The Battle Over Single Mothers

SACRAMENTO — Debbie Vickers is a banquet waitress and a single mom. She’s on course this year, but only if all goes well, to earn $22,000.

She did not finish high school but has earned an advanced degree in the fine art of making do. Her diploma is etched in the lines of her face. She is 35. This is her first real job.

Debbie Vickers and women like her are poster parents for a tax cut--$483 billion over five years--proposed by Texas Gov. George W. Bush; the presumptive Republican candidate for president insists that his economic plan will be most helpful to single mothers “on the outskirts of poverty.”

He talks about them all the time, in Palm Springs, in Manchester and Hilton Head, on network television; in presidential debates. As he promised while unveiling his tax plan in a packed Des Moines ballroom: “A single waitress supporting two children on an income of $22,000 . . . will pay no income tax at all.” Although he hopes that all Americans warm to his economic plan, these symbolic saleswomen may especially appeal to crucial female voters.

Critics say that Bush’s tax cut would simply line the wallets of those who need it least, with about 60% of the money going to the top 10% of the nation’s taxpayers. When Bush argues otherwise, the people he says he will help the most sound an awful lot like Deborah Lynn Vickers.

In fact, improving the lot of low-income Americans is a philosophical point of departure for the men with an eye on the Oval Office. While Bush would manipulate the tax code to help poor women like Vickers, Vice President Al Gore has proposed government-funded programs such as universal preschool and an expansion of an existing health insurance effort on their behalf.

But Bush is the one pushing the image of the poor, working, single mother to the forefront of the campaign. How much would Bush’s economic plan give back to such a single mother, the one he says over and over again “has the toughest job in America”? Plug her particulars into the “Bush Tax Calculator” at https://www.georgewbush.com, click on “submit query,” and there’s the answer: $110 a year.

One hundred and ten dollars would not change Vickers’ life, nor would $1,000, not that she’d turn up her nose at either. She’d probably use the money to buy groceries; $110 wouldn’t pay for a week of child care. For his part, Bush says the $110 is not the point. His economic plan, he says, would cut the unfair tax rates that he insists discourage low-income workers from getting better jobs or working more hours.

Nothing, however, discourages Vickers from working as many hours as possible. She’s on the payroll at two hotels and a racetrack. She’ll work whatever shifts she can, man breakfast buffet lines of steaming scrambled eggs, lug dinner plates filled with poached salmon and tread the tiered aisles of the nearby Turf Club during harness-racing season. She needs the money.

On a recent weekend, she worked six shifts at three jobs in four days. The hardest part is keeping straight how things are done at different venues. No, the hardest part is focusing on work when you really want to be with your children. No, the hardest part is . . . never mind, it’s all hard. Raising children alone on $22,000 a year is nothing if not complicated.

This is what it’s like.

Heaping Praise on Food-Service Job

“I thank God for the food-service industry,” Vickers says, sipping a pre-work cup of coffee. “I had no job skills. I was an addict for years. [Food service] gave me the ability to make money. . . . Waitressing is one of the highest-paid, unskilled jobs you can have.”

While a household income of $22,000 is above the federal poverty line for a family of three, such a wage is most often earned by women and men starting out, starting over, or on the way down.

Two years ago, Vickers started over.

Until she signed on at the Turf Club in April 1999--followed by the Radisson Hotel Sacramento a month later and the Holiday Inn in January--she had held only one job for a full 12 months, working at a Wendy’s when she was 19. She had started smoking pot in her early teens; life spiraled downhill from there.

By the time she was in her early 20s--a decade she says she “pretty much wasted all of”--drugs were her whole life. She dropped out of school, got in serious trouble with the law, went on welfare and didn’t come off. She gave birth to a son, Timothy, 16, who lives with his father in Montana.

These days, she and her 2-year-old son, Richie, live in a spare apartment in north Sacramento. Four-year-old Arianna, her daughter, stays with Vickers a few nights each week.

Arianna lives in another corner of the same complex with her father. Someday, Vickers says, she would like to marry him. For now, they are single parents figuring out if they can have a joint future. They are both in recovery for alcohol and drug addiction; the last time they were together, they relapsed.

But Vickers celebrated two years of sobriety in February; this month she will have been off drugs for the same amount of time. The particulars of her life are complicated at best. Its essence, however, is very, very simple. “The most important thing is staying clean,” she says. “My kids come next. Then work.”

A good month is when Vickers brings home $1,900. In an average month, that paycheck shrinks to more like $1,200 to $1,400. A recent promotion at the Radisson means that she will be first in line for more work. But summers are thin in the banquet business, and Vickers is loath to give up either of her other jobs just yet.

It’s easy to see why. Rent on her one-bedroom apartment is $370 a month, and she is grateful every time she writes that check, for the median rent in Sacramento is closer to $600. She recently sold her 14-year-old Chevrolet Cavalier and bought a used Camry, her pride and joy, with its “Easy Does It” license plate frame, $278 monthly payment and implicit promise that it won’t break down when she’s driving home from work at night, alone.

Car insurance is $57, union dues $26.50. The union contract means her employer pays for her health insurance; basic coverage for Richie is $25 more a month. Food comes in at around $200, various other bills about $150, for a total of about $1,106.50 a month. For now.

Because she is coming off welfare, child care for Richie is subsidized by the federal government for two years. She has one year left. Once that subsidy disappears, she’ll add about $500 in child care costs to her expenses each month.

“It doesn’t leave a lot to put away for the future,” she says. “I’m starting to think about my kids’ education and retirement. . . . I want to buy a house. When I think about it, I feel really overwhelmed.”

Life has improved, though, since she escaped welfare and began working all those hours. These days she has a checking account and a savings account. She can afford to buy an occasional compact disc (Natalie Merchant), rent an occasional movie (“The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc”). She’s graduated to clothes shopping at Wal-Mart and Target--for Richie and Arianna, anyway. “I still go to thrift stores for myself,” she says. “If you stay and look you can find some real cute stuff.”

She wishes she could exercise more, but there is only time and money for the Sacramento waitress full-body workout: hauling dinner plates at the Radisson for the arms and shoulders, climbing the Turf Club’s aisles, an impromptu Stairmaster for the lower body.

“It’s hard being a single mom,” she says. “The normal day-to-day stuff, keeping the cupboards filled, the house clean, the bills paid. I would love for their dad and me to get married, but I know it’s not the time. That’s where exposure to 12-step programs really helps. One day at a time. Easy does it. I’ve had to just break it down to what I have to do today to better my life.”

Making Sense Out of Tax Code

Months before he announced that he was running for president, George W. Bush told Larry Lindsey, who would become his chief economic advisor, to “find the biggest problems in the tax code, the ones that make the least sense and find a way of fixing them.”

What Lindsey came up with was the notion that greater fairness should be brought to the so-called marginal tax rates, whether the average American understood them or not.

Under the current tax system, taxes rise with income. The problem, from Lindsey’s perspective, is that rising tax levels nearly outstrip any gain in income for many poor Americans. Such an unfair tax burden on the poor can be a “disincentive” for work, Bush says, “a tollbooth on the road to the middle class.”

Now, the lowest-income Americans don’t pay federal income taxes at all. In fact, depending on how many children they have and how much money they make, they actually benefit from the “earned-income tax credit,” which gives money to low-income wage earners instead of taxing them.

The earned-income tax credit was passed to help bring families above the poverty line. But the benefit begins to shrink, based on a formula that considers family size, once household income reaches about $12,000. It is gone completely by the time income reaches about $30,000.

If, for example, you have two children and make just under $22,000, you will pay no federal income taxes, and the government will pay you about $1,700 at tax time. This is the likely scenario this year for Vickers.

But for every dollar above $22,000, the federal government will pay Vickers and women like her less. Each new dollar of income at a job will create a reduction of 40 cents in federal help, resulting in an effective marginal tax rate of 40%.

The goal of the Bush plan for a single mother of two earning $22,000 a year, Lindsey says, is to keep her from paying taxes until her income rises to $31,000. That would be accomplished through two parts of Bush’s tax proposal.

First, he would double the current child tax credit to $1,000 from $500. Then, he would simplify the tax code. Income is taxed in five brackets, with tax rates starting at 15% and ending at 39.6%. Bush would cut the lowest rate to 10% and the highest to 33%.

The Birth of a Symbol

This is all pretty dry stuff on which to base a campaign for the presidency, particularly now, when polls show that tax cuts are not a priority for most Americans. So the question loomed: How do you present such a concept to American voters in a way that they can understand, a way that furthers Bush’s desire to be known as that rare Republican, the compassionate conservative?

As they crafted Bush’s first big economic address, speech writers and economic advisors put their heads together. When does the tax bite first hit? At about $22,000. Who’s an icon of hard work and low pay? Waitresses. Bush said so himself. And, as political analysts point out, few figures are more sympathetic to female voters than the single mom.

A symbol was born.

As images go, this single mother is awfully effective, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s a way of blunting a vulnerability that Republicans traditionally have,” she says. “He can say, ‘I’m helping the poor.’ He is. And most of the benefit still goes to the wealthy. They pay the most taxes.”

In fact, in analyzing Bush’s tax-cut plan, the nonpartisan Citizens for Tax Justice figures that those in the top 10% of earners would, on average, get a tax break of $6,369. The bottom 20% of income earners in America would save $43.

“Most of his tax cut goes to upper-income people, but [Bush] says some of it goes to other people,” says Robert McIntyre, director of the Washington-based group. “That’s true, but not very much. The question for those other people is, ‘Is there something you’d rather have more?’ ”

Debbie Vickers would rather have child care, an affordable, high-quality place for Richie to stay when she’s working her full and erratic schedule. “The first lady I took Richie to [cared for] 14 kids,” Vickers says. “Three days was all it lasted. I picked him up one night. He was dirty. He was the youngest one there. He was ignored.”

The hunt for a good replacement plagued her at home and obsessed her on the job. “I had a week when that’s all I thought about. What’s he doing? Is he OK?”

She looked for months before finding a better provider, a place where Richie could be the center of attention. “I really believe in God,” Vickers says, and laughs. “I said, ‘OK, God, I have got to find someone I trust to take care of him.’ A couple days later I found her. She’s perfect.”

But that “perfect provider” just had her day-care license pulled, and the search is on again. “I went to work this morning ready to cry.”

These are the raw materials from which Debbie Vickers creates beauty: bags of white plastic garlic bulbs, stacks of sombreros, piles and piles of brightly colored cloth.

She loves her job.

“I did an absolutely gorgeous hors d’oeuvre line about two weeks ago. It was white with this lime green material, silver chafing dishes that are beautiful,” she says. She is standing in the Radisson prop room. In a few minutes she will punch the time clock, start her day. For now, she talks about work, creativity and a buffet so pretty, “I wished I had a camera.”

This day there is no chance for experimentation, no flight of fancy with lime green linen. Vickers deposits her purse in locker No. 5, clocks in at noon and heads out to the patio, where she will serve hamburgers and Cajun chicken sandwiches to a couple hundred union officials who have gathered for a full day of workshops. The main event: a 7:30 p.m. sit-down dinner with a keynote address on the benefits of organized labor by Gov. Gray Davis.

The outdoor barbecue’s a breeze. It’s springtime in Sacramento, so the heat and bees are still weeks away. At 3:30 sharp, the real work begins. That’s when the hotel’s two main ballrooms--used all day for meetings--must be changed into a stylish dinner hall for 600, fast.

It’s called “turning a room,” and like much of banquet work, it’s an exercise in monotony and precision, a working waltz. The bigger the dinner crowd, the tougher the task. “That’s when I tell my friends, ‘One table at a time. Don’t look up,’ ” Vickers says.

On this day, Vickers helps clear the detritus of a day’s worth of meetings. Then 60 oval tables are set up, spread with 60 navy blue tablecloths, outfitted with 600 chairs. Next, in this exact order, each table is spread with saucers, coffee cups, dinner knives, spoons and forks. Then salad forks, dessert forks, bread plates, water glasses, wine glasses, butter knives, and finally the red linen napkins.

Vickers lays out water glasses and “the big dreaded knives,” so-called because each one must be hand wiped before placement. The dinner starts, Vickers serves salad, a slide show in the corner flashes union slogans: “En la lucha por justicia.” In the fight for justice.

Vickers doles out salad dressing, scrapes dirty plates, serves salmon, then cheesecake, then coffee, then salad again to a few late diners. She never sits, she always smiles.

When her shift is finally over, her day is not. It is 9 p.m. and she’s off to child care to pick up Richie, off to the market to pick up milk. Home to put the cranky baby to bed and eventually get to sleep herself. At 7 o’clock the next morning she is perfectly made up, sipping coffee on the living room sofa and just about to start the whole process again.

Richie lies on the throw rug, holding his bottle in one hand, ruffling his soft, curly hair with the other, little feet steepled in the air. Barney the dinosaur sings on the television set. Vickers talks about the future.

She wants her children to go to college. Maybe Richie will be a doctor, maybe a lawyer. Maybe pretty Arianna will be a model. Maybe their mom, who has since earned her GED, will go back to school. Maybe she’ll buy a house and work in the yard. In the last two years, she says, her life got “so full, so fast.”

“It’s a struggle,” she says. “My dad got 20 years [of sobriety]. He lives in Florida. He told me, ‘You know my whole life I wanted to be a hero.’ He said, ‘In my opinion, you’re a hero, going to work, staying clean, being a mom.’ ”

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Getting By

Sacramento waitress Debbie Vickers sometimes earns as much as $1,900 a month, sometimes as little as $1,200. That does not provide much of a cushion considering her set monthly expenses:

*

Rent: $370.00

Car payment: $278.00

Food: $200.00

Miscellaneous: $150.00

Car insurance: $57.00

Union dues: $26.50

Child health insurance: $25.00

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Total: $1,106.50