The Deep Thinkers on Capitol Hill wrestle with Wall Street’s $700 billion bailout, and Nick Bagley asks a simple question: Where’s his? The banks need money to keep the credit lines flowing. But Bagley’s 65 years old, and he’s worked all his life, and he’s still waiting for somebody to extend him a line of credit.
He was sitting there last weekend, at a little card table on Broadway for the Fells Point Festival, selling political T-shirts with an old friend at a few bucks a pop. The money will supplement his Social Security check, which is enough for him to live in a $650 a month one-bedroom apartment on Bentalou Street and pay his $64 in monthly pharmaceutical bills and help him get around town on his MTA senior bus pass.
“Costs me $1.20 to ride the bus with a senior pass. I earned it,” he said, “by living long enough. Now $1.20, that’s a blessing, when you wake up in the morning and got 60 cents left over.”
He sat there in the balmy late afternoon southeast Baltimore sun, wearing an old Army T-shirt and a look of pure cynicism on his face. The banks have bills to pay, but so do those without access to Capitol Hill rescues.
“What about phone bills?” he was asked.
“Haven’t got a phone. Too expensive.”
“What about cable TV bills?”
“Haven’t got a TV. Had to put it in the pawn shop.”
“What about gas?”
“Haven’t got a car.”
“Never had one?”
“Never had a new one. Never could get credit. When my wife passed, she left a little money, and I bought a $5,000 used car. I guess I went a little nuts. That was the most expensive car I ever had. I’ve worked all my life, married, raised my kids, played by the rules. And now I’m gonna have to bail out those banks on Wall Street, when they ain’t once helped me out. Why bail out Wall Street, and not me?”
This is a simplistic question, as Bagley understands. He’s been around the block a few times. He knows that the banks have to have money so they can extend credit to businesses large and small, and to individuals who need money for large purchases, thus keeping the machinery of the market place flowing more or less smoothly.
Bagley only wonders: Why has he never been included in such an equation when so many were part of it, and profited from it, and thus lived their versions of the great American dream?
He spent his career as a cook. He worked for a couple of hotels, and for Tyrone’s Chicken. The most he ever made, he says, was $12,000 a year.
“And the government,” he said, “took $1,800 of that.”
“So you never got a credit card?”
“Tried to,” he said. “Finally got one, but they set my limit at $250. What good’s a credit card if the most you can spend is $250?”
But now the lending institutions, having extended credit by the billions, and blown money by the billions in adventurous loans and excessive salaries, await their multibillion-dollar salvation. All who pay taxes will contribute to it, like it or not, afford it or not.
The bailout will arrive only after some tortured politicking on Capitol Hill — and cries of anguish from those already pulverized by the country’s economic troubles and feel themselves overlooked in the current chaos.
As everybody knows, millions have already faced foreclosure. The Mortgage Bankers Association reports 4.2 million loans either delinquent or in foreclosure — in the second quarter. In Maryland, foreclosures have doubled this year to nearly 50,000.
Millions more worry about making the next monthly payments on their homes. Among them: the 159,000 who lost their jobs in the last month (the ninth consecutive month of job losses), including 35,000 jobs in the construction business.
Who needs construction workers when the housing market’s dried up?
Meanwhile, retirees worry about dwindling savings — and those such as Bagley, with no serious savings, worry about getting through each week’s financial shakiness.
“This is all about credit, right?” said Bagley. “The banks need money so they can give credit. For them to give credit to people like me, I gotta help give them $700 billion. But, once we do that, I still won’t qualify.”
He sat there in the late afternoon sun on Broadway and mulled that over for a moment. Yeah, this is the American system? It certainly is a wonder.
