NO,Bama!

From about seven years old on, I've been anxious about money: getting it, having enough of it, and what will happen to me if I can't. Now that I have no income to speak of,  I spend much of my time trolling web sites and applying to jobs, convinced that if I could just find one, the clawing feeling in my throat will go away. Which, I guess, is more effective than trying to bury that feeling in toaster waffles (my strategy of choice for most of the Oughts).

On the other end of this continuum are my parents, who have worked hard their entire lives, budgeted carefully (I remember the twice-monthly trips to Taco Bell on payday; I remember assuming that everyone went school shopping at Goodwill), and, until recently, were the American success story that exists so rarely: high school graduates who grew up dirt poor, worked hard, and made a life for themselves. They had savings; they went on vacations every couple of years; their kids went to college (on borrowed money, but still). The fact that I am no longer seriously eating-disordered has much to do with my dad's ability to wrench care for me from a behavioral health care system which, at the time, was uninterested in providing treatment to anyone not requiring a feeding tube.

But officially, that story doesn't exist. The rhetoric of "economic justice" kind of hinges on received truth that the American Dream is illusory: according to it, anyone who is able to improve his life through hard work is actually just blind to this own privilege.

Sure, my parents grew up in poverty; sure, they spent their early married years moving wherever my dad could find work, doing whatever work they could find -- repossessing other people's belongings, picking mushrooms, cleaning other people's toilets. But their willingness to do those things, and to do them while living off welfare cheese and carrots at the end of the month, and dried pintos and Ramen at the beginning -- that's not how they got where they are. They were just lucky. And, of course, white.

So now, my dad is one of the "richest" Americans to whom Obama's economic penalties are limited. He's worked for the same company for over twenty years, and for many of those years, his raises have been going into a shared retirement account, rather than his paychecks. When he got sick a couple of years ago, and his doctor advised him to stop working and go on disability, he kept working -- but he also started watching this account, thinking: maybe after a few more years.

Only under Obama's new tax code, I guess, his company can no longer get a tax benefit for this account, so they're closing it and requiring their employees to cash it out now, while they are still working, as a lump sum -- which means that it'll be taxed at the highest possible rate, since he'll receive twenty years of savings in a single year. Money intended to support my parents once my dad has no salary is being added onto his current salary; to the IRS it looks like any other windfall.

Effectively, he's losing about 40% of the account to the government -- whereas, since he had anticipated withdrawing it ten years from now, when it would have been his only income, he was expecting a much lower tax rate.

Then, of course, since he is withdrawing it early, he's subject to an additional 20% penalty designed to keep people from taking their retirement money out early and using it for other things. In his case, keeping the money in the account is not an option -- the account itself is being dissolved by his company -- but the employees are still subject to this penalty.

It's really shitty, basically, and I feel stupid, because I had pretty blind faith that Obama's plan to fix the economy was really only going to hurt the very wealthy. And I listen to my father and how angry he is, how scared and betrayed he feels, and I understand how people become vulnerable to ideologies about "those people".

And... I don't know. The part of me that wants to live with grace, wants to find a way to be loving in the face of this, to fight the frustration that people who try so hard, who work through migraines and exhaustion and nerve damage, should end up in the same place as people who can't, or don't, find work.

I don't want to face the ugly part of me that thinks: well, my dad should have peace of mind, should have a comfortable retirement -- even if other people are going without. He's worked hard every day of his life for it; he's done things other people wouldn't do to ensure it. The jobs other people "can't be expected" to take? He's done those jobs. Situations that make it impossible for other people to become, or remain, self-sufficient? He's pushed past them. He didn't believe there was another option. Now, in order to help people who didn't, or couldn't, do what he's done, he loses out.

And I get that that's what it means to redistribute the wealth. But I didn't think it would affect the people I loved: stupid. Nullum gratuitum prandium. 

Unless, I guess, you find someone with "more than enough" lunch money, and help yourself. Happy Inauguration Day.