Reaganomics Done Got My Boy Down

By David Waldron Anderson

Back in the early 1980s, my brother, who still runs a parking company today, had a valet employee take off with an expensive Mercedes. The kind of loss you notice immediately.

My brother is a former state champion wrestler, not a desk guy, and he decided to handle it himself. He went straight to the St. Thomas Housing Project, knocked on the young man’s door, and was met by his mother.

She was polite. She was tired. And she loved her son.

She told my brother her son was a good boy, but “Reaganomics had done got her boy down.”

We laughed about that line for years. It became a family phrase, half tragic and half funny, very New Orleans. But decades later, it does not feel like much of a joke.

Because Reaganomics has gotten a lot of people down.

Yes, it lifted a very successful one percent. That part worked. But for many working people, and for cities trying to function, it has produced results that are hard to defend when you see them up close.

Take these two municipal services.

In New Orleans, we now get trash pickup one day less per week than we used to, yet we pay the same rate. Profit margins must be strong. If they were not, companies would not line up to bid and fight to keep the contracts.

But look beyond the margins and into the community.

Many of the workers riding on the back of those trucks and driving them are subcontracted, paid by the day, earning wages below basic living standards, with no healthcare, no pension, and no long term stability.

If those same services were run municipally, we would not need to spend more money. We would simply spend it differently. The same public dollars now flowing to private profit would instead go toward wages, benefits, and pensions for city workers.

The result would likely be hundreds of municipal employees earning above poverty wages, households making fifty thousand dollars or more, with healthcare and retirement security. That stabilizes neighborhoods, families, and the children growing up in them.

The same logic applies to our roads.

We have largely privatized road repair. Would anyone argue we now have better roads. Potholes linger, repairs drag on, and costs keep rising. These are not high tech manufacturing jobs. They are core civic services, trash pickup, sanitation, road maintenance, that communities once ran competently and locally.

Those jobs used to be honorable work. Dignified work. Jobs that allowed people to buy homes, raise families, and stay rooted in the city they served.

Privatization, driven by Reagan era economic thinking, promised efficiency and savings. In practice, it has often delivered higher costs of living, lower wages, and less stability.

Add another layer, labor and housing.

When public adjacent services chase profits with the cheapest possible labor, wages are driven down for everyone. At the same time, more people competing for rentals and entry level housing pushes prices higher. Longtime residents and city workers find themselves squeezed, earning less while paying more to live in their own communities.
The affordability index expands negatively.

So we get hit twice, depressed wages and rising costs.

That model makes sense in the private sector, where maximizing profit is the mission. But when it is imported wholesale into the public sector, the results can be corrosive.

Reaganomics created wealth. There is no denying that. But for essential civic services, the long term math often does not work.

Maybe government is not perfectly efficient. But redirecting our common money toward stable jobs, family sustaining wages, and strong neighborhoods may be the more responsible investment.

Because looking around today, it is hard not to conclude that Reaganomics did not just get one boy down.

It got many of us there.

btw, the Mercedes was returned that evening… LOL