The only thing trickling down is exploitation
The American Dream doesn't exist for workers, and that's exactly what makes us vulnerable
Heads up: this essay deals with hard topics and potentially triggering material.
It’s January 2024. An election year.
I’m sitting at my desk, scrolling through LinkedIn Sales Navigator and prospect databases, sending out pitches for a client. Little Babe is sitting on the chair behind me, wrapped around me like a koala on a branch. She is watching me type, moving my eyes from monitor to monitor, words flowing out of my fingers at 93 WPM.
You type so fast without looking, she says.
I had to teach myself to be efficient.
Why?
Because I only get paid one amount, and if it takes me 5 hours or 50 that won’t change. So I’ve taught myself to be very efficient so we can buy everything we need and I can have enough time to spend with my family.
My voice is matter of fact, even cheery. I’m not trying to say anything terrible, just the simple facts of what it costs me to exist. The origin of my typing speed. But her cheek is resting against my back and I feel her start to cry.
It’s just not fair… grownups have to work so much, how can we have to work so much to eat and have a house when there’s so much stuff in the world?
There is lead in my gut, and I notice it, naming it for her. Then I remind her what we do with that lead. How we lift it out of our bellies and put it where it belongs: squarely at the feet of the United States government.
You’re right kiddo, I say. Good noticing.
My daughter lives in a home with 3 adults, all of whom work full time. Together, we expend 100-120 hours a week on paid wage labor, and as much again on the essential unpaid labor of raising 2 children, managing a home, preparing meals, caring for our own bodies and families. And yet we, like a huge portion of the American population, are at ongoing risk of becoming unhoused.
Mainstream narratives tell me that the United States is one of the richest nations in the world, and some groups would like me to believe we are one of the greatest.
As someone who was first unhoused in middle school and has experienced financial instability since, despite working consistently since the age of 15 and getting a college education, I can tell you I don’t see it.
13 Million U.S. children are currently experiencing hunger. Imagine going to school everyday and being expected to sit still and perform to excellence for 8+ hours while your belly growls and you know it won’t be alleviated when you get home. Or maybe you don’t need to imagine. Maybe you were one of the millions.
40% of our population cannot afford a $400 emergency expense in a country that has chosen not to provide a social safety net in any practical, working way.
15% of our aging veterans are malnourished.
35,574 veterans who put their lives on the line to serve the U.S. government are currently unhoused, many of them living without access to shelter.
30% of households earning $250,000/year are paycheck to paycheck as median home prices in the U.S. hit $412,000.
I grew up in a family financial situation that gave me whiplash and primed me for exploitation by anyone promising secure access to the American Dream. My extended family includes multiple millionaires, family companies that have been passed down for generations, or sold to private equity for the payout. During one of the times I became unhoused, I had a trust fund from the sale of real estate related to my grandfather’s company. Supposedly it was locked up behind trustees because the family didn’t trust my dad’s financial habits (fair) and doing so would make sure my sister and I were provided for in the future. Somehow they forgot to ask what we might need in the present.
One trustee was connected to our church. He embezzled thousands of dollars out of the account, maybe tens of thousands. Nobody would ever tell me the amount, and my mother wouldn’t press charges because “Christians suing Christians is against the Bible.” I wonder how many other working families in the church he has financially exploited, unchecked. It’s one of countless crimes I’ve seen swept under the rug, as grifters and criminals flock to churches where good-hearted people who have been brainwashed out of using the legal system are vulnerable targets.
Later, when my mom refused to pursue medical treatment for her cancer and instead went on a delusional tour of questionable providers and vitamin infusions with a 6-figure price tag, pulling all of us into her dramatic and lethal spiral, the relative entrusted with protecting those funds would come to my sister and I and tell us that she had to confiscate all the money.
You know, for my mom.
To keep paying for the quackery vitamins.
The person entrusted with protecting my financial future gave my mother every last penny of that money, no strings. No need to go see proven medical doctors. No questions about if maybe her girls were going to need something to take care of them once she was gone—because it was obvious she was going to be gone. Behind her back, they fumed at my mother for being delusional, while siphoning off my life savings to fund and grow the delusion, a confusing bait and switch.
I spent a while cleaning blood off the walls as my mother’s tumors grew so big they’d suddenly spurt in a Tarentino-esque nightmare, and she continued to get astronomically expensive vitamin infusions and eat cottage cheese. When we buried her, my sister was still a teenager. I wasn’t anymore, by 3 months.
I was also broke.
In the years that followed, I grieved my mom while sitting on the floor in the aisle of the grocery store, crying as I tried to figure out if I could afford to buy both the tomato in my basket and a piece of meat for us that week. Most days, my then husband would eat at the restaurant he worked at to shave down our grocery bill, and I’d make a single pack of bacon to last 5-7 days, carefully crumbling one of the pieces and a bit of fat into a dish of pasta, trying to fool our tongues into thinking we had reliable access to protein.
I felt stupid. It was my fault, after all. The relative—unlike the church member—had asked if they could have the money.
I was so stupid, wasn’t I?
Wasn’t I?
Or was the entire premise of that question… off? Had there really been a way for me to engage with those circumstances with my sense of choice, agency, and clear foresight intact?
I was still a teenager at the time of the Big Ask, a freshman in college. In addition to carrying a full class load, I was freelancing to pay my own bills and running my mother’s business in order to ensure she could continue to draw a salary, so my still at home sister wouldn’t lose their apartment while losing her mom. (This wasn’t me on a solo heroic mission for my sister. She was working full time in the business for the same purpose, and so was my then husband.)
If you don’t do this, your mom is going to bankrupt nana with these treatments. We have to have this money to keep her alive. My aunt’s words were panicked. She was staring at me with intensity.
In my teenage brain, the math seemed simple: keep mom alive and nana from going bankrupt, check. I didn’t know how to do the other, more realistic calculations. The kinds of calculations any rational adult not operating from the throes of trauma would run through.
Is the cancer curable?
Will she even do the necessary treatment to cure it?
Is the problem here really that nana will go bankrupt? When did she become an incapacitated person incapable of saying “no” to her own child? Isn’t it her responsibility to set limits, and let my mom experience the consequences?
How will I survive while grieving?
Years later, my nana would die and I would find out she was a millionaire in liquid assets alone. I don’t think she owed my mother a dollar. But the context would have helped.
My uncle, who had been the financial backer of my mom’s business, sold it weeks after her death, after asking my sister and I if we wanted to run it. None of us had even thawed from the trauma yet, or gotten a single full night’s sleep, and even being around my mother’s things was enough to give me a panic attack. We said no. We were all still babies, and I don’t think any of us imagined you could sell a business so quickly.
Less than 2 months after she died, the business had been sold off and all three of us were unemployed, our savings gone. My sister and I split $1,200 we found in my mom’s things, our inheritance.
It didn’t cover the cost of funeral clothes, travel, and time off work to get to her service.
I’m sitting in my aunt’s living room, having a Coke and a snack while we chit chat. She’s talking about an employee of hers.
You know, the other day we went grocery shopping together, and he said he knew I was rich because I never look at the food’s price before I put it in the cart. Can you imagine having to be so careful? I felt so bad!
I don’t say anything, just leave the room.
In 2022, my sister and I went on a phone call spree. She’d just become unhoused mid-divorce and was facing a financial situation that was insurmountable, while my business was dissolving, but I was optimistic and confident. Just a few week’s prior we’d spent a vacation with one of my aunts at her third home, the one on the ocean, as she apologized for the time she bailed on us when we became temporarily unhoused in middle school and life went to hell.
I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. I could tell how much y’all were struggling. Don’t worry, I’m here now and we have each other for life.
We stayed up late as she told me how much she regretted not speaking up when she knew we weren’t being educated, and that she wanted to pay for my sister to go to college or vocational school to get a career and get stable. To overcome the barriers that adults had put on her when she had no choice. I rested my head against her and relaxed my shoulders. I’m glad we are back together, I love you, I forgive you.
My aunt picked up the phone as my sister told her what she needed—a security deposit and some help getting into her new place as she geared up for legal proceedings. She’d already been turned away by all of the local community resources, because she had about $400 in her bank account. Spending it would put them in peril of not being able to eat or buy gas for work. Having it had kept them from being able to access “help” for housing. I listened to my aunt promise her they’d get a plan in place and everything would be ok.
She never called back.
When I confronted her, the text I got back was vague and tried to shift the blame onto my own lack of Christian faith and the fact that my (increasingly queer) appearance was hard to look at. I might not be a safe influence for her grandkids.
I didn’t hear from her again.
If trickle down economics can’t even protect all of the children in a single family, how exactly do you think it’s going to provide the economic safety net of an entire nation? While on my angriest days, I’d love to say that my family is an outlier of atrocious monsters, the fact is that this is simply the ordinary behavior of wealthy white people. This is human behavior, or rather, human behavior in the context of capitalism and white supremacy’s ubiquitous moral decay and moral injuries. No monsters to vanquish, only humans to contend with.
We need to stop acting surprised, and start picking up our anger and putting it where it belongs.
It is common sense that housing, food, health care, and education must be inalienable rights in a wealthy and just nation. That is not an extremist position.
What is extremist is the wealthy ruling class—which most of our political body is made of—insisting that elderly veterans and children be made homeless and hungry as an example, to keep the working folks so terrified they don’t demand their rights.
The French burn cars and riot when their vacation time is shortened, while Americans are so exhausted by wage labor that they don’t even have the freedom and time to participate in the democratic process or organize actions. We claim to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but in practice I’ve never personally met a working person who has PTO for election day—or who can afford to take a day off.
Might that be the point?
I don’t feel bad about myself that my family works 100 hours a week and has nothing to show for it financially. I don’t feel bad about myself that my daughter is more accustomed to seeing a mom at work than a fully present mom. I don’t feel bad about myself that I have to say “No” to 95% of her requests to avoid overdrafting my bank account. I don’t feel bad about myself that we’ve had these hard conversations already at her young age.
Because I have directed my anger exactly where it belongs: at the governors who celebrate their decision to slash already available money to feed kids in the summer, at the people elected to congress who claim to be patriots but don’t treat unhoused veterans like an emergency crisis in need of an immediate solution, with billionaires who are allowed to continue buying real estate and investing their capital in themselves instead of the malnourished in our American communities, with wealthy individuals who don’t even see to the housing and food security of their own before buying second and third homes.
I dream of a day where having a billion dollars of personal wealth is considered so shameful that a billionaire’s only choice is to relocate to one of their private islands and waste away alone, unserviced by a single essential worker, accepting their shunned fate as they stare at a useless pile of wealth that will get them nothing without the participation of the collective who make goods, deliver goods, perform services.
I dream of a day where working people quit arguing about being a liberal or a conservative and start getting damned curious about why American Millennial renters are 3 months away from homelessness so we can fight the real issues together.
I dream of a day where we all acknowledge that the trickle down economics con of Reagan-era policymakers was a grift by billionaires promising all of us already financially vulnerable people unchecked wealth and social mobility, a promise that has never been realized and was never realistic or possible given the policies that were implemented. Somehow, instead of us saying that 40 years is long enough to watch something fail before we cut our losses and change course, so many of us have dug our heels in, insisting that we must be stupid. We must be bad with money. We must be too dumb, too uneducated, too lazy to make it in the American dream. Our boss must suck, we must be unlucky.
Honey, you’re not dumb.
That’s just what being exploited feels like.
The vulnerability of the working American public to grifts is immense. When you have spent decades with your back against the wall, unable to reliably access healthcare and housing for your kids, keeping your secrets silent so that you don’t lose face in a country that demands you “succeed” while robbing you of any resource that would make that tenable….
…anyone with a cheat code looks like a Messiah, even if they’re just a cheat.
It’s no surprise to me that I fell prey to a supposed business coach’s expensive grift and shoddy advice that left me massively in debt exactly one time—right as the pandemic hit full stride, and right after I’d recovered from 6 months of uncompensated disability.
It’s no surprise to me that I was in good company, surrounded by dozens of the most brilliant and hard working people I’d ever met. The good ones washed out, many of them exhausted, broke, and feeling full of shame for winding up in the same predicament I had.
Others doubled down, started their own grifting scheme, and joined the exploiters. Maybe because they were grifters all along. Maybe because it was easier than admitting they’d been exploited. Maybe because if they didn’t con someone else, they’d be unhoused too. I’ll never know. What I know is that every person and small business whose financial statements I’ve seen has revealed a pattern of vulnerability and instability that is unsurvivable, systemically caused, and ripe for exploitation.
Are we all dumb? Failures? Or is the very setup that all of us working people in the U.S. live in fundamentally rigged against our own potential for success and wellbeing, despite our hardest efforts?
A few places to get resourced + find actions that will let your anger and your desire make a difference
Join your neighborhood association, especially if you rent. You live here too, your voice is more valuable than a landlord’s. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Find your fellow working people already doing good in the world. Check out the Working Families Party and the Poor People’s Campaign to start.
Talk to folks, write essays, make art, tell your truth. Stop treating your personal pain like a personal failing, and start helping everyone around you realize how we’re all being screwed by the economic and political systems together. Starting with yourself.
If you’re a wealthy person, Resource Generation is doing good work.
Thank you. This hit me right in the gut and, like you beautifully said, I will be lifting that pain out of me and placing it at the feet of the systems that are actually responsible.