The Cost of Living Hits People Unequally
Think about the share of their income that people now hand over just to stay afloat in this economy. The number is hard to believe. There's a widening gap between what one set of people calls a fair price for something and what another set can barely picture spending at all, and that gap keeps stretching.
More people are tightening belts, going without, buying the cheap version, or hauling home what someone else threw away. Call it a new class of poor. It's being filled by qualified folks who can't land a job and by retirees discovering that their Social Security check, pension, or savings no longer stretch across the bills they face. Paying $600 a month for home and car insurance barely registers when you earn $50,000 to $75,000 a year. On a fixed income of $10,000, $15,000, or even $20,000, it feels impossible. And yes, plenty of people on Social Security collect under $900 a month.
Costs climb and climb, and somehow we assume people can keep paying. What it takes to farm a field or raise a herd of beef or dairy cattle is staggering now, with the profit margin shrinking by the season. Big business answers by lifting prices and trusting someone will cover them. When did that become the normal arrangement? People buy imports from China because nothing else fits the budget, plain and simple. Well-made goods that last, along with home repairs, maintenance, and keeping an appliance running, have slid out of reach. So we cut corners where we can (the dollar menu at the drive-through) and drop things many of us now treat as basics, a cell phone or internet access among them.
How did we land here? How did we come to shrug at this growing split in who can actually afford to live? We ask the small-fry of this country to pay the same high prices that, realistically, only the vanishing middle or the upper class can manage. Marie Antoinette and her "let them eat cake" come to mind. Whatever happened to the American Dream? We figured this was old history, back when royalty expected commoners to pay crushing tax rates so the crown could live well with a blindfold on about how it all got paid for. Power set against love. Materialism. The people we handed authority to, the ones meant to decide in our interest, aren't doing the job. I'd rather own a stove that works than fund some agency's retreat at a resort. Wouldn't you? The Little Red Hen fits here too.
So how did we accept it, this lopsided ability of regular citizens to cover the basics? Should most of us pay through the nose for gasoline, medical insurance, and prescriptions, then scrape by on nothing much for everything else? What unsettles me is the thought that the powerful and the wealthy may have engineered it this way on purpose, betting we'd swallow it without a fight. And we did. I did.
I used to clear enough to cover living costs with a little to spare. Not anymore. Eating out has mostly stopped. Ten dollars for lunch, tip included, is my ceiling, and it's saved for a special occasion that comes around rarely. In town I'll usually just get a drink, and I'm picky about where. I spend next to nothing on clothes, and those HGTV room makeovers I watch? Not happening here. Things don't match, they show their wear, some of it's an eyesore. My car could nearly pass for an antique.
The rest of the cost of living, I pay whatever the economy demands: insurance premiums, utilities, gas, household supplies. Food is the exception. We eat what we can afford and what will stretch, not what we'd pick. We're tight with meat, and the price of chicken wings and hamburger still makes us wince, though we pay it. For a lot of this there's no real choice. Pay what they ask or do without. Whatever became of competition?