Why I Blame the Billionaires for the Restaurant Down the Street

I’m not the only one cutting back. When regular people can’t afford small luxuries, entire communities suffer.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

A cute restaurant on the historic downtown square a quick walk from my home is closing. I feel a little guilty because I didn’t go there often enough.

And I’m not the only one pulling back. Frugality feels responsible. But when it’s widespread and forced by inequality, it can quietly strangle a local economy.

Although we love living in a walkable area close to many bars, restaurants, coffee shops etc., we almost never actually visit any of these places.

Believe me, I’d love to be able to just amble over to one of the restaurants once a week or so and get to know the regulars. I dream of the Cheers situation — I want to go where everybody knows my name.

But I can’t.

I blame the oligarchs

As the ultra-wealthy hoard wealth and dodge taxes, the rest of us stretch every dollar. Executive pay balloons while worker pay stagnates. Billionaires pay lower effective tax rates than teachers and truck drivers. So when we skip dinners out, it’s not just frugality — it’s survival. And it’s killing our local economies.

While the poorest Americans pay little in income taxes, they pay an outsized amount of other taxes like payroll taxes, property taxes and sales taxes.

One study showed that the average American paid 13 percent but that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid just 8.2 percent.

My spending habits are not like those of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. Not even close. While my husband and I were sitting in the kitchen eating our thrifty little meal of black beans and pasta last night, they were having — well, let’s be honest, I have no idea. But I am fairly sure Elon and Mark had fancier dinners in fancier spaces and that neither of them cooked a darned thing.

The Big Stupidly Named Bill that gives to the billionaires while gutting families is full of bad things and will make income inequality far worse.

I’m an old hand at living frugally and so are lots of others. But I predict a lot of people who have up to now been able to pay for all kinds of little extras are going to start pulling back.

Think about the people this will hurt:

• Your favorite neighborhood restaurant closes.

• The servers lose their jobs.

• The nail bar lays off workers.

• The dog groomer downsizes.

• The teen mowing your lawn loses summer income.

• The woman who cleans your house can’t pay rent. And no, she won’t show up in job loss stats — not when you were paying her in cash.

This is how the dominoes fall

It starts at the top, with billionaires hoarding more than they could ever need. Then the middle class starts pulling back. The workers serving them feel it next. And at the bottom, the poorest — house cleaners, delivery drivers, the guy scraping by on gig apps — get crushed under the collapse.

The billionaires are still feasting. At my house, we’re stocking up on black beans.

Don’t miss my current special series, Poverty and Privilege, which comes out every Saturday:

Poverty and Privilege is the story of Richard, a man with generational wealth, and Lauren, a single mom struggling to keep her household afloat. The twist is they both have Ivy League educations but life has turned out very different for each of them. The story is true but names and certain identifying details have been changed.

Part 1, Unlikely Allies in an Unequal America

Part 2, The Country Club Lunch

Part 3, One Family’s Fall From the Middle Class

Part 4, Billable Hours Don’t Pause for Birth

Part 5, The Value of $60,000

Part 6, How Marriage and Divorce Shape Financial Futures

Part 7, Why the Rich Don’t (Usually) Get Divorced

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.

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