My mother wasn’t much into politics, but I’m sure she would have assumed that fifty years later, the minimum wage would be a lot higher. If it could feed a family of three and pay a mortgage in 1965, surely by now a minimum wage would let a family afford, say, a home and a car—and maybe even a little money for college applications for a skinny daughter. Right?

Wrong. Way wrong.

Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage today is lower than it was in 1965—about 24 percent lower. That job at Sears allowed my mother to eke out a living for a family of three; today, a mother working full-time and getting paid the minimum wage cannot afford the rent on the average two-bedroom apartment anywhere in America. In Oklahoma, where I grew up, that mother wouldn’t even come close to providing a poverty-level income for her family. Paying rent, keeping groceries on the table, having a little money left over for school shoes or lunch money—those are all out of reach. Today a mother who tries to break her family’s fall simply can’t grab the same branch that was there for my family.

Today, Washington has decided to turn away as more families than ever tumble over a financial cliff and crash on the rocks below. I’m in my fifth year in the United States Senate, and during my time in office I’ve learned a bitter lesson: a Republican-led Congress just doesn’t care.

Where people end up in life is about more than hard work and good fortune. The rules matter, too. It matters whether the government blows tens of billions of dollars on tax loopholes for billionaires or whether that same money is used to lower costs for students who have to borrow money to go to college. It matters whether Wall Street can pocket billions of dollars by cheating people on mortgages and tricking them on credit cards or if there’s a cop on the beat to keep them honest. It matters whether the minimum wage is set so low that a full-time worker still lives in poverty or if minimum wage also means a livable wage.

When I sit in meetings or conferences and listen to people who have investment portfolios and second homes worry about the impact of raising the minimum wage on giant businesses like McDonald’s and Best Buy without a single thought about how the fry cooks or checkout clerks support themselves and their families from week to week, I grind my teeth until my head hurts. When I hear senators make oh-so-clever theoretical economic arguments while ignoring rock-solid data, I want to scream. When President Trump nominates a labor secretary who opposes a living wage and who made his own fortune by squeezing fast-food workers, I get the urge to bang my head on the table. And when I hear my colleagues in Congress express their deep concern for those who have already made it even as they cheerfully dismiss everyone who is busting their rear just to get by, the fury rises in me like a physical force.

The America of opportunity is under assault. We once ran this country to benefit hardworking people who didn’t have much, to grow a middle class, to create opportunities for our kids. We once held up the ideal that poor kids would get the same chances in life as everyone else.

We once believed that opportunity was not a zero-sum game; more for me didn’t have to mean less for you.

We once believed that the greatest country on earth could bend our future toward more opportunity for more of our people. But today every decision in Washington has a tilt. Politicians think about how they will fund their next campaigns, lobbyists press for every advantage, and armies of fancy corporate lawyers encircle government agencies. Big-deal executives earn millions on Wall Street, then spin through a revolving door that puts them in charge of government policy for a few years before they go back to the corporate side to make even more money. Think tanks support so-called experts who will offer an opinion on anything—if the price is right. The result is that the rich and powerful flourish, while everyone else is left further and further behind. The cumulative impact of decades of these decisions has been to hollow out America’s middle class and to leave us, as a nation, weakened.

The game is rigged. It is deliberately, persistently, and aggressively rigged to help the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful. Whether mild-mannered men or crazy demagogues are pushing policy decisions, it matters what those decisions are and who they are designed to help.

MIDDLE-CLASS AND BROKE

A lot of people say the game isn’t rigged. Some very smart people who are fully committed to making this a better country sing the praises of the American economic system. And they have a lot of numbers to back them up. Yes, there was a dip around the time of the 2008 crash, but the big picture looks great. As a country, America keeps getting richer and richer and richer.

There are so many happy stories to tell:

The stock market is up up up.

Corporate profits are breaking new records.

Inflation has remained low for years.

The amount of wealth we produce every year is double what it was a generation ago.

Unemployment is down, and a lot of people thrown out of work after the financial crash now have jobs.

It’s gotten so good that even lavish Wall Street parties have ratcheted up. Citadel, a major hedge fund, had a good 2015. It celebrated with a party featuring Katy Perry (for a rumored $500,000) and another party starring Maroon 5 (also $500,000 or so) along with—my favorite touch—violinists suspended from the ceiling by cables. Maroon 5 and Katy Perry are hugely talented, and both have fought hard for progressive causes. If a billionaire wants to pay them and an army of violinists a fortune, they should all take the money. But good grief, a party where just the entertainment costs as much as it would take to feed a family of four for half a century? The next year, according to news reports, Citadel’s CEO was buying a new condo spanning three floors of a high-rise overlooking Central Park, a pad priced at a cool $200 million. This condo in the sky has about the same square footage as twelve typical American homes. And why shouldn’t he go for it? He had already set the records for the most expensive home purchases in Chicago and Miami, so obviously it was time to upgrade his New York digs.

Pop the champagne corks!

But before we clink our glasses and exchange air kisses, let’s slide past all those cheery headlines and swanky celebrations and take a close look at the reality that is lived by millions of American families. Even a quick glance is enough to cause whiplash. What we see are people who get up when it’s still dark outside, work all day, go on to a second job in the evening, and then fold a pile of laundry late at night so they can accomplish that one last thing before they fall into bed. We see men and women who work as hard as they possibly can and still fall behind a little more every month. We see lives that look nothing like those lived by billionaires in eighteen-thousand-square-foot condos, because these people don’t live in some fairy tale—they live in today’s reality.

NOT LONG AFTER I started writing this book, I talked with a woman I’ll call Gina. She is fifty—the same age my mother was when she headed off to Sears. Gina wanted to tell her story, but she asked for her name and some details about her life to be changed in the book so her neighbors and her employer wouldn’t recognize her, and I promised to do that.

Gina is full of nervous energy—quick bursts of laughter, quick flashes of anger. Short, compact, and sandy-haired, she’s the kind of woman who talks to people around her in the grocery store line and who knows every clerk by name. She’s a loyal friend and a proud American.

Gina grew up with four sisters. Her dad died when she was a teenager, and from then on her mom ran the family business, a local bar. Gina gives a throaty laugh as she claims that “her mother knew every single dirty joke” ever told.

Her story starts out well. Gina went to college and got a business degree. She met Darren and fell in love. They had both lived all over the country, and they decided to settle in a small town in North Carolina because it seemed like such a nice place to raise a family. Soon they had two boys, but for Gina and Darren, the grown-up, we-have-found-our-place-in-the-middle-class moment arrived when they bought their home. It was a tidy, almost-new mobile home, permanently set on a large lot with a long gravel driveway.

Gina speaks in a rush, wanting to make very clear the importance of this house—what it says about who she is and what she has accomplished. “I love the house,” Gina says. “We keep it immaculate. We live on the corner here. The whole world sees us.”

Gina had a good education, but when their two boys were small she decided to stay home with them. She volunteered at the boys’ school and took up scrapbooking, making little treasures out of bits of nothing. It was a good time for their family.

One of Gina’s artistic handiworks, a Christmas decoration.

Once both boys were in school, Gina headed off to work. She got a job as a sales rep for a big national company, making calls on retailers across a three-county area. Darren was doing well as a roofer. He owned a truck, Gina had a car, and by the late 2000s, they were bringing in about $70,000 a year.

Their income put Gina and Darren smack in the middle; they earned more than about half of all four-person families in America and less than about half—which is about as solidly middle-class as it gets. But even with a good, solid income, Gina and Darren were mostly stay-at-home people. They shopped at discount stores. An occasional meal out usually meant Denny’s or Chili’s. Most of all, Gina and Darren were careful people. They contributed to their 401(k), bought a few stocks, made extra payments on their mortgage, and put away some cash savings. They were a perfect picture of what it meant to be a member of a huge tribe: solid, middle-class America.

Today, Gina is still married to Darren, still living in the same house, still gluing buttons and bits of lace into her scrapbooks. Is she still middle-class? Her answer is short and bitter:

“I don’t think there is a middle class anymore. If there was a middle class, we wouldn’t need to go to a food pantry.”

Darren’s work as a roofer has been spotty, and he’s had trouble with his back and knees. Gina works at Walmart now, and that’s what keeps them going.

Their stocks and their savings are gone, used to fill in during the stretches when one or both of them were out of work. The small 401(k) has nearly disappeared. There was no money to help either of the boys pay for college, and now their sons are nearly grown men. Both work odd hours and live at home because neither one can afford a place of his own.

Gina’s car is now seventeen years old. She and Darren have talked about selling their home, but she says their mortgage is less than they’d pay in rent, and a mobile home like theirs—even though it’s on a big lot—doesn’t appreciate much. They have a stack of bills that, in her quietest moments, Gina admits to herself they will never pay off. Why? Because today Gina and Darren’s combined income is less than $36,000.

What happened? What’s the tale of shocking personal tragedy and extraordinary misfortune that landed a solidly middle-class woman like Gina at the doorstep of the food pantry?

Nothing.

No crisis. No accident. No tale of woe. Just the grinding wear and tear of an economy that doesn’t work anymore for families like Gina’s.

And that’s the part of this story that makes me want to pound the table in frustration. What happened to Gina and Darren is the modern economy—the one that produces all those bubbly stock market records and corporate profits and private concerts with Katy Perry. What happened is an economic boa constrictor that is squeezing working families so hard they can’t breathe.

Gina’s basic story could be repeated in millions of households across America with only small variations. Could be? Shoot, it is repeated, again and again and again.

But the part of her story that bothers me the most is that Gina did everything just the way she was supposed to. She worked hard—no, she worked herself into the ground for years, getting up for a two-and-a-half-hour commute to work and stretching her food budget so they could pay a little extra on the mortgage. She played by every rule: savings, insurance, retirement. And now she’s fifty years old and on a long slide down. The family that used to eat out occasionally now needs to visit the food pantry to make it to the end of the month.

Fortune smiles on some more than others, and no one is guaranteed smooth sailing. I get that. But Gina is not alone. Instead, she’s part of the collateral damage of a mostly invisible dismantling of America’s middle class. She and millions of other once-middle-class families may keep up appearances, they may keep their lawns mowed and smile and wave to their neighbors, but their economic lives have become a new kind of hell.

When Gina talks, her voice says as much as her words. The pride in her home. The worry over her sons. The bravado, the gravelly I-can-take-whatever-life-dishes-out attitude. And the small tremor of desperation.

What comes next for Gina? What happens when Darren can’t work anymore? When they can’t hold it together? What will they do when the doctor thinks it’s time to start on a medication for high blood pressure that has a $50 copay or when the transmission finally falls out of the car? No wonder Gina talks fast and sometimes sounds like she can barely breathe.

Consider a few other facts—the not-so-smiley-face facts—about the American economy:

Nearly one in four Americans can’t pay their bills on time.

Nearly half of Americans would not be able to cover an unexpected expense of $400.

A lower proportion of Americans own their homes than at any time in the past half century—63.5 percent.

The typical man working full-time earns less today than his counterpart did in 1972.

Nearly one-third of the country’s adult population—76 million Americans—describe themselves as either “struggling to get by” or “just getting by.”

The overall economic statistics—the GDP, the stock market, corporate profitability, unemployment—are powerfully important, but the rosy picture they paint has huge blind spots, and those blind spots hide much of America’s lived experience. As America’s middle class is hollowed out, these numbers become even less accurate in describing what is happening to Gina or millions of other people like her. Growth in GDP said something far more revealing about America back when that growth was widely shared. Stock prices better reflected the growing security of the middle class when more people saved and when their companies invested in pensions for them. Corporate profitability meant a lot more when it wasn’t a function of massive layoffs and moving operations overseas. Unemployment statistics were more useful indicators when people were offered full-time jobs with benefits, rather than twenty random hours at Walmart. Unemployment figures also mattered more when the minimum wage kept people out of poverty.

I’m happy that the GDP is up and unemployment is down. Yay! But I’m not drinking champagne. In fact, I’m hitting alarm buttons everywhere I can. Our once-solid middle class is in mortal danger—in danger and running out of time. Every one of those happy numbers is used by nearly every economic reporter and pundit and politician, but those numbers paper over the fact that America’s middle class is literally disappearing.

NO MONEY, NO TIME

Gina says she feels lucky to have a job, but she is pretty blunt about what it is like to work at Walmart: she hates it. She’s worked at the local Walmart for nine years now, spending long hours on her feet waiting on customers and wrestling heavy merchandise around the store. But that’s not the part that galls her.

Last year, management told the employees that they would get a significant raise. While driving to work or sorting laundry, Gina thought about how she could spend that extra money. Do some repairs around the house. Or set aside a few dollars in case of an emergency. Or help her sons, because “that’s what moms do.” And just before drifting off to sleep, she’d think about how she hadn’t had any new clothes in years. Maybe, just maybe.

For weeks, she smiled at the notion. She thought about how Walmart was finally going to show some sign of respect for the work she and her coworkers did. She rolled the phrase over in her mind: “significant raise.” She imagined what that might mean. Maybe $2.00 more an hour? Or $2.50? That could add up to $80 a week, even $100. The thought was delicious.

Then the day arrived when she received the letter informing her of the raise: 21 cents an hour. A whopping 21 cents. For a grand total of $1.68 a day, $8.40 a week.

Gina described holding the letter and looking at it and feeling like it was “a spit in the face.” As she talked about the minuscule raise, her voice filled with anger. Anger, tinged with fear. Walmart could dump all over her, but she knew she would take it. She still needed this job. They could treat her like dirt, and she would still have to show up. And that’s exactly what they did.

In 2015, Walmart made $14.69 billion in profits, and Walmart’s investors pocketed $10.4 billion from dividends and share repurchases—and Gina got 21 cents an hour more. This isn’t a story of shared sacrifice. It’s not a story about a company that is struggling to keep its doors open in tough times. This isn’t a small business that can’t afford generous raises. Just the opposite: this is a fabulously wealthy company making big bucks off the Ginas of the world.

There are seven members of the Walton family, Walmart’s major shareholders, on the Forbes list of the country’s four hundred richest people, and together these seven Waltons have as much wealth as about 130 million other Americans. Seven people—not enough to fill the lineup of a softball team—and they have more money than 40 percent of our nation’s population put together. Walmart routinely squeezes its workers, not because it has to, but because it can. The idea that when the company does well, the employees do well, too, clearly doesn’t apply to giants like this one.

Walmart is the largest employer in the country. More than a million and a half Americans are working to make this corporation among the most profitable in the world. Meanwhile, Gina points out that at her store, “almost all the young people are on food stamps.” And it’s not just her store. Across the country, Walmart pays such low wages that many of its employees rely on food stamps, rent assistance, Medicaid, and a mix of other government benefits, just to stay out of poverty.

The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children. In total, Walmart benefits from more than $7 billion in subsidies each year from taxpayers like you. Those “low, low prices” are made possible by low, low wages—and by the taxes you pay to keep those workers alive on their low, low pay.

As I said earlier, I don’t think that anyone who works full-time should live in poverty. I also don’t think that bazillion-dollar companies like Walmart ought to funnel profits to shareholders while paying such low wages that taxpayers must pick up the ticket for their employees’ food, shelter, and medical care. I listen to right-wing loudmouths sound off about what an outrage welfare is and I think, “Yeah, it stinks that Walmart has been sucking up so much government assistance for so long.” But somehow I suspect that these guys aren’t talking about Walmart the Welfare Queen.

Walmart isn’t alone. Every year, employers like retailers and fast-food outlets pay wages that are so low that the rest of America ponies up a collective $153 billion to subsidize their workers. That’s $153 billion every year. Anyone want to guess what we could do with that mountain of money? We could make every public college tuition-free and pay for preschool for every child—and still have tens of billions left over. We could almost double the amount we spend on services for veterans, such as disability, long-term care, and ending homelessness. We could double all federal research and development—everything: medical, scientific, engineering, climate science, behavioral health, chemistry, brain mapping, drug addiction, even defense research. Or we could more than double federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, dams and levees, water treatment plants, safe new water pipes.

Yeah, the point I’m making is blindingly obvious. America could do a lot with the money taxpayers spend to keep afloat people who are working full-time but whose employers don’t pay a living wage.

Of course, giant corporations know they have a sweet deal—and they plan to keep it, thank you very much. They have deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers to fight off any efforts to give workers a chance to organize or fight for a higher wage. Giant corporations have used their mouthpiece, the national Chamber of Commerce, to oppose any increase in the minimum wage, calling it a “distraction” and a “cynical effort” to increase union membership. Lobbyists grow rich making sure that people like Gina don’t get paid more.

The result is that for decades, the policies and rules that once served to build a robust middle class no longer offer the same kind of foundation.

EARLIER I MENTIONED that when I was a kid, my mother’s minimum-wage job paid enough to let us cover our mortgage and keep food on the table. We didn’t need welfare or food stamps because the minimum wage set a floor that would support us without taxpayer help. But there was something else different about my mother’s job. When she got hired by Sears two generations ago, she worked for a predictable forty hours a week. If Sears was busy, she got a paycheck. If Sears wasn’t busy, she still got a paycheck.

My mother is the tall one in the plaid dress. Her minimum-wage job at Sears covered our mortgage and put food on the table.

Gina describes life at Walmart as a constant fight to get enough hours to support her family. Walmart deliberately overhires, which then puts workers in competition for shifts. Even though she’s worked at the store for nearly a decade, Gina doesn’t get her work schedule far enough in advance to plan a trip to the dentist. And she doesn’t know how many hours she will get each week or whether her paycheck will be enough to cover the basics.

Gina thinks the crazy Walmart system of scheduling work isn’t just about keeping the store open. She believes it’s about raw power. She talks about her friend named Nicole, who is trying to support herself and her little boy on a Walmart paycheck. “She needs more hours. She was trying to do better, so she was taking classes at the local community college at night,” Gina says. Nicole was available every day and five evenings every week, but “she needed Tuesdays and Thursdays off at night” so she could go to class. “They wouldn’t give them to her.”

Why? Gina says that management wanted to show Nicole that she wasn’t any better than anyone else. “They use [the schedule] as punishment,” Gina says. “They were going to teach her a lesson.”

Once Gina starts talking about her coworkers, the examples tumble out one after the other. There are stories about workers whose schedules are changed without notice. Stories about workers who have anxiety attacks. Stories about workers who burst into tears in the break room because of bullying from higher up the food chain.

Gina has become a sort of anxious den mother. She started a food collection for the coworker living in his car. She sweet-talked one of the store managers into changing the work assignment for an elderly coworker who couldn’t do much heavy lifting after his bout of pneumonia. Gina tries to help her coworkers every chance she gets, but it’s never enough.

Even though she’s worked at Walmart for years now, her position at the company always feels unsteady. Talking to me didn’t help things. I repeatedly promised I wouldn’t use her name or tell anyone how to find her. She was always willing to talk—in fact, she would say, in a near shout, “We need to tell this story!” Then, in a much smaller voice, she would add, “But I really need this job.”

Employers in other industries have invented new models that are every bit as effective as Walmart’s efforts to eliminate guaranteed hours, fixed schedules, minimum wages, and benefits. They classify workers as subcontractors, independent contractors, or gig workers. Today, millions of hardworking people live in a world in which their incomes go up and down, their schedules shift from day to day, and they take whatever work is available. The much-touted virtues of independence and the creativity of the “flexible workforce” are undoubtedly true for some workers under some conditions. But for millions more, the new work economy adds up to little more than another setback in a losing effort to build some economic security in a world that is tilted against working families.

To get a sufficient number of hours, workers need to be available. But that availability comes at a cost. If she can’t go to community college, how will Nicole ever build up her skills and get a better job to support herself and her baby? How will she ever make enough to let go of her rent subsidy or food stamps? How will she ever move to a better neighborhood, one with nice parks and good schools?

It’s not just Nicole. How does the guy in the stockroom sign up for auto-repair classes at a nearby vo-tech school if McDonald’s won’t give him his schedule more than a week in advance? How does the woman working the front office set up a time to take her elderly mother in for checkups and physical therapy if her hours change every three days?

What about the food-service people and office cleaners I speak with in Massachusetts? Working two or three jobs is an economic necessity for them as they try to support their families, but with shifting hours in most places, it’s hard for them to piece together schedules that will let them show up when called. Some say they look for all-night cleaning jobs so they can have their days free to take second and third jobs. Childcare is a nightmare. No wonder that woman I met falls asleep the minute she gets to her mother’s house.

It’s a vicious double crunch: low wages and unpredictable schedules combine to make life an unending struggle for millions of Americans. It all works great for Walmart or the food-service company, but for people like Gina and her friend Nicole, it means they can barely scratch by. And it also means they are likely to keep on scratching by for the rest of their lives.

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