After the jump is a blog entry I posted to my OpenSalon page, The Broadband Teat (link at right on my Blogroll), on Friday. I was killing time before the debate, a conversation I'd had earlier in the day weighing heavily on my mind. I wrote and posted what follows before the debate, but after watching it I will say that I think Obama did a much better job at acknowledging these kitchen-sink issues than McCain did. Surprise surprise.
"Main Street vs. Wall Street" is a buzzphrase I'd love to see retired, but there's something to it. Having to choose to save $100 on daycare so we have money for food, gas and medicine isn't as sexy as trillion-dollar bailouts and epic stock market plunges, but pulling the investment banks' privates out of a vise won't do much good if millions can't even afford the basics of living.
That was what my son's babysitter asked me today, since he wouldn't be coming in next week. It broke my heart, and amidst all the news about bailout deals and whether they were on or off made me wonder if this is what we were coming to.
We are not phasing out the babysitter. She's the daycare equivalent of the mythical rent-controlled apartment in New York City that goes for a pittance of what it would really be worth. She flexible, she's great with the kids and has a patience and gentleness with them that I aspire to as a parent. And she babysits so that she can be at home for her teenage son. But my wife and I are having one of those months, where our paychecks just aren't lasting till the next one and we're drowning financially one bill at a time.
Part of it, I will admit, is our fault and can't be blamed on the economy. But like many millions of others we are being inexorably squeezed between rising food and gas costs, higher prices for electricity (and air conditioning is a necessity in Texas until the end of September, sometimes later) and just about everything else, what can we do? Do my wife and I go without our medications? Even with good insurance--we're fortunate to have that at least--our meds aren't free. Do we buy poorer quality food for our son? Do we drive our cars below "E" and hope and pray we don't run out of gas? I greatly wish we could get by on one car, but unfortunately it doesn't seem possible.
What we ended up doing was that my wife flexed her hours so we could go without daycare and save $100 next week. And it left me wondering how it came to this. My wife makes $40,000 a year. It seems to me that it wasn't all that long ago a family could make a decent living on that salary alone. Now we can't get by on that plus my modest pay at a part-time job, plus what I make from selling fiction and what my wife makes with freelance work. We probably work about three jobs between us and we can't get by.
This is the root problem of our economy. My family's story is hardly unique; it is all too common. Bailouts are all well and good, but shouldn't our true priority be giving the middle class back the financial security it had when this country was at its most economically prosperous.