The Big Divide

This week we learned that our housekeeper has been evicted from her house after the house was foreclosed. My first question was, "how could this happen to her and her husband, they both work hard and are good at what they do?". She is a housekeeper and is limited in salary by the number of hours in a day and houses she can clean during a week. Her salary is capped. Her husband is a painter. He is in the same boat. You can only paint so many houses in one day and the market sets the rates for painters. Anyone who works with their hands, produces or serves based on their physical/hourly limitation, has the same cap on them. This is the problem with us having become a service industry country. We are capping ourselves just like our housekeeper and her husband. What really bothers me is that she and her husband got caught in the sub prime mortgage fiasco. They tool an adjustable loan three years ago and now three years later their mortgage more than doubled and they can't pay. I feel terrible for them. They are not freeloaders of the system. They were not real estate speculators. They were me coming out of school buying my first house. I remember it well sitting with the mortgage broker when I took out an adjustable loan. They loaned me the money based on my future earnings potential and the loan could change 2% per year with a 6% cap increase over the life of the loan. The broker told me that there was the risk that the rates could go up, but "when did that last happen...it was back in the 70's". I am sure my housekeeper and her husband heard the same story. But this time, it happened. And what are we to do about it? I worry about the haves vs. the have nots. We may lose our housekeeper because to raise her children, send her oldest to college, they have to move and rent another 30 miles away from us. Will we be able to keep her? Can she afford the gas to come this far? And if she can't can she get the same number of houses at the same rate in the area she will now live? I think the answer to all the above is no. They should not be "have nots", but the way things are going is forcing them into this category. Everyone talks about the divide being the class of living and spending. That is not what I worry about, I worry about that the divide will become so great that those who want to work won't be able and those who want to employ can't because there is no one available. It seems preposterous in a free market system but I can see a real life example staring us in the face and I don't like it.