A recent article in the Boston Globe rang true for many regarding the nation’s economy. The article was about Butler, a small town in Pennsylvania, and it showed why today’s middle-class Americans are worried. They’re worried about the future, and they believe that America has fundamentally changed from the America their parents enjoyed a generation ago.
In Butler, one of the town’s two main employers in the 1970s, Pullman-Standard, closed up shop a decade later, laying off thousands of people. No other major employer has taken up the slack since. The other major employer, Armco Steel, was bought out and laid off about one-third of its workforce.
Those jobs, which provided generous pensions, health-care benefits and perks like college scholarships for employees’ families sound like fantasies for many of the town’s citizens who graduated high school in the mid-1970s.
Since then, rising health-care costs, less job security and a shifting of retirement savings burdens to employees from employers have created sharply higher expenses for workers, many of whom have seen their wages fall or stagnate.
A majority of the people working in Butler today believe they’ll never really have a retirement; they may have to work until the day they die in order to pay off debts, medical bills or just daily living expenses from living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Numerous citizens of Butler say things were different for their parents, who were in most cases able to retire by age 55, with many buying second homes or moving down to Florida. For the town’s residents today — even relatively secure ones — that sounds like a pipe dream.
Downtown jewelry store owner Bob Emigh said he can’t imagine ever having the money he’ll need to retire, and he doesn’t trust the government to pay the Social Security benefits it promised. “I love the country and I hate the government,” he said. “I really see the country deteriorating from what it was then. I think the country has gone downhill a lot. Economically and morally.”
According to the Center for Secure Retirement, only three in 10 middle-income Baby Boomers in America believe that they’ll have enough money to live comfortably to the age of 85. Eight out of 10 still have major debts, and almost one-quarter of them still have 20 years or more on a mortgage to pay.
At Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, Director Alicia Munnell says, “The question is whether you have enough to sustain your standard of living over a long period of time. And I think the answer is no.”
“I think people want to be able to not worry about money and live kind of how they did before,” she says. “They’re willing to do a little more cooking at home, their own gardening, and that kind of stuff. But they don’t want a dramatic falloff in their quality of life.” In the end, many people are working well past age 65.
Munnell’s organization maintains a National Retirement Risk Index which measures financial security for potential retirees. In 1989, some 30 percent of Americans were at risk of not being able to have enough to retire on. Now, that number is 52 percent.
A number of factors are to blame, but chiefly among them, higher health-care costs and longer lifespans are big culprits. People who lost equity or savings in the real-estate bust of the 2000s have not necessarily recovered from it.
Employers aren’t helping, either. In 1983, 62 percent of American workers had employer-sponsored pension plans and 12 percent had 401(k) savings plans. Today, those numbers are 17 percent with pensions, and 71 percent with 401(k) plans.
Now in their 50s, bookkeeper Cindy Hindman and her truck driver husband make enough to get by, but not to save much. “The day of my funeral, I’ll still be working. I don’t look forward to retirement at all,” she says wearily. “It’s just — the American dream, I don’t think even exists really that much anymore for most people. And Butler has gone straight downhill.”
Like many of the town’s residents, Hindman and her husband blame Washington. “I’m scared. To be totally honest I am totally scared. One day I like Hillary, one day I like Donald Trump. Hillary, I just don’t feel she has what it takes to be in office, due to the e-mails and stuff like that.”
Trucker Mike Linnon agrees. “Our society is breaking up. Just like Rome did,” he said. “These idiots are throwing it all away. Something has to be fixed. This is just stupidity.”
Linnon has bounced from job to job and now barely knows what day it is in between his 14-hour shifts delivering fiberglass shower stalls up and down the East Coast. Although Linnon thinks Trump’s policies lack specificity, it doesn’t matter to him.
“We need a guy like Andrew Jackson again. We need someone who will go kick some butt,” Linnon says. “[Trump] doesn’t say how he’s going to fix it, but he doesn’t have to. Sometimes you just need to believe. You just need to hope… This whole area, there was tons of union manufacturing jobs that paid well. And you retired at a decent age. You weren’t rich. But the whole town was rich, really. That was all lost. And I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back.”
The neighborhood where Linnon grew up used to have crowded stores and competitive high school sports teams. In 2016, the same neighborhood has boarded-up houses and trash lying in various front yards. Many homes have “No Trespassing” signs posted outside. On a main road out of town, there’s a billboard advertising “Life After Heroin.”
In Butler’s downtown, most stores are closed by 4 p.m. for lack of business. Some stores like Worsley’s Furniture (established 1927) and Morgyn’s Frozen Yogurt (established 2014) are out of business for good. The local movie theater is padlocked, with a faded poster in a window advertising a film that was released ten years ago.
On Main Street, restaurant-lounge owner Larry Goettler says, “The neighborhood bar is my pension. And I have this romantic idea that I’ll be up there like Jackie Gleason was, in an apron and singing songs for people in my old age.”
But that idea may not agree with reality; Goettler is convinced the government is not going to help him out much in the coming years.
“From our standpoint thinking about Social Security and the threats around it, and politicians wanting to privatize it so the Wall Street boys can get their hands on it — all those things swimming around there like sharks in the water,” he says.
“You watch this and say wow. I can impact to a minuscule degree . . . by voting. And I do. My guy may win; he may not. But in the big scheme of things, the only thing I can control is my little piece of the world here in Butler, Pa.”
Goettler paid $250 per month for his health care before Obamacare was implemented. Now, his premiums are double that.
Goettler’s friends ask him when he’s going to retire. Goettler says, “Let’s see. It’s 2016. I’ll probably retire in 2040 if I make it that far. It’s a plodding year-in, year-out struggle. You just keep your nose to the grindstone. Keep moving because if you fall down you’re going to get run over. You just keep going at it… Most in the generation before me said, ‘I’m going to retire at 55. I’ll get a home by the river, a boat in the water. For most in my generation, that’s gone. We might get grandpa’s camp, we might not. But if we do, we might have to sell it as soon as we get it. That veil is being pulled back. That life is gone.”
