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Economy

Economy Is Politics: Arizona’s politico-economic disaster

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Bet you thought I was exaggerating when I described the shenanigans going on down at the state house. Truth to tell, though, that post was barely the half of it: a lazy job of reporting, indeed.

To date, budget shortfalls have gutted higher education in Arizona, trashed K-12 education, closed down state parks, and shut down important segments of the state government. Tens of thousands of state workers and employees of companies that contract to the state have been thrown out of work. Far from showing any concern about these disasters, our legislators persist in a demented campaign to balance the budget on the backs of our children, of our most vulnerable citizens, and of every other resident.

What they are proposing to do is cut state income tax revenues by a half-billion dollars, repeal the $250 million state equalization tax, and inflict a further 5.2 percent cut on our already devastated education system. Health care for low-income children would be cut. Child Protective Services, never the nation’s finest agency of its kind, will be further reduced. Food banks will be cut.

To silence opponents, the legislature’s plan proposes to put the governor’s desired temporary 1 percent sales tax increase to the voters; in the unlikely event that they approve it, the 5 percent education cut will be erased.

The 3 percent flat tax legislators are straining to push through in this budget proposal will cut state revenues by $450 million just as a three-year sales tax hike phases out.

As a clue about what kind of people these are, Arizona Senator Jack Harper has described teachers as “feeding at the public trough,” and he made himself the subject of an ethics complaint when, acting as chairman of the committee of the whole, he “accidentally” shut off all the microphones in the room and then cut off an ongoing debate.

Meanwhile, these nut cases are legalizing dangerous fireworks, banned in Arizona for years because of the horrific risk they pose to the children to whom they are marketed (good idea: the more of the little darlings we can maim and kill, the less we’ll have to pay to educate them!), ending the hard-won domestic partner benefits for state employees, and planning to allow Arizonans to carry concealed weapons without a permit and to carry guns into public buildings and schools. They want to close the Arizona Historical Society (shutting a half-dozen museums and effectively discarding their holdings) and they have withheld $18 million in research funding promised to the Science Foundation Arizona. However, overcoming their distaste for “socialism,” these worthies are applying for $1 million in federal funding to save the state’s debunked, intellectually bankrupt abstinence-only program.

A  million bucks for abstinence-only…these are the same folks who tell us that if you’re poor and your sick child needs expensive medical care, you’re out of luck. See? If you had just abstained, you wouldn’t have had that weakling brat!

Jon Talton, an observer who calls the gang in power the Kookocracy, suggests we allow the fools to have their way. The disastrous result, he thinks, will demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt what extreme right-wing dogma means to the individual citizen’s pocketbook, jobs, and quality of life. That’s what it will take—the collapse of the state’s government and economy—to persuade Arizona voters to put the wackos out of office, once and for all.

Maybe so. In the interim, the disaster that will ensue—that is ensuing—will make this state a terrible place to live for a long time to come. Friends are talking about retiring to northern New Mexico. Not a bad idea: once I’m out of work this winter, thanks to the dismantling of higher education, I won’t really have to stay here. I may follow them to Los Alamos, joining the brain drain that’s already under way.

Word from On High: Stay Calm

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Yesterday the Deans tried to do a little damage control. The six of them called a “town hall” meeting of academic professionals and other underlings in related nebulous positions. The conversation was pretty interesting, and I (for one: possibly the only one) came away slightly encouraged.

To understand the subtext, you need to know just how precarious the “academic professional” or “service professional” position is. These are full-time jobs that,even though they’re nontenurable and usually ill-paid,are considered quasifaculty positions. Some are nine-month (academic year) and some are twelve-month (fiscal year) appointments, but in either event incumbents stay at the whim of the administration. APs are exempt, meaning the bosses can fire you at any time, for any or for no reason. Tenurable faculty cannot be canned for nothing, and neither can classified (nonexempt) staff, for whom dismissal requires a supervisor to go through the tortures of the damned. Thus, academic professionals hold the university’s single most vulnerable full-time job. APs include librarians, program directors, certain researchers and instructors, and various oddments such as graphic artists and editors.

Before the current president acceded to the throne, some APs were theoretically tenurable: these worthies had “continuing” contracts, as opposed the more typical year-to-year renewable contract. A year-to-year renewable means the university issues a new contract annually; a “continuing” contract is effectively permanent. As a practical matter, the search process is so cumbersome and such a hassle that most people on year-to-year renewable contracts, afloat on institutional inertia, hang onto their jobs as long as anyone else. But of course, a continuing contract is much to be desired.

Not surprisingly, most of the layoff rumors blowing through the halls have focused on academic professionals. The libraries have stopped acquiring books and have canceled all their periodical subscriptions, rendering librarians redundant—quite a few of them have already been canned. Starting in the middle of last summer, we have heard volley after volley of theories to the effect that some or even all service and academic professionals will be laid off. And, not surprisingly, morale among this group is at an all-time low; fear and loathing, at an all-time high.

The overall gist of the deans’ remarks at yesterday’s meeting was uncertainty. They admitted that they didn’t have a clue, but, while warning that more cuts are pretty much inevitable in fiscal years ’09 and’10, they said they saw “cause for cautious optimism.” They insisted they are doing all they can a) to shield students from the worst effects of the disastrous budget cuts, and b) to minimize staff cuts to the extent possible. Those brief statements made, they opened the floor to questions. Videlicet:

What will happen if a state of financial emergency is declared?

The Board of Regents is the only entity that can do so. [This conflicts with the university’s rules and regs pertaining to employees, which specifically state the university president can declare a state of emergency.] The deans do not believe this will happen in FY 2010, and the FY 2009 disaster has now been wrestled into a “manageable” state.

Will the furloughs continue into FY 2010? Or will they morph into a permanent salary cut?

No, and no. The furloughs created massive administrative headaches, leading the deans to conclude that “furloughing is not a good way to do things.” [Roger that, bosses!] They urged staff to keep in mind that our college plays such a crucial part in the university’s mission and operation that it has “a privileged position.”

Will the satellite campuses be closed?

Not likely. However, the College’s vice-president (i.e., our Dean of Deans) remarked that it would be preferable to shut those campuses than to damage services at the main campus.

About three weeks ago, the questioner, an instructional professional with a continuing contract, received a notice from the vice-president for personnel stating that her contract would be canceled and replaced with a year-to-year or even possibly a semester-to-semester contract. Other APs have not received any such message. What’s the deal?

The deans are discussing the issue with the Provost’s office. They are resisting this move, because they wish to retain APs [who do much of the College’s scutwork]. If the College is forced to dismiss a lot of adjuncts—or if many of them seek work in the community colleges or the business world—we will be forced to close our doors. To retain APs, the university is doing all it can to increase funding. Our funding sources, which include tuition revenues [especially from out-of-state students, who pay exorbitant rates] and external funding grants, are up. Tuition revenues are up; retention is up. One-third of the university’s revenue comes from tuition.

That’s great, but what about contracts for academic and service professionals?

What is on the table are six-month or semester-to-semester contracts. We will not know what comes of this until April. The Deans are not included in the discussion. The administration wants more “flexibility.” They want to be able to end contracts summarily.The service professional’s twelve-month contract, which requires a 90-day warning of cancellation, does not provide this. In April, all service professionals may be told that we will be hired from July through December of FY 2010. This has not been firmly decided, but it is certain that multiyear (“continuing”) contracts will go away.

Will changing the contract’s terms affect our benefits?

No.

The deans wrapped up the discussion by saying that although the worst is probably over, we’re not through the storm; some rough times are still ahead. Things will be clearer, they said, in six to eight weeks, mid- to late March.

Isn’t that sweet? In one breath they tell us the university’s operations depend on our underpaid presence, and in the next they tell us they’re about to remove the teensy bit of job security we had. Now, instead of not knowing from year to year whether we’ll have a job, we won’t know from month to month. In all their earnestness to reach out to staff and calm the waters, what they did was reiterate an old truth of academia: Universities subsist on exploitation.

We need a union.

Well, at least it appears that those of us who survive into FY 2010 will see our salaries return to normal. It also looks like there may be a fair chance my job will not be RIFed. To be OK in a premature retirement, I only need to hang on for another year. It would be ideal if I could stay in this job for another three to six years, but even a single year would suffice.

“Shared Work”: It has some advantages

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So this morning I made it to a ninety-minute presentation on Shared Work, the Unemployment Service’s plan to provide a modicum of compensation for people who are being furloughed instead of flat laid off. In a nutshell, if your employer cooperates you can get unemployment compensation for those days that you’re not paid on your job. Within limits. The scheme has some nice advantages over regular full unemployment compensation, but it retains a few of the old program’s drawbacks.

Plusses are significant:

You do not have to reapply for every week in which you have a furlough day. Your employer takes responsibility for informing the bureaucracy of the days your pay is docked. That cuts an enormous amount of red tape and hassle.

You are allowed to earn income from a second job or from freelance gigs without losing the Shared Work benefit. This is a sharp contrast to regular unemployment insurance, which boots you off the system if you get so much as a day of back vacation pay.

If you manage not to be laid off and if you earn enough to get by on your reduced salary, you could in theory collect the ten or twelve weeks’ worth of payments and stash them, plumping your savings account a bit or using the money to pay down debt.

Cons are also significant:

These payments bite into your regular unemployment compensation, in the event that you do get laid off. If you collect, say, $400 from Shared Work, your unemployment entitlement will be cut by $400. This means that if you’re in the financial position that too many state employees find themselves in—below or right at the poverty line—and you have to use the Shared Work payments to make ends meet, you will suffer when you’re laid off.

The payments are piddling. The max payment would be something like $48 a day, barely enough to buy a bag of groceries—given that you will take off one day every two weeks.

To be eligible, you must be furloughed for at least 10% but not more than 40% of a given week. This means that if you take as many as 20 hours of furlough time in a week, you don’t collect a penny. In other words, you can’t bunch several or all of the furlough days together to give yourself a little unpaid vacation. Take off 16 hours or more, and you lose the compensation.

The default mode of payment is a debit card issued by Chase Bank. The Unemployment Service’s spokesman warned, in no uncertain terms, that these cards have all sorts of strings designed to nick and gouge users, including limits on where you can use the things, how you can use them, and how many times you can use them. To get the government to direct-deposit the payments, you have to fill out yet another form (we filled out seven pages of forms today, including one that gave the gummint permission to examine all of our bank account activities). It takes two weeks or so to put your request in action.

As with regular unemployment compensation, you have to sit out a one-week “waiting period” after your first day of eligibility. This means you will not and cannot be paid for your first furlough day. So instead of receiving Shared Wages for 12 days, GDU employees will get it for 11 days. It smacks of another right-wing whack at the working poor, highly offensive in my view. If you’re unemployed for x days, you should collect Unemployment Insurance for x days, not for x – y days.

It certainly adds insult to injury. We’re the ones who are suffering from the shenanigans perpetrated by outfits like Chase, and now we have to pay the SOBs for the privilege of using our own unemployment insurance? That truly does stink.

But hey! Beggars can’t be choosers, eh?

Anyway, there it is. Better than nothing, I guess. Better than being canned now instead of later.

Update: It now begins to look as though at least the first payment from the Unemployment Insurance Service, a munificent $48 on $240 lost to a day’s furlough, may never be retrievable. Stay tuned for more entertainment.

The grocery pool

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The pooling scheme I came up with for budgeting has worked exceptionally well. In short, all inflowing cash goes into a single checking account at the credit union. From there, the amount needed to cover recurring monthly expenditures, such as utility and insurance bills, goes into an account from which EFTs are drawn, automatically paying my various creditors. Another amount, currently budgeted at $1,200, goes to a money market checking account, where it is held to pay the monthly American Express bill; I charge all expenditures other than regular bills on this card and pay it off at the end of each billing cycle. Three hundred dollars goes from the “pool” into an escrow account each month, to pay annual property tax, car insurance, and homeowner’s insurance. And finally, $400 a month (soon to drop to around $100, thanks to the furloughs) is transferred to savings.

The upshot of this is that there is always enough to pay the bills. And then some: because the de facto pay cut created by the switch to bimonthly pay forced me to live on $220 a month less than I used to have, the two so-called “extra” checks this system presses on us go unspent. Over the course of a year, the equivalent of two net paychecks has ended up in savings.

Here’s where I’m going with this: Why couldn’t you do something similar with grocery and household supplies?

Suppose you took a chunk of savings, as I did when I originally bankrolled the “pool” account, and used it to buy a full month’s worth of groceries and cleaning supplies. Wouldn’t that have the same effect as “pooling” your income? Over time, it would create a fair amount of savings. Here’s how:
1. Given that the original month’s grocery stash would include a lot of staples (things like flour, salt, sugar), you probably wouldn’t use it all during a month. So, if you repeated your first stash run at the beginning of the second month, by the start of the third month you would always be way ahead of yourself. In other words, after the first two months, instead of buying a whole month’s worth of goods at a time, all you’d be doing is restocking, and you would never drop below a month of supplies in your stash. Over time, you likely would find yourself having to restock less and less.
2. Because you rarely would be in any hurry to restock—this assumes you keep an eye on what you have and become aware that you will need x or y before you run out—you could wait to make purchases until you found the items on sale or until you had time to drive across the city to retailers with better prices than those available at closer-in stores.
3. Three weeks of every four, you would stay out of grocery stores! We’ve already seen that simply not going into stores saves a surprising amount of cash.
4. It would force you to plan and to write lists; once you arrived at a store, you would be very focused on acquiring only the things you needed, and so you would be less tempted to make impulse buys. As commenter Anne reported, research by the supermarket industry has shown that a list is one of your most powerful money-saving tools at the grocery store.
5. Think of the amount of time it would save! I dunno about you, but I spend half of Saturday or Sunday driving around to grocery stores, searching for products, and standing in line at check-out counters. That doesn’t count the time spent stopping by a store on the way home to pick up things I’ve run low on or forgotten during the weekend expeditions. Shopping is far from my favorite pastime. Imagine having your entire weekend free to do what you want to do!

I’m going to try it.

Here’s my plan:

First, use some of the savings I’ve stashed over the past few months to buy a freezer ($200 at Costco).

Next, clean off some shelves in the storage room and in the garage to make space for dry goods, cleaning supplies, and personal items (such as shampoo, contact lens solutions, soap).

Third, compile a well thought out list of all the stuff I need over the course of a month.

Fourth, buy some airtight containers for grain products, such as flour, cornmeal, and oatmeal (or make room in the freezer for them).

Fifth, buy some wire baskets to organize goods in the freezer.

Sixth, reallocate the AMEX budget, which currently is divided into four equal “chunks” allowing about $300 a week for food, gasoline, household and yard goods, pool supplies, pet costs, and incidental expenses. Front-load the budget to allow about $500 in the first week (this will cover gasoline and a few other items in addition to a month’s worth of groceries), and cut the amount available in the other three weeks.

Seventh, download or clip coupons to assist in getting better buys.

Eighth, on February 21, which is the first day of the billing cycle (the food & incidental budget runs on the AMEX billing cycle, not from the first to the last of each month), spend the entire darned day running around buying enough to stock the first one-month stash. Package and store things so they will keep and can be accessed from the oldest stuff to the newest.

Ninth, keep a running list of items that need to be replenished. Try to refrain from buying these things until the next shopping expedition.

Tenth, on March 21, make a second run on the stores. In addition to replenishing things that have run low, purchase a second full month’s worth of stash goods. This will enlarge the stash so that at any given time it should contain well over a month of food and household goods.

Freaking brilliant, isn’t it? Sometimes I amaze me.

It has several golden advantages.

1. Over the long run, it should save a lot of money on groceries.

2. It forms a kind of “emergency fund,” in kind instead of in cash. Should I lose my job (a prospect that looks less unlikely as the days pass), I’ll have enough food in the house to last for several weeks. During that time, I should be able to earn enough to get a grip on making ends meet. Not having to buy groceries for a month will make that challenge a lot easier.

3. It saves a phenomenal amount of time and, three weeks out of each month, relieves me of a tedious chore.

4.Over time, the stash may accrue, just as money in the “pool” checking account accrues. In a year or so (assuming I keep my job and so can continue the monthly purchasing), this strategy could result in my having a lot of food, household supplies, and personal goods stored in the house. Effectively, it will grubstake retirement. When I do retire and see my income drop drastically, I will not have to worry about where my next meal will come from.

Got a freezer? Now’s the time to stock up

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beansIt looks like this is the time to hoard up some food, if you havesomeplace to store it anda few extra bucks. CBS MarketWatch reports that deflationary pressures have pushed prices about as low as they’re likely to go. Everything from soup & nuts to automobiles is marked down.

Earlier this week I found some very nice seven-bone chuck roasts at the Safeway: $1.47 a pound, a buck less than hamburger. I bought two and had them ground into burger (I’m not nuts about stewed beef; and I can feed hamburger to the dog as well as to myself).

If you have some money or some credit, now is the time to buy a car or a house. I sure can’t afford that and don’t know anyone who can…but somewhere there must be a retired banker or two who could manage it.

Seriously: As the piper comes around asking to be paid for all the rescues the taxpayer is subsidizing and for all the money the government is minting to engineer those subsidies, we’re likely to see some serious inflation. If prices go up and none of us can get work, we’re all going to be in deep trouble. Helle’s Belles: if prices go way up—or, to put it another way, if the value of the dollar goes bust—it won’t make much difference if we are working, because our wages won’t buy us a heck of a lot more than unemployment benefits will.

This weekend I think I’ll see if I can find a small freezer that will go through the door to the spare bedroom I’ve devoted to storage. It wouldn’t take a lot of extra freezer space to hold at least a couple months of food for me and the Corgi. Then as food comes on sale, I’m going to start buying, wrapping, and storing.

It looks like I’m going to need a new washer one of these days—have you seen the prices on the frontloaders at Costco? They even have one of those top-loading high-efficiency washers with no agitator at an almost affordable price (good-bye wadded up sheets and ripped shirts!).

The problem with buying a big-ticket item before one really needs it is that in these uncertain times it feels like a real bad idea to part with whatever cash you’ve managed to sock away in savings. And you can be darned sure racking up debt to take advantage of rock-bottom prices is a bad idea. But…if things get as bad as they could get, a freezer would pay for itself. So would some “futures” in rice, beans, and canned goods.

State legislators get their way

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So, here’s what happens when you gut a state university’s funding:

§ Applications to next year’s freshman class at the Great Desert University are closing.
§ Four dozen academic programs are closing.
§ Each satellite campus will be left with only one college; all other colleges and programs at those campuses, which serve the eastern and western districts of a huge, far-flung metropolitan area, will be closed.
§ The nursing progam will be further reduced (enrollment had already been cut) and moved to the downtown campus.
§ The program for training firefighters will be closed.
§ The clinical laboratory sciences program will be closed.
§ The master’s degree in sports business will be discontinued.

Here’s a summary of other programs that will be canceled at this one university:

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Tempe)

• M.S. Kinesiology
• Master of Natural Sciences (MNS)
• Concentrations in Natural Science in
• Life Sciences
• Geology
• Speech and Hearing
• MA Anthropology concentrations in
• Archaeology
• Physical anthropology
• Sociocultural anthropology

Herberger College of the Arts

• Ph.D. in History and Theory of Art

Music

• M.A. Music and Music Theory Concentration
• M.M. Music concentrations in
• Performance (Music Theatre/Opera Directing)
• Music (Performance)
• Performance (Music Theatre Performance)
• Performance (Music Theatre Musical Director)
• Music Ed (Jazz Studies)
– Music Artist Diploma

Theatre

•  MFA Theatre concentration in Scenography

Mary Lou Fulton College of Education

• Ed. D. in Curriculum and Instruction
• Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction
• Physical Education
• Ed. D. in Adult Education
• M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction
• Communication Art
• Professional Studies

College of Teacher Education and Leadership

• M. Ed. Education Administration & Supervision concentration inEducation Entrepreneurship

College of Technology & Innovation

• Computing Studies
• M.S. Tech. concentration in Computer Systems
• Electronic Systems
• M.S. Tech.
Electrical Engineering Technology concentrations in
• Instrument and Measurement Technology *
• Microelectronics

Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering Tech

• M.S, Tech Mechanical and Manufacturing Tech concentrations in
• Aeronautical Engineering Technology
• Security Engineering Technology

Information Management Technology]

• M.S. Technology

Technology Management

• M.S. Tech.in Fire Service Administration
• Undergraduate Certificate in Fire Service Management
• BS in Industrial Technology
• BAS concentration in Materials Joining Manufacturing Technology
• BAS concentration in Fire Service Management
• BAS concentration in Aviation Maintenance Management Technology
• BAS concentration in Digital Media Management
• BAS concentration in Digital Publishing
• BAS concentration in Municipal Operations Management
• BAS concentration in Law Enforcement Management
• BAS concentration in Technical Graphics
*BAS concentration in Computer Systems Administration
• BAS concentration in Cyber Security Applications
• BAS concentration in Software Technology Applications
• BAS concentration in Microcomputer Systems
*BAS concentration in Alternative Energy Technologies
• BAS concentration in Instrumentation
vBAS concentration in Semiconductor Technology

Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness

• B.S. in Agribusiness with concentrations in
• Golf and Facilities Management
• Professional Golf Management

New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

• M.A.I.S. (Masters of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies)
• M.A. in Communication Studies
• M.A. in Social Justice and Human Rights

Now, just between you and me, a few of these programs should have been closed years ago. But most are legitimate professional programs that train workers for decently paying jobs, many of which contribute not just to the state’s economy but also to the welfare and safety of the entire citizenry.

The wacko right-wingers have gotten their way: they’re killing the beast. Let’s just hope the next time the morons who vote for these people need a nurse, a firefighter, an IT specialist, or someone to diagnose and treat their hearing-impaired child, they remember to thank their elected representatives for the result.