The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Deborah Taylor-Hollis

Gap widens between rich and poor

I feel like a middle-class kinda gal. I grew up in a single-family detached house in a blue-collar neighborhood, where every third family earned their daily bread at the Ford Motors plant. My folks, both college grads, worked in advertising sales. Mom stayed home when I was born, and dad paid the bills. Beaver Cleaver had nothin' on me.

Fast-forward 35 years and see: I own a home with my husband, a blue-collar kinda guy who works hard so I can stay home with our 4-year-old. We own a single-family detached house in a nice neighborhood. We both have college degrees. We still feel we are middle-class.

Middle-class can mean different things to different people. To me it means that we have never been on welfare and make near the median income nationwide--that's $32,264, according to 1994 census data. Middle-class people buy a car and keep it awhile, say at least five years, and they plan one big vacation a year for no more than two weeks. Middle-class folks might know a foreign language, but it's usually not ancient Greek, and they probably can name more members of the 49ers starting offensive than U.S. department secretaries. Middle-class women own maybe two really great dresses that they save for special occasions.

You'll be happy to know that the middle class is getting bigger. Not that so many more people from lower economic strata are earning more; nope, folks from the higher end of the wage pool are climbing down to join us. Newt Gingrich, who makes $171,500 from the speakership alone, claims he's just a middle-class American. So does Bob Dole. So do 95 percent of people making $75,000 or more a year. If you're making $75,000 a year, you are in the top 14 percent of wage earners nationwide. You will never have any idea of what poverty is really like. But most of those folks polled in that same census thought they were middle-class. Three percent actually had the temerity to call themselves "poor."

I bring all this up because you really have to hustle to make enough money to live in this valley, and we sometimes lose sight of what's going on everywhere else in the nation. Wages are below 1989 levels and falling--they are not keeping up with the standard of living. What this really means is that 10 percent of the people in this valley will become instant millionaires in the next decade because of flukes involving stocks and IPOs, while the other 90 percent will slowly lose their grip on what they have achieved thus far, probably having to sell their overpriced houses and move to other areas of the country where homes are reasonable and wages have been stagnant for years.

I'm sure you laugh now--heck, we've got the boomingest economy in decades, right? We don't need to worry. But we do. The economy is booming because earnings are high. Corporations are making a ton of money. They are making tons of money for stockholders and CEOs. They are making a ton of money while they lay off workers, cut back hours, give smaller raises, hire part-timers and temps and dismantle the dreams of 95 percent of us. Only 5 percent of Americans make more than $100,000 a year. "Earnings," to quote George Stephanopolous, "are made at the sacrifice of wages."

Where once we had companies with full-time jobs and benefits for their entire workforce, we now find places where you will never meet a real employee. They all work through temp companies, are out-sourced for information and get a paycheck from Manpower, now one of the biggest temp employers in the nation, thanks to "downsizing." Their workers don't want to be temps; they would like the bennies and the dollars that real companies offer their real employees. But they will never have them.

The problem is that things have moved way too fast, and the division between rich and poor is expanding quicker than most of us can comprehend. While the value of milk may have risen just 20 percent over two decades, you cannot buy an average 1,000-square-foot home in the Glen for less than $315,000. I dare all the CEOs out there to do the math and figure out what they need to pay their workers if they want to have them live here.

Wanted: I am interested in your ghosts. Please tell me about the supernatural haunts of the Glen for an upcoming issue. All spooks welcome.

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