Hello! If you came here fromCary Lockwood‘s Your Auto Network Calling All Cars, welcome to Funny about Money.
Funny is about Life, the Universe, and All That Money. We talk about subjects having to do with frugality, personal money management, and the real values that matter in life. You might enjoy these posts:
Take time out of your busy day, or your relaxing day, to remember those whose sacrifice made it possible for us all to be busy or relaxed in freedom, and those who as we pass our day in peace at home are at the fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
To get your mind around the enormity of war, take a look at this mix of image and fact by author Robert M. Poole (On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery) and design studio Rumors.
Today was the choir’s last performance before its summer hiatus. {sigh}
Everyone else, I expect, is happy for a break—especially the paid staff, who take the term “hard-working” to a whole new level of meaning. But I’ll miss it. When you don’t have much of a life, you tend to get invested in an activity that brings you together with a bunch of nice people.
I really will miss the superb voices of the professionals and near-professionals who form the chamber choir. They sing each Sunday during communion. It was this incredible music that drew me to the church: attending a service there is like going to a chamber music concert. Every week. All through the fall, winter, and spring.
We had a great party this afternoon, wherein the James Beard potatoes au gratin knockoff was a humble entry among some truly awesome dishes. One couple occasionally brings salmon smoked in their own cooker—it is invariably splendid. Everything was good; one broccoli salad was just delicious, and I don’t even like broccoli! And some of those people are dessert artists.
Many of them leave town for the summer, since they own vacation homes or they live somewhere else and spend the winters here. Almost all are gone for at least a week or two. But I expect some of them will show up at the regular Sunday services. I suppose if I would get myself in gear on Sundays, I could reconnect with them there over the summer.
I’m not very churchly myself. But the director said we could sit in the choir loft, if we chose, during the summer services. That would work: first because I enjoy watching the organist as she plays, and second because it’s amazing to be close to the various musicians who come in to perform. And third, because it makes it easy for me to evade going down to the communion rail. I’m superstitiously averse to drinking out of a communal chalice, and I do not believe for a moment that dipping the host in the wine is one whit more sanitary than sipping shared wine.
Really, I don’t fare well with colds or the flu—almost died from one case of influenza, and recovery takes about twice as long as it does for most people—and so I don’t do things that put me at risk. As adjunct faculty, I get no sick leave; the college docks your pay if you don’t show up, and I can’t afford to lose even one day’s shekels, much less a whole week’s worth. And when you live alone, getting sick can be difficult, because there’s no one to help you or to get you something to eat when you can’t drag yourself into the kitchen.
So that’s my excuse. 😉
Welp, it’s gunna be a long, hot summer, financially very scary. I have no idea when or how the college will pay for the online course prep and so can’t rely on that income to cover bills. While the Copyeditor’s Desk holds some funds that could cover a shortfall, I want to keep that money in the bank in case I need it this fall. There’s no guarantee that either of the eight-week courses slated for fall semester will make. If either fails to make, it’ll be a nuisance; if they’re both canceled, I’ll need every penny the S-corporation can disgorge to make ends meet. At the moment, though, it does contain enough to carry me through the fall semester, and then some. I just don’t want to diddle it away over the summer.
The aftermath of the mad shopping spree, the dental bill, and the glasses comes due with this month’s AMEX bill, speaking of diddling money away. However, it appears that diddle-it-away savings will cover those extravaganzas. So I’m pretty certain the overage collected during the cool winter months, when I didn’t have to run either the heat or the water, will carry me through the summer.
I may need some divine intervention, though. It could be worth visiting the church now and again.
Paul Krugman has aninteresting and kinda scary article in this morning’s Times. He points out that the biggest threat to our economy right now is not the deficit but the fact that not enough is being done to fight unemployment. Says he, the recent hiring gains have, to date, “brought back fewer than 500,000 of the 8 million jobs lost in the wake of the financial crisis.” In that department, he notes, the Administration is doing way too little.
Eight million jobs gone. Heaven help us!
Krugman says the fairest comparison between our economy and another country’s is not with Greece’s debt-ridden economy but with Japan’s, which has never fully recovered from the deflationary cycle of the 1990s. He lays the blame for Europe’s unrest over national debt issues on the establishment of the euro, whose creation, he observes, “imposed a single currency on economies that weren’t ready for such a move.”
Though you’d never know it by the grocery bills I racked up today, inflation is at a 44-year low, and that is not a good thing. Smart money, fearing deflation will extend the economic slump, is moving out of the stock market and into treasury bonds, perceived as safer than equities.
Come to think of it, this morning my financial manager e-mailed to say they’re moving my investments to a cash position. Let’s hope this time they manage to salvage some of that fund. It hadn’t regained all it lost during the crash, but it had recovered to the point that it might reasonably be expected to support me through old age.
Krugman calls for more aggressive recovery measures, but observes rightly that a new stimulus plan “would have no chance of getting through a Congress that has been spooked by the deficit hawks.”
IMHO, something far more basic is at work here.
America is not going to recover economically as long as we continue on our track toward political schism. That way is the road to ruin. The polarization of our thinking between the extreme right and the extreme left is spinning this country around in circles. Ultimately, it will destroy us. Indeed, I fear that if it continues, within a generation it will lead to uprisings, possibly even civil war.
David Brooks observes, in a column also appearing in today’s Times, that our political center presently “is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes.”
In a little parable meant to elucidate the thinking of people who subscribe to the Tea Party, Brooks predicts that just throwing the rascals out and replacing them with new demagogues won’t get us far. “[Brooks’s fictional angry voter] is going to be disappointed again. He’s going to find that the outsiders he sent to Washington just screamed at each other at ever higher decibels. He’s going to find that he and voters like him unwittingly created a political culture in which compromise is impermissible, in which institutions are decimated by lone-wolf narcissists who have no interest in or talent for crafting legislation. Nothing will get done.”
Just so. The motto on our currency and on the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum—”out of many, one”—resonates with the last great words of Patrick Henry:
“United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs.”
We’ve forgotten those words. It behooves us to remember them, before it’s too late.
Well, for the first time in recorded history, Arizona’s right-leaning voters approved a one-cent sales tax on food. We’re told by the state’s fuzzy, Tea-Partying leadership that this tax will get us off the economic shoals on which we have been cast by the crash of the Bush economy. The public schools will be rescued, and the massive cuts to the state government already planned will not have to take place.
Right.
A tax on food, at a time when about 10 percent of Arizonans are officially out of work and many, many more have dropped off the unemployment tracking radar, is about as regressive as a tax can get. It hits hardest at the people who can least afford it: people who are already struggling to buy basics like food and shelter.
Here’s the problem: Arizona has an essentially circular economy. We don’t manufacture anything, unless square mile upon square mile of ticky-tacky houses built by people who build, finance, supply, and repair ticky-tacky houses for people who build, finance, supply, and repair ticky-tacky houses can be called “manufacturing.” The primary bases for the economy here are housing construction and services. We wait on each other—at amazingly low wages—and we build houses for people who wait on each other. We don’t do anything productive.
So, when the economy goes down, we have nothing left to build on. The jobs for people who deliver services dissolve, there’s nothing to take their place, and no amount of taxation or any other make-shift scheme will change the fact that we don’t have jobs and we’re not going to get jobs.
Why? Because we don’t do anything productive. We just wait on each other.
Hilariously, we’re assured that this tax is going to rescue Arizona’s educational system. This is the system that’s already at the bottom of per-pupil funding in the nation—we rank 49th, just ahead of Mississippi! Grade schools now cram about 32 kids in every classroom. One cent per dollar, whose purpose is simply to avoid laying off more teachers, isn’t going to make much difference. Let’s remember, when times were good, graduates of this system arrived in my university classrooms and, as juniors and seniors, informed me that Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state, that the only thing of note that happened in the U.S. during the 19th century was the Industrial Revolution—well, if you let out World War I, which also happened in the 19th century—and that the word Episcopal is pronounced ep-is-COP-al. A graduating senior in English—that’s English, not English Education—asked me what a preposition is.
This is a school system that will not be helped by a one-cent Bandaid. It needs major surgery.
Despite being a raving, foaming-at-the-mouth sooooocialist liberal, I did not vote for this tax. I didn’t vote for it because it was cooked up by a retrograde governor and supported by an even more Neanderthal legislature. Nothing that these people say makes sense, and so it’s reasonable to believe that the tax as it was proposed is even more ludicrous than it appears on the surface.
It doesn’t get at the problem. The problem is, we need to build an economy that produces things, not one that waits tables, sells insurance, and polishes shoes.
It’s America’s problem, of course: we’ve off-shored the lifeblood of a strong economy. And since Arizona is part of America, Arizona is part of the problem.
Image: from H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, 1920. Public Domain.
