If you’re looking for the inflection point where economic inequality really took off in the United States, the point at which the top one percent started to become the Top One Percent, look to 1979.<\/p>\n
Although the U.S. economy didn’t officially enter recession until the early days of 1980, the decline began when Paul Volcker was installed as the head of the Federal Reserve, with a mandate to tame the rampant inflation that was ravaging America at the time.<\/p>\n
Volcker succeeded, but at a steep price: not one but two recessions that ushered in the 1980s and arguably cost President Carter his re-election. As the economy declined, employers began shedding jobs, starting with the individuals who needed them most.<\/p>\n
Michael “Mickey” Shave was one of the earliest affected by the economic downturn. Mickey was a construction worker with a wife and two children to provide for, and the loss of his job hit his family hard.<\/p>\n
It’s not as if the Shaves were unaccustomed to life’s challenges, though–they were sailing into the wind from the start, in fact, marrying when young Virginia became pregnant during her senior year of high school, at the age of seventeen.<\/p>\n
Still, they’d done the right things, the things they were taught to do: get married, settle down, get a job, work hard, and raise a family. In America, if you did those things well, you’d be taken care of.<\/p>\n
That all started to change in 1979, though, and America never looked back.<\/p>\n
Don’t worry–the story has a happy ending, at least for the Shaves. Mickey and Ginny are still happily married and those early days are likely a distant memory. But not everyone’s story worked out that way, and there was no way to know at the time which way the Mickey and Ginny’s story would go.<\/p>\n
That troubled Ginny’s big brother, a rock-and-roll singer-songwriter of some renown. It troubled him enough to write a song about it, in fact. He started working on it during the first half of 1979, writing a story so explicitly true that it would shock Ginny when she eventually heard him perform it for the first time in a sold-out arena. Bruce changed the name of his heroine, though, to provide his sister a semblance of privacy. Instead of Ginny, Bruce named his character Mary, a name he was particularly fond of.<\/p>\n
In its early incarnations, the characters and backdrop might have been ripped from reality, but the plot wasn’t. Although Bruce’s unnamed narrator and his girl Mary paralleled the early days of Mickey and Ginny, Bruce’s narrator was so unhappy in his marriage that he pined for another woman, a temptress named Angelyne.<\/p>\n
His yearning to escape the girl he’d been saddled with and run off with his fantasy girl consumed him, and in his mind the narrator was always running, running to Angelyne. In this early outtake, in fact, Mary isn’t even mentioned.<\/p>\n