Over the Edge

We often hear about the quiet guy who snaps, goes over the edge, looses it; who explodes in unexpected rage and commits carnage of surprising intensity. No one who knew him saw any signs that he was distraught. No one saw it coming.

Well, I’m close to fury myself. When I snap, though, no one need fear being hurt. Rage expresses itself in bloodless ways as well. In my own situation, it may spew forth in a torrent of words, and then I’ll be fine. Or I may use what power I have in order to merely shut someone off who now has the legal means to rob me.

Let me lay it out for you.

When I was a child in the 1950s, eldest of six siblings, my family had nothing to start with. My parents came from self-sufficient Depression-era households. They were both college educated school teachers, and their gift to their children was a well-nurtured desire to learn. We didn’t know that we were living in poverty – abhorrent conditions by today’s standards – we just knew we didn’t have much. (We often didn’t have a telephone, or a car. Our father carried a bag lunch as he walked to work and we kids carried lunchboxes as we walked to school. We wore darned socks, patched or homemade garments, and re-soled shoes. We saved the bath water for the next kid in line. When I was in fourth grade, we lived in a house with an outdoor hand pump for water. We played outdoors, since only one household in three had a television. Today we have taxpayer-funded programs to prevent that kind of misery.)

To varying degrees we kids took advantage of our opportunity to learn. We were taught that if we earned good grades in public school, colleges would compete to give us scholarships, meaning discounted tuition rates. (That may have been true before the 1960s, but by the time I matriculated at a nearby municipal university in 1969, things had definitely changed.)

Our parents led us to believe that we would never be rich, though. For several of my crucial growing-up years we lived at 1165 West High Street in Lima, Ohio. Our back yard abutted the back yards of houses on West Market Street. The further west on that street, the more enviable the homes. We understood that we would never live like that – spacious brick homes with tree-lined meandering driveways and cultivated flower beds. We believed we would never, even as adults ourselves, know what it was like to go to the bank when we needed money and simply take $1000 out of a savings account. We knew we’d never know what $1000 looked like, but maybe $100 at best. We didn’t expect even to mix with that kind of people, although in school I often found myself among the children of those families. I was self-conscious to find myself accepted and included, but still I held myself apart socially. Rich kids made friends only with other rich kids, right? Kids of teachers became teachers. Kids of poor people grow up to remain poor.

Our house stood nearly on the edge of an all-black neighborhood. I now realize that, even though I had several friends among the kids in that neighborhood, including one who was my best friend for seven years there, the black kids must have looked on us the same way I looked on those on West Market Street. Kids of black people stay black.

Nevertheless, even though we knew our parents weren’t saving to put us through college – heck, our mom was sometimes heard to say she was still paying (hospital delivery charges) for our youngest sister after I had started college – we were taught thrift. I had a daily job (including weekends, as a paperboy) from the time I was 10. I had a savings account from the time I was 12. I bought a car at 15 – a 1939 Chrysler for $395 – and drove it 1000 miles from Ohio to Maine a year later when my family made the big move to my father’s stomping grounds in Farmington.

When I finished a three-year enlistment in the Army and five years of college I landed a low-level management job in manufacturing. I opened a retirement savings plan at work and started an IRA. I worked for that company for 23 years and benefited, slightly, from an employee-stock-ownership plan. I went on to another industry in a related management role, and that lasted nine years. Except for some modest self-indulgence along the way, I’ve been saving for retirement for 50 years. Oh, and I do not have a pension plan (automatic payments for life), only my retirement savings, to count on once I become, in my 60’s perhaps, unemployed. I’m now in what may be my final steady job, as a medical receptionist, entry-level, non-management, and I like it fine. (I already characterize myself as semi-retired: I now work only 40 hours a week in this job, which makes me eligible to buy group medical insurance for $10,000 a year. In my former life as a manager, 40 hours would have been part-time.)

I bought a home when I was young, moved up to a nicer one, and then a nicer one, rivaling the ones I envied on West Market Street. Given the economy of August 2010, I estimate that my home is worth about $180,000 (in rural northern Maine; it would be worth a million or more today in some metro areas), and my retirement funds, all told, are worth about $600,000. A couple of years ago both were worth about 50% more than today, probably about $270,000 and $900,000 respectively. I’m now 59½.

So, why am I close to snapping? I’ve been a fool, that’s why, and it’s too late to back off and rejoin the “poor”. Long ago I fell for the premise that no one else will take care of me (and my wife of several decades whom I pledged to support), so I accepted that I needed to save for my own future. And that may have been a safe assumption if I had earned, and saved, enough to be sitting on a couple of million dollars by now. That’s not a couple million to spend on a spree, but to draw from for support for decades to come in the absence of any other source. That’s to pay the several thousand dollars a year that I’ll need, once I’m no longer employable, to cover the premiums for my “free” Medicare and to buy supplemental medical insurance, to pay my property taxes, to pay for my heating fuel and other utilities, to feed and clothe myself and kin, to remain mobile – and to pay income taxes.

But there is a gap, and I fall within it. A little over half a million dollars is not enough to live on for the next 30 years. It would be if I also had taxpayer assistance. But, because I have “assets” I will evermore be ineligible for such charity. My Social Security, which I’ve paid into for 42 years, will be “offset”. I will be ineligible to have my Medicare premiums paid for me. The other charity that my neighbors enjoy I will continue to pay for: food stamps, unemployment compensation, Medicaid, Social Security disability income, property tax relief, heating fuel assistance, sliding-fee scales, WIC, community action programs, and punitive income tax schemes which assure that more than half the voters don't pay into the program.

I could have believed my parents’ culture lesson – we will never move in those circles and we will never know what it's like to have bank accounts. We will never own assets. I could have rented places to live all my life and could have spent every remaining dollar I made on better vacations, eating out, new cars, more booze, bigger televisions, all-inclusive cell phone plans, tobacco, fancier computers, name-brand clothes and groceries, and a garage full of motorized outdoor toys. Then I might not have ended up with retirement savings or a home of my own; I would have been eligible for hand-outs paid for by fools such as I have become.

Instead, I’m penalized for my thrift and planning. I will continue to be envied by those who remained (as some of my siblings did) in the "poorhouse" as I might have chosen to, while their elected representatives will continue to have hands on my wallet. Their representatives will always promote this class envy – (theirs, not mine – I can’t get my representatives elected because they don’t buy votes by pretending to a false charity which consists of spending other people’s money in order to appear generous themselves).

I do have a choice. It's a bitter choice, and that's what infuriates me. I can spend down my retirement savings as quickly as the Internal Revenue Code allows, being careful not to accumulate assets that can disqualify me from all the assistance schemes. I could – revenuers plug your ears – “spend” my retirement savings as quickly as possible while actually stashing it as cash. I could do the reverse mortgage thing on my house and maybe remove that asset.

Then I could appear, on paper, as poor as those whose elected thieves have their hands in my pockets. What a fool I’ve been!

I’m thinking about it. I'm thinking about it...