I grew up in an impoverished family that transitioned into solid working-class economic status. My first home was an unfinished basement with my mother, father, and their six children. The walls were open studs, and the food pantry was often mostly empty. On Fridays, when my father’s meager paycheck came in, we would have a big platter of hamburgers for dinner. It would be the only meat for that week. Sometimes my mother wept when waiting for that paycheck. We would polish worn shoes on Saturday evenings to get ready for Sunday morning church. The babies were bathed in the kitchen sink while we older children would bathe in the cement laundry tub.
In 1956, my father got a new job in the Chevrolet Stamping and Frame factory in Flint, Michigan. It was a good-paying union job that allowed us a new and modest tract home with one full bathroom and three bedrooms. All the walls were complete and painted. We had good health insurance and were never hungry again. He worked double shifts seven days a week for the first three years to move his family up from poverty.
Neither parent finished high school due to their circumstances but highly valued education as a way to improve lives. They pushed all of us six children to study hard in school. Four of the six would go on to college as the first generation to do so in both lineages. The four worked paying jobs during their college time to supplement scholarships. My younger brother was hired into a union grocery job in 1972 upon high school graduation. With his wages, he rented an apartment for himself, purchased an excellent sound system to play his beloved music, and a brand new Volkswagen bug off the showroom floor for sixteen hundred dollars. All that with just a high school education. Each of us six adult children was able to purchase a starter home to establish our living space and begin to build wealth in the American Dream of home ownership.
Most of the opportunities my family had to raise our economic status are more difficult to attain now or are simply not available. The farm labor hired on my mother’s family farm were replaced by gas tractors. The seasonal laborers hired in Michigan’s orchards were replaced with machinery. The good-paying labor union jobs of my father’s era have been outsourced overseas or replaced with robotics while labor union influence has diminished. In the current housing shortages, we six adult children would never have owned a starter home to build our personal wealth. The American dream of home ownership is being converted to rental housing that increases the wealth of large investors. The crushing debt of current educational tuition negatively impacts many graduates’ ability to finance a mortgage. The current emergence of Artificial Intelligence raises the possibility of the greatest loss of jobs ever seen in history. How will many citizens earn a living wage and spend on consumer goods to keep our economy afloat?
An idea is quietly being mentioned of a guaranteed minimum income in the wealthiest country in the world. A loud rebuttal is calling out socialism or communism. I read in print and hear spoken people’s outrage and anger that “other” people get something for free. “Why should they get food assistance when I have to buy all mine?” and “Why do they get cheap or free healthcare when mine is so costly?” “Their housing assistance is with my tax dollars!” “They don’t want to work, they should pull themselves up by the bootstraps!”
The whole “bootstrap” argument is an American myth. “No man is an island” is more truthful. My dad worked hard, but society had in place for him a good job, veteran’s benefits, and other “bootstrap” opportunities that are currently hard to access. You have to work and pull the straps, but society has to provide the boots. The source of anger and resentment is the idea of getting something for “free” without working for it, meaning “unearned.” Let’s take a look at what we all get for “free” that goes unspoken, unrecognized and typically unappreciated.
Genetics. In my family, I got genes that have allowed me to live seventy-seven years in good health. None of my five siblings have such health. My dad died at forty-three of inherited heart issues. I got my genetic health for free. Another huge genetic freebie of many Americans is being born white in a society that highly values northern European skin color. Nobody has earned their birth entry into this world. But many freely benefit from it. Being born into a wealthy, stable environment offers many free opportunities not available to those born into lower socio-economic environments. As such, these fortunate children are offered education, nutrition, healthcare, and contacts with prosperous opportunities at no cost to that child. Imbued with free advantages and yet, through resentful eyes, still angry that someone without those benefits would be given “bootstrap opportunities” by society so they could sustain and elevate themselves. It is the lesser angels of humans that would resent sharing a little when having so much. It is a lack of awareness and gratitude for what has been freely received by oneself. It is a self-serving assumption that we have all been given equal opportunities, and it is through personal failings that some suffer from lack.
Inheritance. My uncle was the sole inheritor of my mother’s family farm. The three daughters got nothing. That is a clear and succinct example of the free advantages of inheritance. Part of the American Dream is to accumulate enough resources to leave something for heirs. Single-family homes, land ownership, and business revenues are typically the sources of wealth to leave one’s children and grandchildren. Many of those sources of wealth development are gone. Ask a young person wanting to farm or ranch. Ask young entrepreneurs trying to find funding. Ask young families with heavy student loan debt about their search for housing. An inheritance of family wealth clears the way for each of those young people’s goals and dreams. An inheritance is a boot with straps for the heir to pull. The real problem is that more and more wealth is leaving families and entering investor portfolios, leaving straps but no boots for the younger generations.
Investments. “It takes money to make money.” It’s a misnomer to say investors “earn” a return on their money. They are gifted free money by a capitalist system manipulated by politicians and large financial institutions for the benefit of themselves and their account holders. These manipulations take place beyond the reach and knowledge of small investors and individuals who don’t have enough extra to invest. It is a rigged system favoring those with the most money. Some of this free wealth was generated through access to the boom and bust cycles of logging and mining. The electronic age, with its wealth, appears to be here to stay, but cryptocurrency and data centers are yet to play out fully. Investment into the enormous US debt seems to be a lucrative strategy in the face of tax relief for the wealthiest Americans. Their taxation would lower our collective debt, but as I said—it is a rigged system.
Joni Mitchell sang in one of her recordings, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” Seeing the difficulty for young people to achieve their part of the American Dream makes me aware and thankful for the opportunities I had in the 1950s, 60s, and 1970s. Changing times require new ideas to meet the genuine financial challenges for our American citizens. We have building codes and food regulations to keep our people safe. We need to install “financial codes” and “income minimum” regulations to keep our people solvent. When the population is solvent, so is the nation. You could call it “national security.”
