ center. No fresh vegetables, no fresh fruit. That isn’t good for my health. I have cancer.

By late-2012, the unemployment rate had significantly declined from its national peak of considerably more than 9 percent, standing at 7.9 percent the month that President Obama won reelection. Yet even so, close to fourteen million Americans remained unemployed. Millions more were either underemployed—working part-time jobs in the face of a dearth of better, full-time employment—or they had simply dropped out of the workforce, convinced that the economy could offer them nothing. Those who had been unemployed for years were bumping up against limits on their ability to claim unemployment benefits. And despite Congress’s having temporarily extended the benefits at the height of the post-2008 recession, in the new austerity climate that kicked in after the 2010 midterm elections, political momentum started running strongly against more extensions. In California and many other big states, hundreds of thousands of long-term unemployed started losing access to cash assistance.

In the case of Joyce, an erstwhile Walmart employee in Louisville, Texas, unemployment meant living with nothing. As the 58-year-old African American lady told me, she had $50 to her name. In 2012, her economic situation wasn’t a whole lot better than that faced by her family when she was growing up deep in the Jim Crow South.

I’ll probably have to move in with my daughter and my three grandchildren. I have medical bills that are unpaid. I be sick sometime, and don’t go to the doctor even though I need to go—because I have a heart problem. I pray that I don’t get sick. If I get a cough, I get cough syrup; if I get a sore throat, somebody will buy throat
lozenges for me. I do a lot of prayin’ to God; I have a lot of faith that I’ll be able to keep my head above water. How, I do not know. But I do have a lot of faith in God that He is going to help me through this.

Like so many others whom I talked to, Joyce sobbed as she told her story. She didn’t speak about her situation often; when she did, it quickly became overwhelming for her.

I don’t like being in poverty, I don’t like being hungry. I don’t want to be put out in the streets. I continue to pray that God will hold me up. I never really asked for much, but if I get a job, I’ll be blessed. I had a heart attack in 2006. I don’t want to do any strenuous work, but I have no problem working. Lazy is one thing that I am not. I was raised by parents and grandparents saying if you want anything, you have to work for it because nobody ain’t going to give you anything.