Broke and Poor

All my life, I've made the distinction between broke and poor. You're broke if you don't have a lot of cash to spend around, if you don't have endless reserves somewhere, but, fundamentally, you're not deprived. You're poor if the lack of money is consistent, structural, and leads to deprivations for your family. Kate and I have chosen to be broke for this stretch of our lives; she chose a career in the nonprofit sector, which doesn't pay well, and I'm a grad student with barely any income at all. We've been clear that this is, in some ways, a moral choice for us, an attempt not to live high on the hog, not to live in a destructive manner. But we've always been broke, not poor.

I wonder if the day you find out you're eligible for WIC is the day you become poor.

Kate was laid off in February, which explains a lot of the radio silence from around here. It was fucked up, and it sucked, and we're dealing with the emotional fallout as best we can. But what's hitting us most, obviously, is the economic fallout. I don't have any research funding right now, and I'm not teaching this semester. Our plan was for me to take care of X in conjunction with Uncle, and to work on my dissertation this semester, while Kate worked. Well, that plan's fucked now.

Here's the thing: there are ways in which we are, now, officially poor. Our total monthly income comes from our two unemployment checks; together, they just about cover rent, utilities, and groceries, which means anything above that--new clothes for X, plane tickets to academic conferences, dinners out with friends, baby gates to keep our kid out of the kitchen--has to come from our savings or go on credit. We couldn't afford to continue COBRA coverage for all three of us, so I had to quickly jump onto my school's insurance, which is pricey but cheaper, and X is now on Medicaid; we can afford Kate's insurance alone, after the stimulus cut, but we did consider letting her go uninsured. We qualify for WIC because we qualify for Medicaid, which we are actually kind of glad of; the food benefits we'll get will substantially cut our food costs, which will be a big savings for us. Our combined credit card debt is around $19K, most of which is hangover from our wedding and the year-long illness of our now-deceased cat, and which we are now unable to keep paying down. Our student debt is higher.

But we aren't poor in some significant ways. We've collectively got quite a chunk of money in a brokerage account; it's the remains of Kate's college fund, and my inheritance from my grandmother. Our regular savings account has another, much smaller, but not insignificant chunk. The deprivations we've done have been minor: we've both cut back on how often we go to the chiropractor. I've blown off my allergist. I've negotiated with my therapist to a lower rate. Neither of us has an unlimited MetroCard, and we don't really ever leave the neighborhood unless we have a specific appointment somewhere else. We're canceling non-essential trips that we'd have to rent cars for. We couldn't go to a recent family event that was pretty major, but was scheduled last minute in a different state, and we couldn't afford plane tickets. We haven't cut off our cable yet; we haven't canceled our home phone, though we've talked about it. Between our unemployment, the money in our regular savings account, and these sorts of frugalities, we can get through until the fall, at least, if Kate doesn't find work in that time.

But: are we just "not quite poor" yet because we still think of ourselves as broke, not poor? The reason we don't think about our investment money as real money to use is because we both think of it as the down payment on a house, once I get a PhD and a real job. But should we start thinking about it more as money we can live on? I'm scheduled to teach in the fall and spring of next academic year, but should I be looking for work--even work unrelated to my field--right now, just to be bringing in money? Should I be putting my dissertation on hold to support my family? I don't want to do any of these things. I want to keep being broke, even while being objectively poor.

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Then there's the psychological feeling attached to entering into the welfare state. Now, we around the Commune, we are commie pinko bastards; we believe that the government has an essential role to play in supporting people. We believe in socialized medicine and governments assuring a basic standard of living for all. We believe in paying our taxes when we're earning money and getting it back in the form of assistance when we aren't. But we have been, our whole lives, the people paying it out. Every April 15, we say, I'm glad I paid my taxes, for the part of it that means someone got health care, someone got a job, someone got services they needed. But we've never needed them. We have internalized that it is good to give to others. But we have also internalized that classic middle class feeling that it is shameful to rely on others. Kate has talked about feeling as if she's lost her reason for being in the family: she is the breadwinner. She supports me and X. She can't do that anymore. (Don't worry, honey, I say. Your unemployment check is three times mine. You're still the breadwinner. There's just less bread.) She didn't like that she had to fill out the application for state health insurance, putting together the paperwork for it. She shouldn't have to do this. She's the one who gets it for us as a family.

When we went in to be interviewed for health insurance, we were unsure what we'd get. We walked the ten blocks to the local Medicaid enroller's office, in a neighborhood quite demographically different from ours, but where we actually used to live. The office was in the basement of a medical plaza, and a nice older man, who everybody called Mr. M-----, took us into our office. First he decided I didn't count as part of X's family, since our adoption isn't completed yet. Then he realized Kate had filled out the wrong form, and went and got the right one. Then he told her she had brought the wrong paperwork from the Unemployment Office. But he was kind, and listened to some of the terrible details of Kate's firing, and told a horrible story of his own of getting laid off.

We went down the paperwork. "Do you want to apply for WIC?" he asked.

"No," Kate said, "we're fine."

"How does it work?" I asked. I'd heard it was a really restrictive program, lots of hoops to jump through.

"You get food for the baby," he explained.

Kate and I shared a look.

"You paid for it. Baby food gets expensive," he said.

We paid for it. We nodded to each other. "Yes, OK," Kate said.

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I joined a LiveJournal community for families on WIC, since I had heard people complain about the weird food you got. The posts confused me. I never can figure out how to use the eggs, women said. Ugh, it's too many beans. I don't drink that much milk.

We are never going to have this problem.

WIC in New York state is very pro-breastfeeding. (Very: the table on what food benefits you get lists your child as receiving, and I quote: "YOUR PRICELESS BREASTMILK!!!" Yes, the government busted out the triple quotation marks, for real.) For fully-breastfeeding mothers of children under one, you get per month:

Two 18 ounce boxes cereal
1 pound whole wheat bread
$10 cash voucher for veggies/ fruits
Three 12 ounce cans frozen juice
6 gallons of non-fat (skim) or low-fat (1%) milk
1 pound cheese
1 pound dry beans
18 ounces peanut butter
30 ounces canned fish
2 dozen eggs

Let's see. Kate drinks at least a gallon of milk a week; we eat beans, usually cooked up from dried beans, at least three times a week; we go through a pound of peanut butter a week; often we run out of our carton of eggs before the end of the week. Granted, we probably eat $10 of produce per week. That's a hell of a lot of canned tuna, so I see a bunch of tuna sandwiches and tuna casserole in Kate's future (probably while I snarf peanut butter in the background.) Kate can't eat the bread, and probably not the cereal, but they might be able to swap out coupons for rice or something instead.

Why does this work so well for us?

Because the WIC program subsidizes a very specific category of food: inexpensive sources of protein, iron, and calcium. In essence, they subsidize a vegetarian, low-on-the-food-chain diet. That's what we've always eaten, as long as I've been cooking for us, because that's what I eat, so that's what I cook. A lot of Americans don't eat like that; they don't know what to do with eggs besides have them for breakfast (quiche; souffle; spanish tortilla, scrambled eggs with cheese; added to stir fry; egg salad.) They've never cooked from dried beans (you soak them and then boil) and don't know how you eat them (a thousand kinds of soup; tacos; rice and beans; veggie burgers). Peanut butter goes in sandwiches and not much else (with apples; with celery; on crackers; in soup with coconut milk and limes; peanut butter granola bars). If you haven't cooked like this, WIC could be a pain in the ass. It's a bit paternalistic (you must eat these healthy foods! not other ones!), but it's not badly intentioned or poorly designed.


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This isn't a very coherent post. But all of these thoughts are mixed up with us all the time. Can we afford to go to our friend's bridal shower? Have you checked with the Medicaid office about our paperwork getting there? Are there any jobs posted on idealist that Kate qualifies for? Can we use our WIC checks at the Food Co-op? Is the nonprofit temp agency taking resumes?

Hopefully we'll be coming back to blogging now. It's been a rough couple of months.