Jenny

“In my hometown, the number of children living in poverty has more than tripled since I left.[4] The number orphaned by the opioid crisis has tripled just since 2015.[5] After the jobs went away, heroin helped itself to my hometown, followed by fentanyl and meth. The result of that one-two punch has been a preponderance of trauma that is overtaxing every system meant to address it. “Backward mobility,” economists call this devastating trend, exacerbated by the Great Recession. As corporate profits soared, the median wage for workers, adjusted for inflation, stagnated, and the cost of housing, education, and health care far outpaced inflation. In the four decades between my graduation and Silas’s, inequality grew so dramatically in the United States that the richest 0.01 percent of Americans have accumulated the same amount of wealth as the poorest 50 percent.[6]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“For blue-collar workers left to fend for themselves, many of them now working service jobs for half their previous pay and no benefits, the shift to unfettered free trade was like opening a velvet box and finding a turd inside. The Democratic strategist David Axelrod had a better (or at least more polite) metaphor: “I’m so proud of my association with Barack Obama, but the Democratic Party was the party that brought and heralded free trade. We lied to people and said all boats would be lifted somehow. Well, it was a tide that lifted a lot of yachts. A lot of the smaller boats got shipwrecked. A lot of people’s lives were changed for the worse.”[14]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“When they pulled the ladder of upward mobility away from low-wage families, they took away the thing that soothes misery and distress; they took away their hope. What the free-market boosters failed to account for is that, without the potential for advancement and the general sense that fairness and justice will prevail, our social compact is screwed. The more divided our education levels, the more divided our nation.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“When I left for college in 1982, the Pell Grant paid the entirety of my tuition, my room and board, and even my textbooks—an investment in my future that I have paid back through taxes many times over. When you consider that the government recoups the money spent on a typical Pell grantee, through taxes on their increased earnings, in just ten years,[10] the gutting of Pell’s purchasing power is extremely shortsighted. But the plundering of this federal program, birthed in the last gasp of America’s War on Poverty, is also rarely discussed.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America