Mother Jones: Great Boomer Bust

Great Boomer Bust
1989 June
By Katy Butler

NOT LONG After WE MARRIED, MY HUSBAND and I flew to Connecticut to visit my parents. We carried our secondhand suitcases up to what was once my brothers’ bedroom and dropped them on two beds pushed together to make one. The room was, as it always had been, scrupulously clean and white—but richer than I remembered. The beds had real box springs. A cashmere blanket lay folded at their base; on a. nightstand, a red daylily from my mother’s garden opened in a carafe of water. Outside the window, rain from a sprinkler fell on a long lawn sloping into the trees. Every room in the house—the spare bedrooms, the basement wood shop, my mother’s darkroom, the kitchen smelling of herbs—every room whispered of surplus space and money and time. I took off my shoes and thought to myself, I will never live this way again.

I felt shame, resentment, and confusion settling out in me. By the standards of their generation, my parents were only comfortably middle- class. Why, then, were they living so much better on one income than Bob and I, who, nearing 40, had no children and were living on two?

I could not blame my parents: they earned what they got. Immigrants from a pinched, postwar Britain, they came to the United States in the ‘5Os when we were children, with little but my father’s education. My mother sewed my clothes; my father worked hard and got promoted. Through the years, things got better: In the 60s, my father traded the bulbous, secondhand Buick that drove like a sofa for a new Rambler station wagon. In the ‘70s, he bought himself a Ford and my mother a Toyota. The $28,000 suburban house they built on lake in the ‘60s —my mother tiled the bathroom and taped the Sheetrock—was sold in the ‘70s for a place with three bathrooms, four bedrooms, and a two-ear garage. They had enough money to pay for my brothers’ skiing, my college education, and a fattening retirement hind. I went to college 1967 with a vague sense that my future would he much the same as my parents’ past, only freer: I would marry, write work in the mornings, and take care of my children in the afternoons.

By the ‘8Os, my parents had raised three children and achieved all of the American dream on my father’s income alone—and after 15 years in the full-time work force, I could not afford a child and had never owned a new ear.

I couldn’t have eared less about a new ear. But it was an index of how middle-class life had changed in the course of a single generation. And nowhere was the change more striking than in what each generation paid for housing and what they got for it. My parents paid $190 a month—on a 5 percent mortgage—for a four-bedroom house on an acre of land in Connecticut. Bob and I, with a combined income slightly lower than my father’s, paid $1,500 a month—on a 9 percent mortgage—for a five-room bungalow slightly larger than my parents’ deck. Yet we felt lucky to afford a house at all.

Every night during that visit, even as I reveled in my mother’s homemade soups and slid between her clean, cool sheets, I thought bitterly of my downward mobility, not only in money, but in time. Bob and I both worked hill-time and lived in time-poverty: our house in Mill Valley, California, was a launching pad, not a home. We commuted, ate Chinese take out and microwave burritos while standing in the kitchen, cleaned the house once in a blue moon, and sometimes went for days without an uninterrupted hour together.

On the last night of our visit with my parents, we all went to the movies. My mother and father got a senior citizen discount.

So it was with a sense of discontent that I returned home, got out of my unreliable but classy-looking old Mercedes, and opened the door to the tiny, cracked stucco house my husband and I bought for a paper fortune with help from our parents.

I looked at the weeds in the overgrown yard; the ink stain on the couch from a discount outlet, the dust in the corners, the mail-order catalogs and sweaters piled on the dining-room table. Our bedroom, I realized, was smaller than anywhere I had slept in childhood. On the deck were two Adirondack chairs I bought because the catalog said their arms were wide enough to hold a glass of lemonade on hot, lazy summer afternoons. I hadn’t had a single glass of lemonade or a single lazy afternoon all summer; what I tried to buy was not a chair, hut a memory of free time.

IN The MONTHS AFTER THAT Visit EAST To WHAT Was ONCE my home, I looked at the lives of my friends as though through a set of hard, refracting prisms. With few exceptions, most of their parents had cobbled together some version of the American dream: kids (the most expensive durable consumer good), education, houses, retirement accounts, and time to enjoy it all. My friends dressed and ate well, hut most had only one or two elements of the dream we had laughed at in our 20s and now could not attain. We had to choose between kids, houses, and time. Those with new cars had no houses; those with houses, no children; those with children, no houses. A few lucky supercouples—a lawyer married to a doctor- say, with a combined income of more than $100,000 a year—had everything but time.

There were, of course, some notable exceptions to the disguised slide down: my women friends had careers and financial independence denied their mothers; a handful of others had made enough money in mail-order or computer software to afford comfortable houses, children, and leisure. But on the whole, I saw a generational dilemma perceived as individual failure. My friends in the baby-boom generation—so often accused of being unable to defer gratification—were deferring what their parents considered basic. They were smart and hardworking, but struggling, and ashamed to admit it even to each other.

It was the shame and pretense—in people I’d known since we were all in our 2Os and poor—that puzzled me. Then, we’d all worn jeans and put our money into stereos; now my friends were gilding their downward mobility in a skin of glitz. One of my best friends had fallen in love, moved out of her rent-controlled flat in San Francisco, and taken (with the man she later married) a high-rent house, as nice as my parents’, in the Berkeley Hills. I had gone there for dinner and Molly had met me at the door, tastefully dressed. Her table overlooked thousands of houses sparkling around the bay— like a lord’s castle high above his subjects—and I had felt a little envious, almost intimidated.

It was only after she and her husband left town for new jobs that Molly told me that she’d been too deep in debt to buy a winter coat, so broke she d stood in line at the phone company to pay the bill on cutoff day I was shocked she hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me, and something she d said years before came drifting back, a piece of advice she had heard from her mother “Never look poor, dear. Americans don’t like poor people.”

AT THE SAME Time MOLLY MADE HER CONFESSION, MY Former roommate Nancy—the daughter of a psychiatrist who had gone to school on the GI bill and bought his house with a VA loan—became truly poor. The father of her baby left her without child support; she was a technical writer, and her work-dried up after her computer company lost a major-con- tract. The safety net strung up in the 1930s-did not help her: as a contract worker, she didn’t qualify for unemployment compensation. Welfare turned her down because her rent was too high. “I think it’s just as well,” she told me at the time, still - looking beautiful m clothes she’d bought before she lost her job. “I don’t belong in welfare.”

I lent her a little money with only the vaguest sense of her troubles. Only recently, when she laid it all out for me, did I understand how bad it had been. “I couldn’t afford to go to museums, but I went for walks. I breast-fed for a long time, and that was a help,” she said quietly. “Then I finally got a job I was even worse off. I couldn’t afford food, child care, and transportation to and from work. I saved money on food for myself. Thank God my son would eat tofu. I got up at four in the morning to do my overtime work—unpaid, of course— while my son was asleep. Sometimes I felt as if there really wasn’t a place on the planet for someone like me. It makes one ashamed not to be able to buy light bulbs, food, and toilet paper. I didn’t like asking my friends for monetary assistance—i waited until I was desperate before I asked. I didn’t want to be perceived as someone in that much trouble.”

Meanwhile, the newspapers were full of stones about yup— pies and blackened redfish and new restaurants. The cognitive dissonance hurt my head: Was I the only one who felt like a failure? Was it only my friends who were in trouble? Why was it so hard for me to say to a lunch companion, “Let’s go somewhere cheaper”? Acquaintances were wearing $50 haircuts and $75 shoes.

A childless couple returned from a student year in Rome, got jobs, furniture, sophisticated clothes, and a nice apartment. They went bicycling in Virginia on vacation that year, staying at bed and breakfasts. They seemed to be doing just fine. Recently, Roger explained the secret of their success: they were $18,000 in credit-card debt, and he was leaving his nonprofit job for better-paying but more boring work in the computer industry to pay it off. “We both had grown-up jobs for the first time, and we thought we should be able to live like grown-ups,” he said. “We’d struggled for a long time, and I was sick of this thing the Left has about not being desirous, of not wanting sex or money.

“I don’t think you have to be unhappy to be on the Left,” he went on. “I wanted to be able to pick up the tab for ten people, or take a cab when I wanted. I thought that part of being an adult was being able to go to a restaurant, look at the menu, and go in if you like the food, not because you re looking at the prices. A lot of it was playing grown-up and throwing the old plastic around. Then we realized we could have gone to Europe last year on our credit-card interest alone.

“We have nothing to show for it,” he said.”We were in a lot of denial, and finally the denial broke.” He asked for help from his father—a stockbroker in the Los Angeles suburbs who rarely takes a vacation—and was turned down. “My father’s always telling me how much I’m going to inherit,” said Roger, who resents the way money colors their relationship with the tones of prolonged adolescence. “He tells me that if we have a kid, the purse strings will open. I told him, you can’t buy a grandchild.”

I looked at him across the table, amazed that a friend of mine would stake his sense of manhood on being able to pay a restaurant bill. “Manhood,” once seen as the ability to fight and then as the capability to produce, had been redefined again, this time as the ability to consume. And Roger, like many of my friends, seemed willing to pay almost any price to appear a successful as his parents, even though the rules of the game had changed.

IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, as! clipped the Wall Street Journal and collected economic reports, I came to see that there was no way most of us could meet the expectations created in the late ‘40s and ‘5Os, when having both a home and children was an attainable goal. Then, the economy was full of predictable middle-class rewards and hidden subsidies for young families.

In the 70s, as we came of age, the U S economy was entering a disguised but deepening depression whose burdens fell disproportionately on the young. The twin pillars of the middle-class dream—affordable housing and enough real income to support children—were crumbling without our knowing it. Germany and Japan reaped the fruits of their postwar industrial reconstruction, while U.S. products and farm goods lost thur dominance in the world marketplace Vietnam War debt and a bloated military budget—funded with borrowed money—fueled inflation. Real U.S. wages stopped growing ‘and began to fall. Health-care costs grew. Meat went up, cheese went up, and interest rates went up.

When the economy hit the skids, many older people were wearing safety belts. It was the young who went through the windshield. In 1973, 80 percent of those over 35 owned their own homes. But millions of baby boomers were arriving at the labor and housing markets to find starting wages stagnating and houses out of sight.

When productivity and profits declined and ‘corporations squeczed unions and exported jobs to cheaper climes, it was younger workers who got the short end of two-tier wage contracts, failed to get good union jobs at all, or were paid minimum wages that did not keep pace with inflation.

When manufacturing declined and service industries grew, it was primarily younger workers who took the lower-paying new jobs. Between 1973 and 1986, the proportion of younger non-college-educated workers holding (usually better-paying) jobs in manufacturing dropped from one third to less than one-quarter.

in our 20s, my friends and I hardly cared. We ate tofu and hung Indian bedspreads in rented apartments. We were young; it was a lark. But in our 30s, as we married or got sick of having places sold out from under us, we wanted tp be grown-up, we wanted money, we wanted houses.

In 1973—the last really good year for the middle class--the average 30-year-old man could meet the mortgage payments on a median priced home with about a fifth of his income. By 1986, the same home took twice as much of his income.

In the same years, the real median income of all families headed by someone under 30 fell by 26 percent. It was a loss virtually identical to the 27 percent drop in per-capita personal income between 1929 and 1933, -the deepest years of the Depression. The Depression created a sense of shared misfortune and national crisis. But the stagflation of the ‘70s and ‘80’s begot in its victims a sense of individual failure—and in it’s survivors, a sort of chumpish pride, as though they’d come up in the world by paying $100,000 for a house that would have cost their parents a fifth as much.

My friends, who spent much of their 20s marching and organizing on behalf of officers, responded not by organizing politically but by making small personal adjustments. If the middle class was going to disappear, they would ape the rich, not the poor. They spent more on housing and less on charity savings. (In 1981, young families saved less thin 1 percent of their after-tax income, compared with 4 percent in 1973.) They took on more debt and paid it off more slowly. (In 1988, installment debt was at a record 16 percent of personal income, far above the 12 percent of the early l980s.) They took on this debt at an age when their parents were saving for retirement—perhaps on the unspoken assumption that their parents’ deaths would eventually bail them out with a legacy. When pushed to the wall, they did with less: they gentrified slums and bought gimcrack condominiums in buildings with pretentious marbled lobbies and paper-thin walls.

Unable to meet the out-of-scale expectations created m the 1950s, they gave up on necessities and comforted themselves with cheap luxuries: flowers, Dove bars, Häagen-Dazs, Cuisinarts, dinners out. As people dispossessed from housing and family life have done before, they wore their fortunes on their backs or sunk them into their cars. Having unconsciously absorbed the cultural imperative to do better than our parents—and unable to do that in economic terms—my decided to be upwardly mobile in terms of taste, instead. In some ways, we created a culture more adapted to our realities; in other ways, we became a generation of wannabes. One year 1 gave my father a $200 gift certificate for custom-made shirts from the Custom Shop, and smiled when he ordered them in a cotton/polyester blend. I couldn’t make as much money as he did, but at least, I thought, I knew how to spend it. The $200 that paid our parents’ mortgages would only cover our car payments; but we bought Land’s End instead of Sears, and learned to call noodles and coffee “fettuccine” and “cappuccino.”

Other adaptations involved fundamental changes in our family and personal lives. Women entered the full time work force and stayed there: more than half of all women with children under a year old are working: People delayed marriage into their 30s (men tend not to marry until they earn a breadwinner wage—one reason why marriage rates are so low among young blacks); others postponed, or simply forgot about, having children.

Those friends of mine who had children despite the difficulties were forced to make sacrifices their parents were never asked to make. One of my closest friends, an art therapist married to a carpenter, has two young children. She had to return to work a month after each child was born. “I felt I had no choice at all, because of money,” she told me. “There was no breathing time.” One rainy morning a couple of years ago, she left the house with her three-month-old daughter on her chest in a Snugli, her four-year-old son in one hand, and an umbrella and her breakfast in the other. She was on the way to day care and work when she slipped on the steps and fell. She picked up the children, went back to the house, got in bed, and ‘started to cry. “I just felt like I couldn’t carry on anymore, and I tried to figure out what to do,” she said. In the next six months, she collapsed physically with a series of infections and had to quit her job.

Faced with such examples, it’s not surprising that many of the women I know have, sometimes reluctantly, foregone children. Unlike our mothers, we have been freed—by legalized abortion and changing customs—from obligatory motherhood. But for myself, the decision not to have children wasn’t easily or freely made. For years I saved money toward marriage and family. I married late—at 35—and two years later spent my birthday crying, feeling that my husband and I would never marshal the financial, physical, and emotional resources necessary to have a child while we both worked full-time. It wasn’t a simple economic decision, and other factors played their part. But although I am sure there are other women crying secretly in other bedrooms, it was not the kind of thing I could talk to anybody about

I have FRIENDS WO COPE BY keeping up Appearances— running up credit card debt and pretending nothing has changed. But others facethe truth about the way they live now with some dignity and grace. I recently went to dinner with Nancy; my old roommate, in her rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco’s North Beach. She knows how to do well with nothing; we ate spaghetti and homemade applesauce by candlelight on an old picnic table in a courtyard where daisies grew in olive-oil cans. As we talked, her son circled the table on a tricycle. Nancy told me things were much better than they had been when her son was tiny, even though she still rises at four in the morning to get her work done. She still doesn’t own a car, and she and her son leave the city about six times a year. At 34, she owns only a refrigerator, a small Chinese carpet, an antique bench, and her mother’s dinner dishes. “I don’t feel poor,” she said. “I feel as if I actually have luxuries.” It turned out she meant taking cabs to work, sending the laundry out, and having the flat cleaned twice a month —tasks done in a previous generation by a wife whose cash income was not needed.

“You can talk about the economic problems of single mothers, but single mothers exist because it’s an option now, and it wasn’t an option for my mother,” she said earnestly. “I could get out of my relationship when I wanted to. Having a child is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. It changed my life for the better. I wouldn’t go back. If I didn’t have my son to spend my money on, I’d be buying snazzy shoes or yuppiefied kitchen equipment. Instead, I’m seeing things I’d otherwise miss. I’m standing on the corner with him, waiting for the bus, looking at a seagull standing on top of a flagpole.”

I went to dinner with my brother Peter in the flat he shares in San Francisco. He is 36, a perpetual student, and lives on about a quarter of what I spend, There’s always peace and quiet at his place, a sense of being an expected guest, an uncluttered awareness of the spaces between things. He knows how to use a pressure - cooker and find things at Goodwill; when he waits to see a show, he works as an usher. When I arrived, the table was set and the lights turned low, there were wineglasses filled with mineral water, cloth napkins folded carefully at each place, and two stubs of candles glowing. When it was time, we sat down for homemade lentil soup, warm, fresh sourdough rye from the neighborhood bakery, salad and baked potatoes. I felt so well taken care of that I ate bread as though it was ii rare food, tasting the grains against my palate instead of wolfing it down. There was a sort of Zen luxuriousness about the whole meal: we squeezed the maximum possible enjoyment out of the minimum possible consumption. My deepest needs—warmth, light, quiet, companionship—were satisfied. I didn’t miss anything.

I thought of my own life—my constant conversations with myself about wanting a child, a new couch, a weekend cottage, a bigger house on a quieter street—and realized my discontent was cheating me of the life I had.

“If it’s by choice and it’s not overwhelming, having no money can be a way of entering more deeply into your life,” my brother said, as he served me some more lentil soup.

NOT LONG AFTER THAT, I BOUGHT MYSELF A NEW RAINCOAT, a years supply of shampoo, and a pressure cooker I quit my job as a reporter to become a free-lance writer. I wrote to the direct-mail association and asked them to take me off the catalog lists. I sold-ivy ancient, infuriating Mercedes and bought a dull but reliable used Honda. I bought a secondhand copy of Laurel’s Kitchen, learned to cook beans and started using my library card.

I decided that if the economy was going to deprive me of things l deeply wanted, it would not take my time.

I began facing the Life I had, not the life that I dreamed of having or thought I had the right to have. I turned off lights.I started to cut the link between consumption and pleasure, between consumption and self worth. And that paved the way for some unexpected things. I recycled—because it saved money on garbage pickup—and ate less meat and more beans. I walked downtown instead of getting into the car. Having less money forced me to get to know my neighbors, and a network of borrowing emerged. My next-door neighbor Mack, a salesman, lost his job and borrowed my computer to type résumés; when my husband’s car broke down, Mack lent us his. My husband Bob helped Jay, a carpenter, change his clutch; Jay brought us wood scraps for kindling and his wife Gloria fed us dinner. One weekend last fall, my husband and I came home from a walk and saw four of our neighbors standing outside Mack’s house around a pyramid of lawn sod.

“Found it at the dump,” said George, the young contractor who lives down the block. He picked up a roll of sod, laid it out in Mack’s front yard, and jumped up and

down to set it. “Some landscaper threw away a truckload.” Mack’s wife Jan, who works as a flight attendant, laid out another roll, and in half an hour, the patch of dirt in front of her house was transformed into a carpet of green. Jan turned on the sprinkler.

“There’s plenty left,” said George. “Dig up your yard, and we’ll do it too.” They all carried their tools around the geraniums that serve as a hedge between our houses. My husband and I raked out wisps of yellow grass. “My grandfather owned this whole block in the ‘30s,” said George over the clatter of takes. He chopped out a root with his hoe. “There was a dairy farm behind your house, and a vineyard across the street.” I cradled rolls of sod against my chest until I smelled like the riverbanks where- I skinny- dipped as a child. Soon our weed patch was covered with a quilt of green, its nap running every which way. Jan knelt down with clippers and snipped along the edge Of our walk as though cutting out the armhole of a dress. Mack brought out a sixpack. I squeezed lemons into a jug of iced water, and we sat around on the fresh new grass in the afternoon sunlight with no sense that anything needed to be repaid. I shut my eyes and felt no need to compare our block, held in its growing net of mutual favors and borrowings, with anything else I’d ever known.

ONE BATTLE BOOMERS FORGOT TO FIGHT

Baby Boomers, RAISED IN AFFLUENCE AND PUMPED full of rhetoric about being the biggest and best educated generation in U.S. history,” have become the first downwardly mobile generation since World War II. This decline is due not only to structural changes in the economy, but to the baby boom generations failure to defend its interests politically. In the booming economy of the ‘40s and ‘50s, when a rising tide lifted almost all ships, the U S government lavished hidden subsidies on young families. A grateful nation sent a generation of young veterans to college on the GI bill and helped house their families by funding VA home loans, new schools, low income housing; and superhighways to new suburbs.

The nation wasn’t so grateful in the nervous, inflationary ‘70s, when subsidies for education and middle-class housing eroded, and “Not in My Backyard” antigrowth zoning pushed housing prices higher.

Young people could have learned a thing or two from the elderly: also squeezed by inflation in the ‘70s, they organized, voted, and lobbied Congress. (The average voter is now 47 years old.) As a result, Social Security benefits—defended by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), one of the most powerful noncorporate lobbies in the country—have been indexed to the cost of living.

In real terms, Social Security benefits jumped 46 percent between 1970 and 1987 and now total 28 percent of all federal expenditures. The average current retiree will receive a little more .than three times as much as he or she contributed to the system by the time he or she dies. (The average baby boomer will be lucky to receive half that.) In 1974, the poverty rate for the elderly fell below the poverty rate for children. In 1982, it fell below the poverty rate for the population as a whole. Today, the over-50 age group has a higher after-tax income per capita than the under-50 age group.

While the government has increased benefits for older voters it has taken them away from the young, who have no powerful grass-roots lobby. The real value of the minimum wage has fallen, and it is not indexed to inflation. Social Security taxes (FICA on your pay stub) have risen from 4.80 percent in 1970 to 7.51 percent at present As a result, younger workers, including those making only minimum wage, have helped finance benefits for some elderly people who are by no means poor. (Although retirees cannot earn more than $8,880 annually, they can have unlimited investment income without losing Social Security benefits.)

Despite the economic facts, the elderly remain mythologized objects of pity. Baby boomers and young families—with no political organization comparable to the 28 million—member AARP, with its $235 million budget—are pilloried in the press as self-absorbed yuppies or ignored.

The number of children living in poverty has grown, and government support for kids has declined. During the Reagan years, $50 billion was cut from federal programs for children We now direct an average of $9,500 per year in federal benefits to each elderly American—including the middle-class and wealthy—and about a tenth of that to each child.

According to Mary Bourdette, a lobbyist for the Children’s Defense Fund, “There’s not so much a conscious neglect as a lack of understanding 0f what’s gong on by Congress ‘There has to be a pounding away and a repeated message, she said Bourdette senses the beginning of congressional awareness in the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which reduced taxes and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit—an income support program—for poor working families.

Some observers note that it’s hard to expect baby boomers to organize as efficiently as the elderly have on the grass-roots level. Baby boomers have an inherent political handicap they’re busy raising families, and retirees aren’t”, said Phillip Longman, a former congressional aide and author of Born to Pay, a penetrating analysis 0f the baby boomers economic predicament. The elderly have organized themselves as a generation, but there is no organized political voice for the baby-boom generation.”

Baby boomers have also avoided facing the intergenerational conflict by buying the fantasy tone of the Reagan years, when the government and individual households tried to talk themselves into prosperity by running up debt.

“We’ve had ten years of the politics of denial,” said Hazel Henderson, a futurist and economic analyst. “If you don’t face that the pie isn’t really growing, then you can also avoid talking about divvying it up more fairly.” —K. B.