Grace Ross: It’s economic policy, stupid…

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER ™

Grace Ross GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

A year ago after the market had been down for a while and folks were suffering from the unemployment that’s rampant these days, I had dinner with a friend. She’d done a couple of days worth of favors for me and I was having her out for dinner at one of my favorite restaurants to thank her for that effort. Part way through dinner she divulged to me that the dinner was really a big deal for her. Not only has her work as an independent contractor dwindled for a number of years as the economy has worsened, but in fact she recently attempted to get food stamps. They had miscalculated her income at one point and therefore refused to give her food stamps now and she really needed them.

At this point in the United States somewhere around 1 in 8 people are getting food stamps. This isn’t a program that some folks might shunt off into a corner as for poor people. This is a program that is critical to the survival of a huge swath of our communities. Besides it also supports our farms.

She told me over dinner she didn’t have enough money and that she was literally slowly starving herself. She had days of the week when she would eat and days of the week when she simply convinced herself she couldn’t eat. That way she could continue to pay her rent and keep a roof over her head. This is someone who several years ago made good money! It is unacceptable that in a society that considers itself a civilized society, one of the richest countries in the world, that people are literally having to starve themselves to make ends meet. That doesn’t really qualify as meeting ends any way.

It just underscores my outrage when I look at the choices that our political leaders are making.

In late January of every year the Governor of Massachusetts comes out with his budget priorities, (perhaps someday her budget priorities but not yet). As they say a budget is a statement of values. I simply don’t understand what the values are tht this year’s budget represents. And I think if any of us from Main Street among the 99% were left in charge, we would not allow these budget values to happen.

Where are the big cuts coming this year? Well, seniors and children primarily, but the biggest cut in any program as far as I can tell, is in meals for seniors. The Governor proposes cutting the budget for those by roughly a quarter. On top of that, he proposes level funding (that is not adding any money) to the programs that provide money for food pantries even though food prices have gone up a lot. Lots of families depend on food pantries as the only way they make it through the month. They have an income for the meals for the first part of the month and then have to fall back on emergency food for the last part of the month. Funding food programs at the same level that they were at 2 years ago means that that’s actually a cut. Given the continuing increase in the number of folks who are needing supplemental food, that’s a big cut.

This in the contrast, of course, to the fact that very wealthiest folks, even in this bad economy are continuing to get more wealthy! That trend hasn’t changed. So the folks who can most afford to pay for things are not being asked to step up to the plate and pay even as much as the rest of us do. Most of the wealthiest folks are still paying at a top income bracket at the federal level of 15%. Trust me, your neighbor next door who’s making 30,000 a year, they’re paying more than 15% at the top of their tax bracket. The wealthiest person who lives in a nice fancy house in a fancy part of town, they’re only paying 15% tax on their income. And because they are afraid of the “bad economy” they are spending even less of that money than they usually do. No job creation coming out of their economic activities.

So in this incredibly warped context I think it’s time that we demand of our elected officials that they wake up to the reality we’re all living in. I’m one of those folks who still has an income and I can put food on the table, but I have friends who can’t. Friends who used to make $75,000 per year. I have friends who are literally starving themselves without any of us knowing it because, of course, they’re not telling; they’re hiding behind their closed doors ashamed – unable to really grasp that it’s the fault of those presently in charge of our economy, not their personal fault.

It’s not ok. People can live in whatever la la land they want to about this economy supposedly getting better, it’s not getting better at present. And if the most recent statistics I have seen are right then we’re less than a third of the way through the foreclosure crisis. It’s not going to get better unless there is policy change – it’s not to get better if we just sit here and wait for our friends and neighbors to silently get into deeper trouble.