[_tunic_]

There was a very interesting article in the Dutch newspapers about Economy in the US. Here's the Google translation:

Mid-range US drowns: "If we were sick we would not go to the doctor"

Help, the middle class is drowning! It could be an appropriate title for a new movie. The middle class, once the backbone of society, is under pressure. The work of neat citizens with a permanent (office) job or a small business of their own is being taken over by computers at a rapid pace. The flexibilisation of the labor market also makes the middle income uncertain.

Amber Spradlin (38) is an English teacher in Choctaw, Oklahoma, mother of two boys and married to a fellow teacher. You might think average middle class family. But Spradlin and her husband have kept their heads just above the waterline in recent years.

She remembers how it felt when the youngest was just born and they both went to daycare. "Desperate," it was sometimes, she describes. The health insurance for the two little ones alone cost $ 1,000 a month. Then she had not yet paid for childcare, and the repayment of her student loan still had to be sent.

Star hunting in bargains

"All in all, I took home less than $ 1,000 a month," says Spradlin. She has become a star in bargain hunting, though. But vacations didn't represent much. ,, And if there was anything about our health, we would not go to the doctor. While we are insured. We could not pay the personal contributions, the costs of medicines. ”

The American middle class is having a hard time. The income of a middle-class family was about the same in 2016 as in 2000. For lower-income families it even declined - only high-income families improved in those years. The gap between households with top incomes and the rest of the Americans was therefore greater than ever, according to research center Pew. The American dream promised young people for a long time that they would get better than their parents - now half of the young Americans are no longer satisfied, according to researchers from the Equality of Opportunity Project.

Great effort

Teachers like Amber Spradlin belong to the group of well-educated citizens who have great difficulty in living a stable middle class life. The discontent is so great that teachers have started to strike, especially in states where power is in the hands of Republicans who cut funding for public services such as education. Amber Spradlin was part of a major protest campaign in Oklahoma in 2018. She didn't teach for ten days. Teachers also took to the streets in West Virginia, Arizona and Kentucky.

The angry teachers are not only concerned with their salary, which has sometimes not been adjusted for a decade. It is also about financing for education in general. Many American schools lack everything. Teachers regularly pay for paper and pencils themselves. They sometimes represent classes of more than 40 children.

Debts

Public schools in the US are largely funded by local taxes. Prosperous areas have good schools, in less-favored regions there is little money for schools and teacher salaries. Especially there, the threat of teachers leaving for financial reasons is very real, says Mark Webb, teacher of chemistry and local foreman of an interest group for teachers in Oklahoma City. ,, Sad, but real. You can earn $ 15,000 more a year in Texas. "

Amber Spradlin built up debts while teaching teenagers in Oklahoma proper English. She hopes to be able to pay them off now that her own children go to school and she has less to spend on childcare. The car also needs new tires. She doesn't have an internet connection at home - she has to do it with her phone and the internet at school. It is a blessing that she has just paid off her study debt, because she desperately needs the 200 dollars a month to pay for the car to get through the winter. "A home computer," she muses about the things she can't afford, "that would be great."

Additional jobs

Both Spradlin and her husband have another job to make ends meet. She works as a homework supervisor during the summer holidays, he runs summer camps. It is very common for American teachers to do odd jobs to pay the bills. Ask around in states like Oklahoma and Kentucky, and you get to know teachers who work part-time as a pool vendor, or are at the checkout at the budget store Dollar General. Uber has made a business model of the financial stress of teachers and masters: the taxi app focused on looking for drivers specifically for teachers who have to earn extra.

In addition to stagnated salaries, teachers and other working Americans face enormous costs. Higher education is so expensive that young people get into debt for decades, or their parents tap into the pension savings box. In some states, childcare costs just as much as training at a local university, and medical costs are for many Americans - 20 to 25 percent, research shows - a reason not to go to the doctor in case of health problems.

Worry about the future

"My daughter had to be admitted [in a hospital] a few years ago because of a blood disorder and we almost went bankrupt," says Nema Brewer (46), media specialist from a school district in Kentucky and daughter of a miner who has set up a protest movement of teachers in her state when pensions threatened to be undressed. She got Republicans, Democrats and party-less people going for a strike and demonstrations.

Brewer is worried about the future. When she started working 17 years ago, her health insurance paid 90 percent of the costs. Now that is only 80 percent, and she has to pay 20 percent herself, while healthcare costs in the US have risen. Treatments cost just five to ten times more than in the Netherlands. The medicines for Brewer's daughter, for example, had a price tag of 18,000 dollars. "When will the personal contribution increase further to 25 percent?"

Thanks to her activism, Nema Brewer has undergone rapid training in the functioning of American politics and government, and warns against the power of lobbying large companies. "If the middle class does not unite, does not realize that the government is not working for them, and remains divided along party lines, then we will be destroyed."

Towards the end of the article they say "Treatments cost just five to ten times more than in the Netherlands." This is actually untrue, even the basic health care is far more expensive in the US compared to over here, such as simple dental surgery meaning braces for kids. Oh wait yeah it's Sunday morning. like 250 is ten times less than 2500 doh.