Job Creators: The New Oxymoron

This year has been a rough one financially for my family. There have been a number of factors that have been working at odds with our attempts to get out from under the rubble. First, we started off the year being covered by BCBS IL through my husband's employer. We had a deductible to meet and coinsurance. As of March first, the plan changed. My husband's company merged with a bigger company and we started being covered by Aetna. We had to start over with a brand new deductible. The plan had been sold to Brian's company as having a low deductible ($3000), so he was not allowed to continue to set money aside in a healthcare spending account. Upon closer inspection, however, we discovered that it's actually a $6000 family deductible. Each family member has to meet a deductible of $1000 before any medical costs would start to be applied to the family's deductible. Meanwhile, the coinsurance is higher with the new plan and the premiums are more. So we were no longer able to set aside money on a pre-tax basis and all of a sudden we had to come up with extra money out of our pockets.

Then, our computer went on the fritz. It is very difficult to function in a technological world without a computer. It's almost impossible to pay bills and do banking without one. It's also impossible to seek new employment without one. So there went more money.

Then, Jeremy was hospitalized for 4 days. The bills started pouring in pretty steady after that. I will say that Advocate Good Shepherd was fabulous. We were able to get some relief for some of the bills through their charity program. Unfortunately, other facilities have not been as understanding. Brian and I sat down and figured out that we had 13 (at the time) providers asking for money. I wrote them all a letter explaining that we had just gone bankrupt and were broke. We could send them $10 a month to show a good faith promise that we would pay. Unfortunately, as the months have gone by, the list of creditors has increased rather than decreased (due mostly to Doug's birth but also because of tests Brian has to have done to make sure the cancer has not come back).

So here we are. We are trying to be creative with our finances. I used some gift cards I received earlier in the year to buy groceries one week. I received a Kohl's gift card for Doug's birth that I will use to buy new sneakers for Jeremy. The one albatross around our neck continues to be our cell phones. I got an iPhone 3 years ago, back when we had just moved into our house, before Brian had been diagnosed with cancer and before the bottom fell out of the market. Brian got his iPhone almost 2 years ago. Last year, we were going to get a new phone for me (not an iPhone). The problem is, we only really pay $10 a month for me to be added onto the family plan through AT&T. It would have cost close to $200 to get out of the plan with AT&T last year, on top of the cost of buying new phones and accessories and paying the first month's (inflated) bill with a new carrier. We had cash flow issues that disallowed us from doing that.

So now, we are looking line by line to see what we can trim and we are stuck in this awful catch-22 with AT&T. I am no longer under contract--mine expired a year and half ago. But Brian's contract is not up with them until November 20th. In order to have the money to start anew with a different carrier, we need to save up cash, but we can't save up cash because we're paying so much for our cell phones. If I got a new phone with AT&T, then I would be in a new 2-year contract and we'd have to come up with the cash to buy a new phone and new accessories. We went last night to see if there's anything more we can trim from our bill, but we had already done that. So we have three more months of a bill that we can't afford that's making it impossible for us to get a plan that we can afford.

I wish I could say I'm handling all of these situations gracefully, but I'm not. I cried today in front of my kids, which I hate to do. I am frustrated that every single financial decision we make has to be agonized over. Brian and I talked three different times today at length about what to do with this cell phone mess. Bernie Madoff (and others like him) perpetrated this financial nightmare on millions of Americans like me. Yet we are calling his ilk "job creators." From where I'm sitting, that couldn't be further from the truth. I was watching a Law and Order: Criminal Intent today. The criminal was a Wall Street type who had set up a ponzi-esque scheme and then used his money and influence to try to cover it up (with a murder). I have seen this episode before, but today Vincent D'Onofrio's words hit home. It was the end of the episode and this man, who had perpetrated the murder (dressed in cuff links and a nice suit) was desperate to wriggle out of the charges. He was offering to name names of higher-ups. Vincent D'Onofrio said, "what they [the terrorists] did with weapons and ammunition, you did with money."

That's what makes me angry. We have spent billions of dollars fighting a war against the terrorists who attacked our country. Why are we continuing to allow people in our own country terrorize us? Why are we allowing them to continue in their lives as if nothing has happened? I can assure you, when Bernie Madoff gets out of jail (if he ever does), he will not have to agonize over what cell phone plan he can choose. The bankers who received bonuses even after we (the American taxpayers) bailed them out don't have to worry about how they're going to afford to throw their children birthday parties! There are 400 families in the US who hold 99% of the wealth. We outnumber them, and yet we cower because of this title we ascribe them. I, for one, am sick of it. I would love to know what kind of jobs they are truly creating because it seems like the major corporations are employing mostly Chinese workers and they're doing it for far below minimum wage. Meanwhile, we are begging and pleading with them to stay here, so we offer them subsidies on top of tax breaks. So their company is here in name, but it's not generating any revenue for our country.

I am sick to death of seeing the salaries of government workers in people's status updates on Facebook. I can assure you this country is not going broke because of what we pay our civil servants. And I don't enjoy how we call President Obama an elitist--he is actually much less wealthy than our previous president, has taken substantially less vacation time that President Bush and did not come into office with a surplus in the nation's budget. Is President Obama perfect? No, far from it. But this country is broken in a way that only bold initiatives can fix, and unfortunately we are so afraid of the "job creators" that no one is willing to be the one to take the first step in that direction.

This is by far my most rambling and disjointed blog entry and for that I apologize. I just feel like I need to shine a light on the things the press is glossing over. We are not in a recession; we are in a depression. It will most likely get worse before it gets better and getting better will never mean what it used to.