Joe Klein - Right

Joe Klein recently interviewed nine people in Brighton, Michigan, whose mortgages were greater than the current values of their homes.

They were mainly people dependent on municipal budgets for their income (fire fighters, policemen, emergency response workers, lawyers) and they were angry that people they knew were able to benefit from the system when they could not or would not.

Such people have been squeezed from the right for years. When cities grew, some more vocal taxpayers were unwilling to subsidize the growth. They talked about economies of scale, which meant when a community doubled in size, area or population density, the number of people who provided essential services could not double.

People had to do more work for wages that were constantly under public attack.

When people cannot alter the pressures from above, they take solace from the gradations of status that separate them from others below. They only know the rich live in Grosse Pointe and send their children to ivy-league colleges; they don’t see the differences the wealthier do between different addresses or between Yale on the one hand, and Dartmouth on the other.

The differences they see are the ones that separate those making it from those living on the edge of poverty. They could buy their homes, not rent. They could eat meat without depending on food stamps. They could occasionally provide their families with small luxuries.

These status gradations have been under attack from the left, as government programs that provided safety nets tried to do so without stigma.

The anger they expressed to Klein arose from the elimination of such status markers. One person, a lawyer, was angry at a neighbor who used a scheduled layoff as the excuse to apply successfully for mortgage relief. She complained: "It was like she got a raise. She bought her kids a swing set."

When I checked Walmart’s website, simple metal swing sets begin at $129 and nicer wooden ones start at $249 and increase quickly. When I lived near Brighton, you shopped at Meijer’s Thrifty Acres. Their website advertises a metal set with some features of the wooden ones for $139.

A hundred dollars is half a day’s pay, before taxes, if you make $25 an hour.

A cheap swing set is a luxury for a family with a mortgage. A fancy one would indeed arouse the envy and anger Klein heard.

The important point Klein is reporting is that people have not just been squeezed by the economy. They’re also losing their sense of themselves when their social markers are destroyed.

Mortgages are the clearest example, because these people know when their neighbors walk away and banks foreclose, they, not the banks, are the ones who suffer when their homes lose value. Another of his sources, a deputy fire chief, said "It’s immoral," but isn’t punished. He added:

"You've got to figure that our parents wouldn't have walked away from a mortgage. I'm not walking away from mine. But people I know well, friends, are taking a hike, and I wonder, What has happened to us as people?"

What indeed, when a man squeezed by the economy loses whatever remains that makes him feel important?

He can’t see or influence the institutions or special interests who’ve been destroying the economy, but he does see the others every day, the ones who benefit from government programs intended to help. The loss they cause is personal.

Notes:
Klein, Joe. "On the Road: Underwater in Detroit," posted on Time website 16 September 2010; there were ten at the meeting.