Essay by Martha Quillen
Economy – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
SOMETIMES, we in the hinterlands are America’s true sophisticates, far more experienced in the ways of the world than presumably savvy suburbanites.
And one thing America’s rural communities are intimately familiar with is economic decline. Here in Central Colorado we look back at our history of boom and bust with pride, and even take satisfaction in the fact that the busts have prevailed. Most of us have no great love for development, growth, progress and industry. We prefer old-fashioned, rustic places that are small and unspoiled.
But things are changing, here and elsewhere.
This winter, electricity, natural gas, and transportation prices are up, and the cost of food is sure to follow. Insurgents in Iraq and hurricanes Rita and Katrina seem to have conspired to wrack the national economy.
In recent years, financial safeguards have been eviscerated. Welfare programs have been gutted, and social services slashed.
Now, proponents claim that without Referenda C & D, our state will lose what little pretense to higher education it has left. Health care will suffer, roads will deteriorate
Currently, Colorado residents are preparing for dismal days ahead. According to Channel 9 news, the city experienced a run on bankruptcy filings on October 12, and experts expect one in five residents to qualify for energy assistance programs this winter.
But meager finances have long been the status quo in our region. According to the 2000 census, Chaffee County’s median household income was $34,368, in comparison to Colorado’s $47,203. And Chaffee County’s average per capita income was $19,430, in contrast to Colorado’s $24,049.
Chaffee County residents get by on a lot less than most people in Colorado’s growing front range communities. Yet, we are darned near nabobs in our locale. Alamosa County’s median household income in the 2000 census was $29,447, and per capita income was $15,037. Saguache County’s median household income was $25,495, and per capita income was $13,121. Costilla County’s median household income was $19,531, and per capita income was $10,748.
Considering our vast experience, one would think that we could capitalize on the lessons we’ve learned. But poverty isn’t what it used to be. When I was a kid, there was a major information industry aimed at the poor. Budgeting advice crowded the magazine stands — offering money-saving recipes, couponing instructions, patterns to sew yourself into style, and hundreds of ways to serve hamburger.
But in the new millennium a family can’t save enough to pay for health insurance by clothing the kids in nothing but free hand-me-downs. And you’d have to dine on nothing but dumpster cuisine for six months to replace one broken dental crown.
Today, hard-pressed families can afford lots of stuff – furniture, dishes, junk food, toys, radios, televisions, videos — but no matter how hard they try they can’t seem to earn or save enough to keep up with regular payments. Thus, medical care, insurance, retirement plans, and housing — rather than steak and desserts — are today’s luxuries.
Yet locals get by.
For thirty-two years, I’ve lived in mountain communities where teachers are among the richest folks around – since they not only make twice as much as most people (average per capita income in our area: $10, 748 to $19,430), they also get several months off to take a second job — and some of them actually take that time off.
In Salida, working people frequently wear lots of hats. Reporters moonlight; secretaries wait tables; business owners haul wood, sell real estate, and take odd jobs.
For thirty years now, the gap between America’s rich and poor has been increasing. According to Business Week, CEO pay went from being 42 times higher than average worker pay in 1980, to a whopping 531 times higher in 2000. The good news is that this extraordinary discrepancy diminished a little in 2001 (so maybe the tide is turning).
But the non-news is: We don’t have CEOs in our region anyway — and most of the jobs available hereabouts pay considerably less than “average workers” make.
Politicians describe the last few decades as prosperous, but they haven’t been good for farmers, small town retailers, or blue collar workers.
Currently, we’re presumably booming. But the expansion hasn’t done some of us much good. About half of the people I know are hoping to get health insurance – someday. And most everybody worries because their retirement fund wouldn’t cover a good vacation.
The Republicans keep slashing taxes on the rich. So we pass measures that make everybody pay — just to keep our schools, clinics, parks, and public offices open.
But not everyone has money. So I decided long ago that I couldn’t in good conscience approve any more bond measures, mill levy overrides, and the like — until after wages hereabouts escalated.
Which only seemed fair. Housing costs have risen sky high; utility prices are out of control; wages are stagnant — and I really don’t understand how young parents keep hanging in there (with extra mouths to feed, babysitters to pay, and assorted other expenses I no longer have).
But if everybody adopted my plan, our schools would probably fall down. And I do love parks, trails, libraries….
IN RECENT YEARS, Americans have characterized poor people as the problem. They’re unskilled, unmotivated, sucking up assistance, and driving up our taxes.
And that attitude hasn’t merely captured conservatives. Although the Democrats once championed laborers, they sure don’t seem worried about unemployed rednecks, southerners, miners, loggers, or factory workers (which may explain why so many of them are now voting Republican).
Education is the answer, the Clinton administration insisted. They need training.
But to do what?
Most of the laborers which our politicians so blithely label as “unskilled” are still working, which makes such assertions pretty suspect. Their jobs have been devalued, not eliminated.
Now migrant laborers are filling more and more service sector and industrial jobs. Factory jobs are moving overseas, and it seems as if all of the tech reps and telemarketers on the phone are foreign.
(And this is one economic trend that’s trickling up. As American students fail to make the grade in America’s finest math and science departments, the era of imported engineers, doctors, and research scientists grows closer.)
Due to miserly wages, migrant labor introduces a host of problems, especially in regions where affordable housing, health care and child care were already in short supply.
BUT IT’S CRUEL and non-productive to blame foreign workers for our problems, since they are also at the mercy of an economy designed to thrill managers, stockholders, Donald Trump and Bill Gates, congressmen, and bankers.
According to critics, NAFTA could have been crafted with strict wage and environmental restrictions. But modern economists adore deregulation. So now American corporations can by-pass 150 years of hard-won wage and safety legislation by simply moving elsewhere.
It makes you wonder why Americans fought for a twelve, then ten, then eight hour day. What triumph was there in forcing industry to repair unsafe conditions when they can now go back to skimping on exits, lighting, ventilation, fair recompense, and humanity just by moving their factories abroad?
And that makes for disaster here at home, too.
Demoralized and beaten by job cuts, and terrified to be left out on the streets without job prospects, welfare, or hope, American workers have taken to fighting environmental and safety standards themselves. Our country has strict laws to prohibit the dumping of toxic waste into rivers and landfills, and to restrict long hours and prevent child labor and guarantee a liveable wage. Such laws contribute not only to our health and safety, they provide for an educated electorate by insuring that both adults and children have the time, money and energy for continuing education.
But workers today are disinclined to enforce such legislation because it might mean that their factories will close, their jobs will be lost, and their homes rendered unsaleable. Then their hospitals will close, their pension plans will fail, and they won’t be able to stay in chemo.
The choices America has given it’s working class are villainous.
And people like Tom Tancredo who blame desperate migrants only exacerbate the problem. American citizens should be asking why those migrants are here. Our leaky border with Mexico has clearly given way, allowing for a flood of refugees. But wasn’t NAFTA supposed to improve economic conditions south of the border?
Villagers world-wide welcome American factories, hoping for something more than mere subsistence living. They want schools, wells, dams to stop the flooding, septic systems to curtail disease. So they sacrifice their fields, huts, and traditions to work in modern factories. But all too often those factories offer an equally meager existence (along with occasional toxic spills and accidents).
And then, far too often, the factory moves out because there’s a place offering better incentives – free land, total deregulation, no safety standards, minuscule wages. But the peasants in the first village can’t go back to life as it was. Their huts are long gone and their fields are paved over. But the abandoned factory remains as an everpresent reminder of American enterprise. And thus the villagers are left – high, dry and furious.
CONGRESS NEEDS TO PAY more attention to what American corporations are doing abroad, because nothing encourages hatred more than generous gestures turned sour — and recent events have proven that anti-American sentiments can be deadly.
Likewise, American citizens need to pay more attention to what our government is doing to encourage this unrelenting downturn for service and industrial workers.
I think that a lot of us love rural Colorado because we see it as a safe haven, far from the cutthroat marketplaces of the real world. We hunker down in our mountain retreats, glad to escape the rat-race.
But like villagers everywhere, we could use a little cash, so we invite the markets in. We work to attract just a few more visitors to our town, and a few more residents, and a few more amenities, and then just a few more, and a few more, and more.
When Ed and I moved to a small mountain town 32 years ago, it didn’t have paved roads, or much in the way of television and radio reception, unless you count static. The library was puny, the schools laughable (and tragic).
As owners of the local newspaper, we opened our facility to high school journalism students so they could produce a newspaper. And their teacher graded every story by measuring the inches (I have no idea whether he actually read any of their stories or not).
ALTHOUGH SOME KIDS got accepted to college, and went, they almost always came home within a few months. They usually claimed that they didn’t have the reading and math skills to make it in college; it was just too hard. But I suspect the real reason they returned was because life outside their home town was frighteningly different. Colorado’s rural towns were not small mirrors of the front range’s suburban communities then.
Kremmling was truly rural when we moved there. The two red bone hounds that slept in a patch of sun in the middle of the highway had to be rousted at least every two or three hours because a truck was coming through.
In those days, the town was more like a family than a village, and people frequently bickered like siblings. Although we grew accustomed to that after awhile, and eventually even came to enjoy a sense of belonging, at first it was hell. There was a gritty honesty to the place, which anywhere else would have been deemed demented. Our type-setter wouldn’t talk to the town cop’s wife, or even stay in the office if she came by. The typesetter’s husband was feuding with the town clerk, who was disenchanted with us for even associating with that “hideously rude young man.” And people cornered you every time you went out in public to tell you how they felt about your office workers, your husband, your dog, and your friends.
In 1974, Kremmling was a world away from the front range. Young cowboys and loggers who ate lunch downtown really loved to play “freak out the city folk” by making lewd advances toward their wives, or talking about shaving the heads of hippies, or just sitting around polishing their guns and sharpening their hunting knives.
The business community encompassed three gas stations, four restaurant/saloons, a pool hall, a burger place, a newspaper, drugstore, hardware store, and two retail stores, (one of them open only by appointment). In Kremmling in that era, you knew everybody’s personal business, and as often as not their childhood faux pas and genealogy.
ONE 94-YEAR-OLD RANCHER, with a Wobbly/socialist past, used to come into town to recount his glory days of organizing, and everybody would pull over until he got parked — because he drove on no particular side of the road on purpose and proudly proclaimed that he had never had a license.
An eighty-five year old regular in the town’s four saloons found his way home every night by walking down the white center line on the highway, and everybody knew it and drove accordingly.
An old cowboy used to ride his horse into the Hoof and Horn on Saturday nights because, he claimed, she was the only filly who ever wanted to dance with him.
By the time we had lived in Kremmling for a year, cities made me a nervous wreck. There were sirens; there was noise; there were other cars driving on the streets; there were strangers walking down the sidewalks.
The first six months we lived in Salida, I had to grit my teeth and talk myself into going out and facing the traffic every time I pulled away from my house.
That first year in Kremmling, I always woke up if a car drove past the house after midnight. I couldn’t sleep if the wind was too noisy. I got used to people brandishing guns at the local bar.
And eventually, I came to enjoy an incredible sense of belonging. But I wouldn’t want to go back to living that way, and I suspect that most Kremmlingites wouldn’t either – since the place has totally changed.
It might be nice to live in an old-fashioned sort of place, though — a town where everybody always seems to have the time of day for you, and the workplaces are friendly meeting grounds where people stop in and socialize.
But spiraling land and housing prices, escalating utilities costs, and extraordinarily low prices on goods and services make it almost impossible for an old-fashioned family business to make it today. Rural businessmen today often have to moonlight (and due to the influx of cheap labor, odd jobs are tight).
Thus, dreams of country living are dying, and a lot of locals have come to a rude awakening: our region may no longer be a place where a person can earn a simple, honest living. By keeping the costs of labor down, corporations can reduce the price of goods, yet still profit on volume. And that’s a good thing, the free market gurus assure us — because consumers save money, and Americans can thrive on stocks and bonds, and corporations grow, which increases our GNP.
So everybody should be happy.
— And without question lots of Americans have thrived in the last two decades.
But it’s almost impossible for small town businesses and old-time farmers to match those low prices. So more and more of them are falling by the wayside.
Today, the majority of jobs in our region can’t feed, clothe and house a family adequately. And the businesses are often more a hobby than a vocation.
On the bright side, though, we’re not tripping over dead bodies. Beggars aren’t crowding our streets; and local children don’t have hollow eyes and bloated bellies — yet.
The decline of America’s working classes, however, has doubtlessly spawned depression, health problems, divorce, alienation, cut-throat competition, addiction, despair, domestic violence, negligent parenting, political polarization, and bigotry.
And the prodigious concentration of wealth in the pockets of the few has reapportioned political power, eroded democracy, and encouraged arrogance, greed, corruption, reckless spending, felonious business practices, and moral and monetary bankruptcy.
When a country’s economic policies fail to serve the working classes, we workers need to do something.
EXCEPT IT’S NOT exactly clear what we should do. Surely we should band together and decide upon some action, though. Perhaps political lobbying, or trade associations. Or rioting, marching, striking, collective bargaining, profit-sharing, boycotts, emigration, or revolution.
Of course, it’s tough to fund a revolution with spare change and overdrawn credit cards. And I’m not sure how people with two or three jobs are going to find time for it.
But people today are talking about change. In fact a lot of people seem inclined to change everything in our country — our movies, music, media, schools, transportation systems, foreign policies, health care, government, religion, medicine, hospitals, laws, police, courts, prisons, military….
And some inevitably clamor for revolution. America is a country founded on revolution, and we’ve come to cherish it. It represents courage, defiance, and determination, and symbolizes triumphing over great odds. So we invoke it like kids threatening to run away.
But let’s face it; successful revolutions probably don’t come cheap. And they no doubt require a really, really good plan – unless you don’t mind that you’ve gone to all that trouble just to have competing war lords descend to claim the spoils.
Besides, armed rebellion is bound to be bloodier than CSI. So I’d rather sit this one out.
I tend to blame VooDoo economics for a lot of our problems. Supply-side theory intentionally encourages inhibiting wages in order to maximize profits.
But Reaganomics may not merely be a diabolic way to wrest the last coins from the working class. In Being America, author Jedediah Purdy, a liberal if there ever was one, explains some of the idealism behind modern economics:
“Money makes vast inequality possible, because one person can become infinitely rich while others remain poor, but it also produces a form of equality: it has the same worth in anyone’s hands. A commercial society has many more entry points than one based on inherited position, aesthetic or spiritual refinement, or martial valor.”
In a recent television interview, William A. Niskanen, a member of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors from 1981 to 1985 and the author of Reaganomics, published in 1988, said much the same thing. When asked how Reaganomics had played out, Niskanen concluded that it had greatly escalated the integration of minorities into our society.
But Niskanen did mention that Reaganomics had devastated industrial workers – then predictably dismissed the problem as a simple matter of re-education.
He also admitted that supply-side policy did not produce the revenues they’d expected it to, and thus tax cuts are running up deficits, which Niskanen classifies as “immoral.”
You shouldn’t just borrow from your children’s future, when they have no say and no vote, he concluded. “That’s immoral.”
YET I THINK IT’S just as immoral to tax people who have too little to live on.
And that makes Referenda C & D problematical, since they withhold refunds which are not based on income taxes, but overall taxes.
And as for that school mill levy here in Salida? Taxes on housing inevitably effect renters along with homeowners.
But the poor need public schools, parks, libraries, colleges, and assistance with health care costs, too. And those things cost money.
So what’s an American to do?
Vote — whichever way you think is right. Because this problem isn’t going away — no matter how you fill out your ballot this time around.
Therefore, those of us who live in rural regions need to be ready to address some of these economic issues in the next Presidential race.
At this point, I’m ready to concede that free trade may have curbed inflation and delivered marvelous benefits to countless Americans. But it’s crushing others. And we need somebody in the White House who cares about all of us.
And also in congress and the senate.
This Thanksgiving, let’s raise our glass to freedom, democracy, equality, and better days in Iraq – and in the United States.