Coffee heat rising

Taxes, Government, the Tea Party, and America’s Way of Life

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Tea-Party-Logo

Listening to NPR’s All Things Considered during a quick grocery run this afternoon, I heard newly triumphant Tea Partier Rand Paul trumpeting on about what he thinks of as his “moderate” views on the future of American government: basically, get rid of everything that costs anyone anything. The Americans with Disabilities Act, he tells us, was “overreaching,” and businesses should be allowed to refuse service to anyone they please, including those needing special accommodations. Asked if, by that line of thinking, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was overreaching, he backed and filled like crazy, first trying to say that he agreed with legislation intended to eliminate “institutional” discrimination. Then, when pressed by the reporter who pointed out that the Civil Rights Act said businesses could not refuse service to anyone they please, he admitted he hadn’t ever read the darn thing.

The mixed results of the current round of voting, and the silly “We’re here to take back OUR government” motto that’s being used to fine demagogic effect (hey, it’s not your government, folks…it’s everyone’s government), presage re-election of doctrinaire kill-the-beasters. These people would like to see every tax-funded safety net taken away from every American, and if possible every tax eliminated, first starting with big corporate taxpayers, them moving to the extremely wealthy, and finally focussing on the middle class. As we know, the deadbeat working poor don’t pay taxes.

What, really, would this mean? A few days ago, Jim at Bargaineering ran a post in which he mentioned, in passing, USA Today‘s report that American tax rates are lower than they’ve been in 60 years. He also pointed out that those scary-sounding tax brackets do not even vaguely represent the typical American’s actual ratio of tax to income; after deductions and credits, he observes, “very few people pay anything close to their marginal tax rate.”

This engendered a lively round of screaming and wailing from Bargaineering’s readers. I left a half-baked yelp there, myself, which I’d like to refine a bit today.

You know, the American middle class exists not in spite of the government, but because of it. The affluent lifestyle that has been enjoyed by the majority of our citizens since World War II is an artifact of government protectionism and social programs that date back to the 1800s. The amenities we enjoy and that are envied by citizens of other countries, even in the developed world, were put in place by our taxes. As scholar Michael Lind remarked a few years ago, our middle class has “been invented and reinvented by the government.”

How, I wonder, do the Tea Partiers, the Kill-the-Beasters, and the chronic complainers think we get roads built? Bridges built? Airports constructed? Air traffic controllers trained and in place 24 hours a day?

Where do they think schools come from? Do they really believe it would be better for all of us to home-school our kids, or to rely on private entities with customer service like, oh, say Qwest‘s or Comcast‘s, to educate our children? Did none of them watch last week’s Frontline report on the quality of education delivered by for-profit “colleges” and “universities”?

Have they never used a public library? Have they never put their kids in a summer program run by their town or city’s public parks program?

Where does the water that flows out of the taps in their kitchens and bathrooms come from? Who works to make that water as safe as possible and keep it coming, clean and steady, day and night, year after year?

Is each and every one of them ready to pick up an automatic rifle and defend his home against an invading army? And who among them will be the general and who the privates in the unfunded militia that will protect our country against those who hate us?

And do they never go to professional football or baseball games, held in enormous arenas built at taxpayer expense for the benefit of private entrepreneurs? Do they not watch television, an amenity developed and delivered to us at taxpayer expense?

Did they all go to private colleges and universities, paying the vast tuition for places like Princeton, Yale, and Stanford out of pocket? Maybe they went to lesser schools, like Carleton College or Lewis and Clark—no problem sending the kids there with the savings from all those taxes not paid to support public universities and community colleges.

Maybe these folks, the Joe the Plumbers Sarah Palin pretends to speak for, can afford to put their kids in private or parochial schools. But most people can’t. What do they think will happen to America when 70 or 80 percent of the families in this country, absent public schools, cannot afford to educate their children?

One commenter at Bargaineering says about the claim that taxes are now historically low: “You forget to add into taxes things like social security, state and local fees and also real estate taxes.” Oh, the pain. I weep, I do.

Were it not for Social Security, after a lifetime of hard work and with a bouquet of graduate degrees, I would be sleeping on the street and blogging from the library. Oh, wait! No, I wouldn’t. There wouldn’t be any libraries without local taxes. I would not be blogging at all.

Nor would I be eating.

When I was laid off from my job—the micro-local consequence, we might add, of lax regulation of the financial industry and misguided theories about economy and government—I was forced into unwilling retirement because I am too old to get another job and do not know how to wait tables or stock shelves at the local WalMart (which wasn’t hiring anyway). I could not even get a job driving the tourist train at the zoo. Without Social Security, which now represents more than half my income, I would have lost my paid-off home because I could not have paid the utilities or the cost of basic maintenance. I would not have enough to to buy food or clothing.

If Social Security did not exist, my son would have to take me in and care for me through my old age, or else I would be on the street. And all those Tea Partiers would be doing the same for their parents.

Were it not for Medicare, I would not have any access to health care. Even with a better-than-average medical track record, my age, an evening in the ER with a stress attack pushing my blood pressure through the stratosphere, an incorrect diagnosis of a heart murmur, and a single hairline wrist fracture (signaling nonexistent “osteoporosis” to one insurance bureaucrat) render me ineligible for health insurance at any rational cost. If I could get an insurer to cover me, I could not afford it. For the health plan that cost $36 a month while I was working, COBRA charges $500. One early retiree I spoke with earlier this week said that he and his wife, both cancer survivors, are each paying $2,200 a month for health insurance!

That is more than my monthly gross income. It is $666 more than the 2005 average monthly income for Americans.

Medicare is pretty stiff, too: 8.33 times what I was paying on the job, where my employer footed most of the bill. The largest part of the individual’s cost of Medicare goes to private entities: Medicare Part D and Medigap are provided by the same insurance companies that rip you younger folks off; the only reason you can get full coverage in these programs—assuming you move fast and get yourself a policy the instant you become eligible—is that the federal government requires insurers to cover you without prejudice.

Taxes don’t just evaporate into the air. They buy essential services.

Those services keep our country safe, make commerce and communication possible, build and maintain the world’s best land and air transportation system, keep our food and water reasonably safe, give us a record high life expectancy (if you were born in 1900, when taxes were nil, you could expect to live just under 50 years), make it possible for us to educate our children for nothing or nearly nothing (have you priced private grade schools and high schools lately?), and relieve us from having to support our aged and infirm parents.

Among other things.

So please. Let’s get a little common sense!

Images:

Chicago Tea Party logo: shamelessly ripped from the Internet, without tax payment
Deutche Truppen am Arc de Triomphe, Deutches Bundesarchiv, Wikipedia Commons

Another Tax Hike!

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taxation-food-tax

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.

Open Office Users?

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Is anyone using Open Office’s word processing program?

In these precincts, I’m so fed up with Word for Mac. It bogs down the iMac’s system so massively that sometimes it will hang the entire system for several minutes, while it plods through loading or whatever it’s trying to do. Keyboard commands are different from the PC version’s, and if you try to write macros to replicate the commands you’ve internalized, you risk overwriting Apple system commands. Word’s given to sudden crashes that lose or threaten to lose all one’s data, rather tedious. And I hate, hate, HATE the new version of Word with its inscrutable “ribbons” that hide keyboard commands and make it difficult to locate the routine operations.

If you use Open Office, what are its demands on your system? Does it tend to hang your computer? Can you multitask with it, or does it slow down your system so that you’re better off closing everything but the word processor?

And—BIG!—how does the track changes function work? Can your reader see changes you’ve inserted? Can you insert comments?

And finally, can an Open Office document be viewed in Word? If so, do the tracked changes and comments come across?

In short, is it worth the effort to learn a new system?

Lemme know what your experience has been in the comments, pls. 🙂

Another Big Expense: Glasses

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Well, after diddling away $700-plus on clothes a few weeks ago, I’ve done it again. This time, a like amount is going into the optometrist’s pocket. Over the weekend I ordered up two new pair of glasses. Actually, one new pair and a pair of lenses for an existing frame.

I’ve never been satisfied with the progressives and the up-close glasses Costco ground out for me last fall. They just don’t work for the tasks I do in my day-to-day life, which largely entail reading, an activity that apparently has fallen into such disuse that optometrists don’t understand that one or two of their customers still do it. And the truth is, I never intended to use those as my regular glasses, anyway—I bought them on the cheap to use as back-ups.

When we learned that the university would delay closing our office until December, I realized that the period between open enrollment and Canning Day would only be about three months. This made signing up for Avesis, the low-rent vision insurance program, highly cost-effective, since I would only have to make three payments to get the benefit of a year’s worth of coverage. It was only a few bucks a month. If I ran over to Costco, the only dispenser they covered that’s not excoriated in various online consumer reviews, I could try a new pair of progressives (which had never worked well for me in the past) and get a back-up pair for the up-close glasses at a deep discount. My plan was to continue using my old glasses, which at least more or less work, and stash these to use when the good glasses wore out or got lost.

Well, even though I can’t see to read more than a few words in them and they’re useless for computer work, I found myself using the progressives as distance lenses. They work OK to drive in, and I can read the list of ingredients on most (but not all) packaged foods in the grocery store. It’s easier to navigate Costco and Safeway with glasses that will allow me to see down the aisle, even if sometimes I have to take the glasses off to read what’s on a package.

However, they’re not very satisfactory. To read the music for choir, I had to take a pair of old, very strong prescription readers, clip a case to my music folder, and trade off the progressives for the readers whenever the print was smaller than about 12 points. Which is, we might add, most of the time. Some of the print on those scores is submicroscopic! This was a clumsy proposition from the outset. And though I could see the music with the readers on, I couldn’t see the choir director, who signals his desires not only with hand gestures but with various facial expressions. Through the readers, his face is a blur.

Add to that the fact that both the Avesis-underwritten pairs are plug-ugly. I’d selected the frames I thought were the least ugly at Costco, but their selection, despite being numerous, is actually pretty limited. These things are clunky and owl-like. They work at cross-purposes to my current scheme to start looking better.

Well, for quite some time I’ve known about this optician’s shop next to A.J.’s, my favorite overpriced gourmet grocery store. He has gorgeous frames, and he insists that he can do a better job than Costco ever dreamed. He claims he can make a pair of progressives that actually will allow me to read copy, and he does himself one better by proposing to make a pair of monovision intermediate glasses that will bring 8- to 10-point type into view and allow me to see the choir director well enough to follow what the man is trying to tell us.

So on Saturday, having bent the damn Silhouettes again sliding them in and out of the case I clipped to my choir folder (they warp at the drop of a hat), I dropped by his place to ask him to straighten them. This time I took my latest prescription, having already decided to replace the clunkers with a better-looking pair.

What I found there was a frame along the lines of the Silhouettes, but made of a stronger, bendier material. The temple pieces are attached to the lenses in a different way, so they’re less likely to snap off and less likely to crack the lenses. They’re almost invisible on your face, and they’re so lightweight it feels like you aren’t wearing glasses at all. And supposedly they don’t warp as easily as the Silhouettes; when they do, they’re allegedly easy enough to put back into shape that the consumer can do it herself.

So while the optician was measuring for this new device, he revealed the reason I can’t read through the Costco progressives without tilting my head back and peering down my nose. Though the prescription is right and the Costco optician’s measurements were correct, somewhere in the assembly-line manufacturing process they cut off the lower part of the close-up vision range. So in fact, there’s just not enough space on the lens to see a page of print. That’s why…not surprisingly…I can’t see a page of print. He said you should not have to tilt your head to see through the things—that you should be able to read by glancing down, not by doing contortions.

He suggested I take them back to Costco and ask them to redo them correctly. I pointed out that it’s been six months since I bought them, and he allowed as how after that long they probably wouldn’t do anything about it.

At any rate, he makes the lenses himself, at his shop, rather than shipping them to Indonesia or wherever these huge chains outsource to. This means the glasses will be ready the middle of next week instead of two or three weeks hence. And he does his own quality control.

So, we’ll see how this works. Of course, I don’t expect these new progressives to work for all the things I need to see. But I’ll be happy if they work a little better and don’t make me look like the owl-eyed Mma Makutsi in the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency.

So…ahem! Where exactly is the money going to come from to cover seven hundred and some-odd dollars for a pair of freaking glasses? The frames alone were $390 (hey! I resisted buying the incredible $525 gilded pair with the ruby-colored Swarovski crystals), and then the progressive lenses were over $300, too.

Well, the truth is, even after paying for the clothing extravaganza, I still have enough in diddle-it-away savings to cover the cost. So when the bill comes I’ll probably just draw that down again. Even if there weren’t enough there to cover it, after having lived under budget for the entire spring semester, my $14,500 unemployment cushion has grown to something over $17,000. That overage was supposed to carry me through the summer, when, in the absence of teaching income, I’ll be living on nothing but Social Security, which covers only about half my base expenses. However, that extra $2,400 the college has decided to pay me for preparing the online course will moot the question of how I’m going to live through the summer. So, I figure there’s plenty to cover the glasses.

And in the justification department: one’s vision is not something to compromise on. Especially when dealing with it ties in so intimately with one’s vanity. La Maya once remarked, in justifying the wildly expensive pair of glasses she wears, that you have to wear the things on your face 16 or 18 hours a day. So if you have to have the things hanging on your nose all day long, you might as well break out of cheapskate mode and buy a decent pair.

Besides. Given the extravagant cost of Medicare B, Medicare D, and Medigap, this will easily push my 2010 medical costs high enough to make them deductible.

Good Corps, Bad Corps…

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The other day, Budgeting in the Fun Stuff remarked on Frugal Scholar‘s rant about the excruciating customer service emanating from Virgin Mobile. Both bloggers asked readers which corporations are best and worst in the customer (dis)service department.

Apparently they touched a hot button. They each got a slew of responses. Among them, we see that Comcast is roundly hated. Free Money Finance is locked in combat with that worthy organization—as his saga unfolds, it’s hard to tell whether Comcast is merely incompetent or deliberately obnoxious.

Yesterday while I was driving up to the optometrist’s office, what should I hear on NPR but this interesting story. It suggests a new tool for hacking through thickets of bad customer service, at least in some instances: small claims court.

Dartmouth Professor Charles Wheelan was subjected to United Airlines’ latest insult to passengers, a $25 charge for checking his bag. When they lost his luggage, they refused to refund his money. So he took them to small claims court. So far, he has yet to see either the bag or the refund, but, as he notes, even though the action cost him $72 in court fees, revenge is sweet:

Turns out that it’s [the $72 trade-off] actually really important in terms of economics. It’s essentially vengeance, and vengeance has a technical definition, which is you’re willing to harm yourself in order to impose harm on somebody else. Now when we do that, what the behavioral psychologists have learned, is it makes us feel good. It lights up the pleasurable parts of the brain just like doing other things that make you feel good. So vengeance might actually be quite rational.

United crossed the wrong guy when its baggage handlers threw musician Dave Carroll’s expensive guitar across the tarmac, with predictable results. His revenge came in the form of a hilarious (and infuriating) YouTube video that, says he, “became one of YouTube’s greatest hits and caused an instant media frenzy across all major global networks and sources (including the likes of CNN, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone Magazine & the BBC to name a few)” and spawned two more videos. He may never have extracted the $1,200 it cost to repair his guitar from United, but the resulting publicity boosted his career, probably returning that much and more in increased revenues.

Well, most of us don’t have Dave Carroll’s talent. But it’s not hard to put up a talking-head video on YouTube describing some egregious example of customer disservice, and the idea of taking the SOBs to small claims court over money owed has its charms.

My own strategy is first to bypass the CSRs by tracking down the names of upper management at the corporate headquarters and firing off a dear-sir-you-cur letter. Often this will get results, or a simulacrum thereof.

If the go-over-their-heads gambit fails, then I head for a regulatory agency or an attorney general. Many of these customer service fiascos amount to fraud or theft—when they stonewall you or outright lie to you, they’re ripping you off. The trick here is to go to the AG in the state where the company is headquartered and send a copy of your complaint to the AG in your own state.

When a company operates across state lines, as most of the faceless monsters that have developed immunity to customers do, then a fraudulent action becomes…yes…a federal case! Corporate America, as we have seen by the vast corporate donations to doctrinaire Kill-the-Beasters’ political campaigns, really dislikes dealing with federal regulators and attorneys general. So if you can’t get any action from a state attorney general, kick it up to the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, or the U.S. Attorney General. You’d be surprised how fast a call from any of these entities will settle your complaint.

Frugal and Budgeting ask readers what are their choices for best and worst customer service. My all-time worst customer service nightmare is Qwest, an outfit with whom no one should ever do business. Videlicet:

Back Again—Temporarily?
“We Value Your Business”
Unbundled! Qwest Strikes Again
What Happens When a Live Qwest Guy Shows Up
Qwest Redux: How Do These Companies Stay in Business?
Qwest: The Saga That Will Not End
Qwest Update

The best? It’s hard to think of many, since retailers and service providers now will openly tell you that the old saying to the effect that “the customer is always right” is dead wrong. CSRs apparently are encouraged to be rude and trained to bounce off complaints like tennis balls hitting a concrete wall. In my experience, the only outfit that’s consistently shown excellent customer service is the Mayo Clinic.

My question to you is this:

What has worked best for you to cut through a customer disservice fiasco?