A packed Senate hearing room sat quietly, slowly leaning in to catch the grief-stricken testimony of Amanda Greubel. “I’ve sat with parents as they completed the eligibility application [for free or reduced lunch], held their hands as they’ve shed tears of shame,” she explained, “… I’ve held women’s hands through pregnancy terminations because they can’t afford another child now.”
As Greubel's voice broke in her testimony, tears were beginning to form in my eyes. And mine weren’t the only ones.
Greubel is the director of the Family Resource Center at Central Clinton Community Schools in DeWitt, Iowa. She came to Washington on Thursday to testify before a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee hearing entitled, “Stories from the Kitchen Table: How Middle Class Families are Struggling to Make Ends Meet.”
Testifying with Greubel were Jared Bernstein, Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Susan Sipprelle, multimedia journalist; and Thomas Clements, Founder of Oilfield CNC Machining LLC in Louisiana.
The hearing was the second in a series the committee is holding on the economic struggles facing the middle class. Congress has much to learn from the stories of real middle-class families about where Washington’s priorities should be. Their testimonies offered a clear portrayal of the broken social contract. Witnesses repeated the idea that middle-class families had “worked hard, played by rules and did everything the government told them to do,” and yet they are now so far away from the American Dream the government and society had promised them.
Bernstein provided the “empirical evidence behind the middle-class squeeze” that Greubel so tragically shares with many other middle class families. He displayed a chart based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data that shows median family income and U.S. productivity growth for two time periods: 1947-1979 and 1979-2009. As the chart shows, real median family income did not begin disappearing at the onset of the Great Recession and will not end after the aftereffects of the recession are past. Economic inequality has increased almost exponentially in the last 30 years.
Get Truthout in your inbox every day! Click here to sign up for daily updates.
The decline of real middle class income in this country over the last 30 years is intolerable. Greubel’s own family life is an example. She has lost $10,000 in income a year when the state of Iowa, for the 2009-2010 budget, cut education funding mid-year, forcing the school board to reduce her position to three-quarters time. This change has forced the family, as Greubel put it, to go through a “complete financial, emotional and spiritual overhaul.” She has a young son and is expecting another child in December. Her son ends up eating more cereal and ramen noodles than she cares to admit, most of their clothing now comes from Goodwill and the couple spent the last few months catching up on a $1,000 hospital bill when her son became sick. She even thought about terminating her own pregnancy at one point.
Despite all this, Greubel considers her family lucky compared to the families she helps at her job who have to pick between medicine and food, who make anguished decisions to terminate pregnancies they cannot afford, who watch as one or both parents fall into a deep depression after 16 months of unemployment and feelings of worthlessness.
Greubel said her family and others she works with are neither lazy nor uneducated. In fact, both she and her husband earned master degrees, but they are also facing the difficulty of paying off student debt on a tight budget.
Most middle-class families in America are in the same plight, Bernstein said, as middle-class income in the last 30 years has gone up only 3 percent but college fees have gone up 10 percent.
Families like Greubel are facing hard financial and family decisions as politicians in Washington are trying to tear up the social contract previous leaders signed with the middle class. Meanwhile, CEOs of financial corporations bailed out by taxpayers are getting six- and seven-figure salaries.
Washington, I implore you to hear the plights of middle-class families all across America. Listen to the words of Chairman Sen. Tom Harkin’s opening statement, which summed up the economic situation of the middle class:
“…[S]ince the 1970s, that social contract has disappeared. Real family income has barely budged despite our workforce becoming more productive than ever. Unions have deteriorated and defined benefit pensions have all but disappeared. Our manufacturing base has been shipped overseas. Large corporations have put returns for their shareholders and higher pay for their executives over their workers economic security. Income and wealth inequality are at levels not seen since immediately before the Great Depression.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy