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Expert: Housing, health care costs threaten middle class (Associated Press)

By Wilson Ring

The American middle class is being threatened by the increasing costs of housing, health care and the loss of well-paying jobs, a Harvard law professor said Saturday during a town meeting with Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Elizabeth Warren, who has studied the economics of middle class Americans over the last generation, said families need to have two incomes to provide basic necessities and that means there is less room for economic disruption that can be caused when someone loses their job or a child or elderly parent gets sick.

"A family in the mid-2000s is a much risker family than was the family in the early 1970s," Warren said.

"What happens is, the family on the right no longer has to make 52 paychecks to make the mortgage payment or keep the health insurance," she said referring to two graphs displayed on a screen in the Montpelier High School cafeteria. "They've got to make 104 paychecks. If either one of them is out of work they're out of business and they've got nobody else to put into the work force to pick up extra money."

Warren and Sanders, an independent, met with a couple hundred Vermonters.

Warren said her research showed that even though middle class household income had gone up between 1972 and now, Americans were no longer able to save and they are spending 150 percent more on their mortgages and 63 percent more for less health coverage.

Sanders recently posted a message on his Web site asking Vermonters to send messages telling of their perceptions of the economy, both in Vermont and in the United States. He read some of those responses during the meeting.

People told him of the difficulties posed by the high costs of heating oil and gasoline, health care and the choices people have to make to survive.

Sanders told of frail, elderly people who have to split wood to heat their homes and families that have to give up healthy, nutritious food to have enough to eat.

At Saturday's meeting Sanders invited a number of Vermonters to share some of their experiences.

Ann Moore of the Northeast Kingdom town of Wheelock told of how she and her husband who raised five children between them are now struggling to pay their bills.

"We raised our children in the Kingdom, we've paid our taxes, we've made our contribution to that community, but we have some real concerns about our future," Moore said.

She said they struggle to pay bills and need to meet certain day-to-day expenses like food, gasoline, car repairs and medical copays by using credit cards.

They're helping pay for their children's' college by taking out loans against their retirement.

"And this is a time when our employer has put a freeze on wages for one of us, for the last four years," Moore said. "Neither one of us ever thought we'd be here because we watched our parents’ generation work hard and move into this stage of life, you know the empty nester thing, with some financial security, which we yearn for."