Coffee heat rising

Arizona legislature

More Days of Our Lives

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Busy past few days! Haven’t had time to write much, so much has been going on.

The minute I sat down to the computer this morning, Gerardo showed up. His “8:00 a.m.” usually means “10:00 a.m.,” so I’d imagined plenty of time to get a few things done before I started to prune the roses, a chore I’ve put off now for three or four weeks. Today was my chance: get him to haul the clawed debris from the man-eating plants, instead of me having to chuff it into the garbage bins in back.

But nooooo…. Before I could even bolt down breakfast, he was on the phone, on the way casa mia. So while he and his sidekick did battle with the rest of the yard, I cut back eight roses. Then for reasons unknown he decided nothing would do but I had to meet him at M’hijito’s house (why??), so here I am, in front of a strange computer.

Probably was a wise thing. I see the lime and lemon trees were hard-hit by the frost. The lime was OK where I was able to pin sheets around it, but I’m just not big enough to sling frost covering over the top of it, so about a third of its canopy is frizzled. The lemon tree, too, oddly enough, suffered some serious frost damage. Usually lemons and grapefruit are the toughest of the citrus. Anyway, I’ll have to ask Gerardo to trim back the limbs that are obviously dead.

Yesterday I became so engaged in a client’s project I utterly forgot the evening Bach concert for which I had tickets. Recalled it about 4:00 this morning. {sigh}

A choir member gave away three tickets to Bach Festival performances. I was thrilled to get all three of them, and really looked forward to going. So was mightily disappointed when I realized that, once again, because it wasn’t written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror I lost track of it. Old age is the pits.

Sunday, though, was a full day of glorious music. We sang, of course, in the morning, which is always fun, but much more to the point, the chamber choir, which is mostly composed of music professionals and graduate students, put on THE most incredible performance. One of the pieces was just ethereal, it was so beautiful. As his finale, choir director Scott Youngs, a superb organist, played an astonishingly complex piece, the kind of thing that leaves you in awe of what the human mind and body can do. In the afternoon was the Bach concert, four sonatas played by violinist Stephen Redfield and harpsichordist Kathleen McIntosh. It was very fine. From there it was back to All Saints to join the chant choir for evensong, and that was very pleasant. At the end of the evening, Scott performed yet another amazing piece, dark, complex and noumenal. Did you know an organ can make a delicate sound like chimes? I had no idea… It can. And the effect, in a piece of music that already evoked the the other-worldly, was spine-tingling.

Monday I made a conscious decision to stay away from the computer and clean my filthy house. Actually, I intended to get to the roses that day also, but the housekeeping expanded to consume the entire day. I’ve never been fond of cleaning. It’s such an exercise in futility: the minute you finish, it needs to be done again. Didn’t do the greatest job yesterday, but at least I finally, very belatedly cleaned and oiled the kitchen cabinets and scrubbed the dirt off the floors.

The magazine article writing course is not making, and so I asked the chair for another comp course. He said he would try to arrange that, but so far no word on what will come down. Whatever, you can be sure he’ll hand it to me at the very last minute. If it’s anything other than a 16-week Eng. 102 section or a 5-week 101 section, I won’t be prepared. So I determined that I need to at least draft course outlines for a 16-week 101, a new 8-week 101, and a new 8-week 102, each incorporating my latest pedagogical strategy. Writing any of those will take two or three full days. Setting up three of them so they’re ready to go at a moment’s notice represents about a week of unrelenting work. Ugh.

Of course, I should have done this over the winter break. But really, I wasn’t kidding when I said I needed a real, extended break from the 7-day-a-week, 14-hour-a-day work schedule. Nor was I kidding about bringing a halt to the unpaid labor. It’s taken almost the entire month to unwind and get back to feeling more or less normal. I could do with another two to four weeks away from the grind, to tell the truth. Next summer, maybe.

So, nothing much of import here, except for the ongoing buzz over the Tucson shootings

Turns out the deranged perpetrator had been arrested for drug use, apparently had contact with the police more than once, evinced symptoms of madness at not one but two institutions of our fine education system…and still he could freely walk into Sportsman’s Warehouse and buy a 9-mm semiautomatic pistol. Nothing like your handy-dandy Glock for picking off doves, eh?

And of course, since Arizona has done away with all concealed-carry regulation, he could have walked through the Safeway with the thing tucked into his belt. Because in Arizona it’s perfectly legal to carry a concealed weapon in your vehicle, after he was stopped for running a red light on the day of the shooting, he just went on about his murderous business.

What a place!

A new set of crazies is set to descend on us, and they are SO wacked that the viciousness has even penetrated our thick-skulled legislators’ notice. A bunch of nut cases from Kansas’s Westboro Baptist Church (“church”!) announced their plan to raise hell at the funeral of the nine-year-old girl who was assassinated. They’ve already circulated hate material to the effect that Catholicism is not a real religion, that the ceremony is devil-worship, and on and on, and they’ve made known their intention to yell this hateful garbage at the grieving family and friends burying their child. The legislature promptly passed a measure blocking protesters from approaching funerals any closer than 300 feet. But 300 feet is within yelling distance. At any rate, it was a positive sign, to see Arizona’s legislators make a move in the direction of common decency.

Let’s hope they hold that thought.

Images:

Frost on a Nettle (Netherlands). Vincent van Zeijst. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Johann Sebastian Bach im Alter von 61 Jahren. Elias Gottlob Haussmann. Public domain.
Broom, Sponge, and Towel. Chuck Marean. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Compact Glock 19 in 9x19mm Parabellum. Vladimir Dudak. Released under the GNU Free Documentation license.
Førde kyrkje ein kald vinterdag, 2000. Roy Henning Helle. Public Domain

Too much debt? Sell your house and rent it back!

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For Sale--Make Offer!

Ever doubt whether your elected representatives should be your role models? Well, here’s a new twist on finance guaranteed to convince you, one way or another: the Arizona state legislature proposes to sell state capitol buildings, presently owned free and clear by the taxpayers and including the state House and Senate buildings, and them rent them back from the new owners. So deep in debt is our feckless state government that this desperation move apparently makes sense to some of our august leaders.

Think of that.

Now let’s suppose you, the personal financier, owned your house free and clear; let’s imagine it’s worth, say, $300,000. You’ve made a few small errors in your personal finance adventure…to wit, you’ve charged up $350,000 on your credit cards, and now that the economy has imploded, you’re out of work and can’t pay those pesty, interest-bearing bills.

So to raise some cash to hush up the bill collectors, you sell your house to Bob Buzzardo for $280,000, about the best you can do in the depressed real estate market. You now have 280 grand in cash, and Bob agrees to rent the house back to you for $1,678 a month (not including taxes and insurance). You propose to pay down those nagging bills at the rate of $2,000 a month, using the money you expect will soon “begin flowing into [your] coffers,” creating a monthly outflow of $3,678. At that rate, your $280,000 will last 76 months, or about six years and four months—assuming you’ve invested the principal gained from your sale in a reasonably safe instrument.  At that time—when you run out of cash—you will have paid down your $350,000 debt by $12,688.

You will still be in debt over your head, and now you’ll be out of money to pay against those debts and also out of money to pay the rent.

Amazing concept, isn’t it?

Okay, I admit: a state government is not a household, and government finances do not equate to personal finances. Still, raising taxes—a move our legislators stoutly decline to do, especially where business taxes are concerned (horrors!)—is roughly the equivalent of taking a second or third job. Which would you do: a) take a side job or two; or b) sell your house, rent it from the new owner, and use the proceeds to pay the rent and try to keep the wolf from the door?

If your choice is the second, maybe you should consider running for public office.

😀

State budgeteers continue to wrangle

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Hauled back into session by a vetoing governor, the Arizona legislature unanimously restored funding to the public schools. The governor has agreed to sign the revised bills.

While the gov’ won this round, the budget remains incomplete, and so we state employees still can’t be assured our next paychecks will land in our bank accounts. One way or another, the fundamental problem remains: the state simply does not have enough money to pay for basic services, and other than having the legislators and state employees get together throw a giant bake sale, there’s no way to get the money without raising taxes. And the legislature is philosophically (one might even say religiously) opposed to taxation. Our elected reps want to lower taxes, not increase them.

Well, I don’t want my taxes raised, either. But then neither do I want to lose the benefits of soooo-cialism such as

• roads
• police protection
• fire protection
• unemployment benefits
• child protective services
• prisons
• state prosecutors
• public defenders
• public records
• public health protection
• water treatment plants
• libraries
• museums
• schools
• universities

…and on and on. Given a choice between sinking further into Third-World living conditions or raising taxes, I’ll take the tax increase any day.

Legislators in moronic game of chicken

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Every year, Arizona’s political leadership engages in a frenzy of grandstanding around the state budget. And every year we’re told to be scared, be very scared, because if the budget isn’t passed by the end of the fiscal year, the state government will shut down.

And every year, up until this one, it’s been so much stürm und drang.

This year, though, things look a little more dire. In the first place, we have an out-of-control legislature filled with right-wing demagogues who, deep in their hearts, would just as soon see the state government shut down. In the second, the state is in the middle of a real-life perfect financial storm; it’s not something a bunch of dunderheads can deal with, as we’re seeing by our elected representatives’ mulish and self-serving actions. And third: we’re not a week or two from the deadline. We’re hours away from it.

What the fools are doing is using the crisis to force through pet schemes that they couldn’t begin to faze past voters or a governor under normal circumstances. They’ve engaged the governor, who herself is very far to the right, in an idiotic showdown, refusing until the last minute to send her a budget they passed over two weeks ago, so as to circumvent her veto. They have no intention of putting their budget before the governor until the 30th, the last possible moment before the government closes down. Their outrageous scheme includes a provision for a flat income tax and a plan to put a one-cent sales tax before the voters, who are guaranteed to turn it down. It’s a pretend budget because it relies on a tax that will not fly, and it’s a doctrinaire end run to pass a regressive income tax that will weigh most heavily on the tens of thousands of Arizonans who have lost their jobs and the hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who live on substandard wages.

While the governor probably is not prohibited from vetoing the budget if it arrives on her desk that late, they’re just daring her to veto it and shut down the government. She actually sued the legislature—a body dominated by members of her own party!—asking the state supreme court to find their actions unconstitutional and force them to get off the dime. The court agreed their actions are unconstitutional but declined to rule that they must play nice.

The characters in the legislature are so extreme, such right-wing wackos, that they make Governor Jan Brewer look moderate. That is quite an accomplishment.

If the budget is not passed by Tuesday, then none of us state employees will get our paychecks on Thursday. And one wonders whether we’ll be covered by health and dental insurance, since our premiums also will be in arrears.

One thing you have to say for Arizona politics: it’s always a spectacle!

Right-wing legislators, pushed to the wall, raise taxes

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LOL! What should I notice in today’s paycheck but a $13.43 pay cut?

So I enquire of our business manager…whazzat? She forwards the following:

State increases tax withholding rates


The Arizona state income tax withholding rates will increase effective May 1, 2009. ASU employees’ paychecks issued on May 8 will reflect the new tax rates mandated by Arizona Senate Bill 1185, which was signed into law April 9, 2009. The Senate bill amends the amounts required to be withheld for Arizona state withholding tax as a percentage of an employee’s federal withholding tax.

 

Between May 1 and Dec. 31, 2009, the withholding rates will increase. Between Jan. 1, 2010, and June 30, 2010, the withholding rates will decrease. Please consult your personal tax professional if you need further assistance.

Decreasing the withholding rate won’t help those of us who are to be canned on or before December 31, such as, say, moi. Given these chuckleheads’ rabid opposition to any kind of tax increases—and heaven forFEND any increases on the businesses here who help to keep this a right-to-work (for nothing) state—it certainly is inspiring. Notice how they get around admitting it is a tax increase by changing the old way the state figured taxes to a percentage of federal income taxes.

So in addition to the furloughs and layoffs, the kookocracy brings us yet another pay cut.