Archive for February, 2010

Modern life, that’s what.

The Times didn’t arrive at the usual hour this morning (nor, I notice, did the Arizona Repulsive, delivered to the neighbors). It finally did show up, around 9:00 a.m.: it was reclining in a puddle of rainwater when I went to drive out of the garage.

A paper that gets to me after breakfast is a paper that arrives too late. I won’t even open the thing. I won’t have time to look at it, because I’ll be fully engaged in the hectic round of time-consuming, repetitive, can’t-be-neglected activities that is my daily life. And my life isn’t even especially busy, compared to most people’s.

As newspaper subscribers realize they’re paying to have half-a-forest of pulped wood delivered to their front doorstep that they have no time to read, they cancel their subscriptions. Revenues fall and management cuts back on the delivery of news. We get less content, less serious reporting, less of value. More readers cancel. In due time, the paper falters and then fails.

That’s about where I am with the Times just now. The only reason I haven’t canceled is that I got a smokin’ deal while I was on the ASU faculty. If I cancel the paper and then decide I want it back, that incredible bargain won’t be available again. I certainly can’t afford to subscribe to the New York Times at its full price. In addition, the Times is instituting a scheme to limit readers’ access to its online edition unless they’re already subscribers to the paper version (huh?) or are willing to pony up some cash for the privilege of cruising the web version. So…it’s either keep the paper subscription, continuing to abet the destruction of forests, the contamination of the environment in the production of ink, and the transport of wads paper smeared with ink that go directly into the recycling bin, or (since on principle I do not pay for Web content) forgo reading the Times altogether.

It sets up quite the internal conflict. I’d like to support journalism. It’s one of the pillars of democracy. Without good reporting—real reporting, not Play-Nooz—citizens cannot know what their elected leaders are doing (or not doing) and can’t know when it’s time to throw the rascals out. The long, slow demise of journalism has traced the long, slow demise of education in this country, and in fact when solid journalism no longer exists, the American republic will soon cease to exist.

But still… Sometimes I feel like a fool, continuing to pay for something that’s fading away like the Cheshire cat.

Image: John Tenniel, The Cheshire Cat. Illustration for Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. Public Domain

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Whenever the surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean shift in just the right way, we get an El Niño event, a periodic rainy season that goes on and on and on. All winter long, we’ve had rain at least once a week.

It’s raining again this morning. Poured half the night. The desert is greening up, and soon the hills and valleys will be awash in wildflowers. And, consequently, our noses awash in pollen. Arizona is the place to come when you want to find out what you’re allergic to!

Our xeric landscaping also bursts out in wildflowers, more familiarly known as weeds. Right now my front yard is filling up with milkweed and ragweed, filaree and dandelions, many of them noxious imports from other parts of the country and the world.

Some are very pretty. A variety of lupine, for example, will sprout in the alleys and occasionally in the lawn. By and large the ones that grow in the city, though, are plug-ugly, invasive, and turn your yard into a jungle of fanny-high brush that, as soon as the heat comes up, dries out and turns to tinder.

Most of the really pretty plants won’t grow in the city, though. You have to get out on the desert and climb a slope to see the carpets of Arizona poppies during the brief few days they bloom. I’ve rarely seen one volunteer in my yard—maybe once or twice, but they’re not happy and they don’t last long.

What with all this water falling out of the sky, the yard crop is fierce, noxious, thick, and so robust that it regards Round-up as a minor nuisance. I’ve dribbled the stuff on the front yard weeds twice, to exactly zero effect. And yes, I know… but let qui mal y pense come over here and spend a few days on hands and knees digging thorny plants that exude rash-inducing sap out of a quarter-acre of gravel.

The house plants are happy, though. There’s  no question that plants can tell the difference between rain and tap water. As the roses are vibrating with joy, so the indoor plants radiate vegetable contentment when they’re allowed to sit below the eaves and bathe in falling rain.

Problem is, of course, you have to yank them indoors at the first sign of hail, of which we have a-plenty. That Christmas cactus out there ran amok the first time it was put out in the rain this winter:

Cassie the Corgi, not being a plant, hates loathes and despises water when it’s not in a dish. Water falling out of the sky is particularly abhorrent. This morning she ran out into the wet dark, pivoted on a dime, streaked back into the house, and deposited a lovely steaming pile in the family room for me to clean up. {sigh}

Well, whenever I get back from ululating down at the cult headquarters, I guess I’ll have to set another fire in the fireplace, the better to keep the Cassowary warm and dry, and spend the afternoon in front of it grading student papers.

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Berkshire Hathaway Inc. released their annual shareholder letter earlier today. The shareholder letter was signed by Warren E. Buffett, Chairman of the Board of Berkshire Hathaway, on February 26th, 2010. Here are some of the pieces of inform...

American Express has emitted this year’s rebate: $334 back in my pocket! Took it direct to the credit union after having cashed the voucher at Costco.

Despite the new regime of penury, I decided to try to continue putting $200 a month into a savings account for indulgences and emergencies. This will jack the $400 accrued in January and February up to $734.

I do hope that American Express doesn’t pull the widely favored stunt of instituting an annual fee. I doubt that they will, because this card doubles as a Costco membership card. I think it’s more likely that they’ll get their pound of flesh by persuading Costco to raise  membership fees and then kick the increase back to AMEX.

If they put an annual fee on the charge card itself, then I’ll drop it. If they increase the Costco membership…hmmm. That’s another matter. I do almost all my shopping at Costco. It’s extremely convenient, the gas is cheaper than anyplace else around, and the meat is very high in quality. Plus they sell a brand of jeans that actually fit around my capacious rear end.

All of which could be said to fall under the heading of “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” Why would you drop a rebate card that returns $300 or $400 because the lender starts soaking you for $15? It is kind of stupid, isn’t it…

Well, it’s the principle of the thing: we’re already paying for these cards in the form of increased prices, since the banks charge retailers a stiff transaction fee for the privilege of taking payment in the form of a credit card. The cost is passed along to every consumer, whether or not that consumer pays with a card.

So I think the banks are earning quite enough without adding an extra gouge. If they want to charge users a fee for carrying a piece of plastic around, then they need to remove the transaction fee levied against retailers.

For the nonce, though, money has just happened. And I’m glad enough for that.

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So while I was visiting Costco to collect the AMEX rebate and get some gas, I also picked up some RoC Retinol Correxion Deep Wrinkle Fancy Flashing Lights and Mirrors Face Cream. I’d wanted to get some AlphaHydrox, which (as one might suspect) contains a stiff dose of alpha hydroxyls and did indeed make my ruggedly seasoned face look much better when last I used it. But couldn’t find the stuff at the drugstore on the way from the college to the Costco, so settled for the RoC, which boasts not only alpha hydroxyls but also a retinoid compound. It comes highly recommended by those who claim to be in the know. And it’s made in France. Oooooo! Must be good!

Like the mineral make-up, this set of three small tubes of overpriced face goop also came encased in steely hardened cardboard and impenetrable plastic.

Grrrrr…. To make a point, I asked the check-out dude if someone at the store would please cut the consumer-proof package open, since the last time I bought a package of make-up there I wondered if I was going to slice off a finger before I could get at the stuff.

To my amazement, he whipped out a box cutter and cheerfully sliced all the individual components free from their plastic prison!

Clearly, he was not dealing with the first person to make this demandrequest.

So. Now we know: whenever you are forced to buy items sealed in wretched impossible-to-open packages, ask the store’s staff to open them!

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Good grief! As all of us who live in cities large enough to support two or more Costco stores know, individual outlets of that worthy retailer tailor the merchandise to their surrounding demographics. Although basic supplies stay the same from store to store, the blandishments do not: the fancier the neighborhood, the more variety in choices.

Inside the stores, when any two Costco outlets offer the same products, the prices are the same. But outside? Not so much!

I dropped by the Costco near the college today, partly to cash in this year’s AMEX rebate and partly to see if I could pick a few things missing at own much more downscale store. Yes indeed, they did have the lifetime supply of sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil, MIA here in the ghetto. Not only that, but I picked up a pair of periwinkle blue jeans, unheard of among the working classes.

On the way out, I drove through the gas station. “Through” is the operative word: they wanted $2.55 a gallon, not significantly different from the street price and altogether, IMHO, too much.

From there I had to drive to the credit union at the West campus of GDU, there to deposit the $334 rebate (!) in my savings account. Another Costco outlet is located right on the way, and that one resides in a much scruffier area. Whip into the gas line there, and what do I find on the pump but a price of $2.43!

That’s a twelve-cent-a-gallon difference!

Since I bought 6.355 gallons, I saved almost a dollar (well…76 cents) by moving on down the road a couple of miles. The car was about a third of a tank down, so had I done a complete refill, the savings would have been over two dollah.

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For most Americans a jobless recovery is an oxymoron.  After all, the vast majority of Americans who pump money into the economy through consuming what they earn, typically find it harder to spend if they don’t have a job to draw an income from.  It is understandable that there is a lag between a recession and when companies start to hire.  But over the last four decades each subsequent recession seems to add more and more months of so-called jobless recovery.  Part of this has to do with the amount of exports we bring in.  When spending goes down in the U.S. the actual contraction goes beyond our country and hits many of our trading partners.  Yet the middle class in the U.S. has fallen behind both in nominal and inflation adjusted terms for over 40 years.  Part of this has to do with the structure of our banking system and our heavy reliance on debt spending.  Today, as talk of a recovery permeates the media outlets we have 38,000,000 Americans on food assistance and nearly 20 percent of Americans are registering as underemployed.

Let us first look at a Gallup poll registering underemployment:

Source:  Gallup

Now the Bureau of Labor and Statistics usually measures the above through their U-6 rate.  This rate measures those that are working part-time but would like to have a full-time job.  There is something psychological about this that makes it seem a lot better than full unemployment but the repercussions on the working class is deep and profound nearly as deep as full unemployment.  First, if you are working part-time you have less money to spend and this showed up in the survey clearly:

Source:  Gallup

This is important in understanding that even with a 6 percent growth rate in GDP last quarter that many people still feel this recession deep in their pocketbooks.  In addition, that latest GDP number is based on companies cutting their top line item, employees and also inventory restocking.  But these are usually one time measures.  What we want to be seeing is GDP growth because of additional consumption and growth through hiring.  That is the real nature of a healthy expanding economy.  Cutting and firing middle class workers isn’t exactly the recipe for a longer-term recovery.

Americans are having to do more with less and are facing new measures of austerity.  Many are adapting and many are simply unable to cope with the radical changes taking place.  Even in the past decade, many Americans came to rely on credit cards and home equity as some kind of embedded ATM for most households.  For over a decade this seemed to be the case.  Even many that relied on this deep down realized that something just wasn’t right when home prices kept going up by double-digits while their salaries remained stagnant.  Any lack of wage growth was made up by additional borrowing.  Banks were willing to lend out this money.  But now that the bubble has burst, Americans are filing for bankruptcies in record numbers, losing jobs, and losing their homes through foreclosure.  At the same time, the banking industry has kept their practices going thanks to taxpayer bailouts.  The middle class is bailing out the same industry that was largely at the center of this financial crisis and their practices still largely remain the same.

This struggle to maintain the middle class is going to be the story of the next decade.  But beyond that headline, we now have over 38,000,000 Americans receiving food assistance in this country:

Source:  SNAP

The most prosperous nation in this world has over 12 percent of its population receiving food assistance.  It is tough to see fellow Americans in such difficult times.  You can see on the chart above how quickly the rate has risen in this recession.  Clearly in every recession the rate will go up but in this recession the number has struck many more Americans.  In fact, the length of unemployment is a large reason for this as people eat into emergency funds.  Beyond that, we now have the largest percentage and number of Americans working part-time in history:

Source:  Itulip

In fact, the large number of underemployed has been a shadow to how deep this crisis really is.  For example, the headline unemployment rate nationwide is 9.7 percent.  That seems bad but nothing historical.  But just look above and add in that underemployment rate.  In reality, we can understand why middle class Americans are struggling so much with daily financial life.  Think of someone that lost their job and is now working at Wal-Mart as a greeter.  Sure they aren’t part of that 9.7 percent but they probably would think so:

“(The Atlantic) Over lunch I spoke with one attendee, Gus Poulos, a Vietnam-era veteran who had begun his career as a refrigeration mechanic before going to night school and becoming an accountant. He is trim and powerfully built, and looks much younger than his 59 years. For seven years, until he was laid off in December 2008, he was a senior financial analyst for a local hospital.

Poulos said that his frustration had built and built over the past year. “You apply for so many jobs and just never hear anything,” he told me. “You’re one of my few interviews. I’m just glad to have an interview with anybody, even a magazine.” Poulos said he was an optimist by nature, and had always believed that with preparation and hard work, he could overcome whatever life threw at him. But sometime in the past year, he’d lost that sense, and at times he felt aimless and adrift. “That’s never been who I am,” he said. “But now, it’s who I am.”

Recently he’d gotten a part-time job as a cashier at Walmart, for $8.50 an hour. “They say, ‘Do you want it?’ And in my head, I thought, ‘No.’ And I raised my hand and said, ‘Yes.’” Poulos and his wife met when they were both working as supermarket cashiers, four decades earlier—it had been one of his first jobs. “Now, here I am again.”

We are in a deep struggle and fight to preserve the middle class of this country.  What has made this country strong has been a compact between the government and the citizenship between work and some semblance of financial protection.  Yet right now with the banking system in power, it is all about that bottom line and they have no idea what is happening in Main Street USA.  They are happy with GDP going up by 6 percent even though this was based on restocking lost supply and firing workers.  But how is this really good for the middle class?

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Despite imagining that this morning brought some sort of Insight to the effect that I need to quit hanging on to pennies and try to invest something in building my little business enterprises…Jayzus!

This evening at Compline I was reminded that tomorrow we’re supposed to be doing a potluck surprise party for one of the veteran choir members. Oh god. I don’t have any party food and I don’t have any time to fix stuff like that, so that means I’m going to have to go out and buy something, and my grocery budget for this week is spent and then some, since I blew most of my food budget restocking my much-depleted Hoard. By the 21st, when the new February-March discretionary budget cycle started, I was out of everything from beans to toilet paper and so spent two hours at Costco buying everything in sight. Ohhhkayy…

Then I was told that afterward we’re all supposed to go down to Trinity Cathedral to continue the celebration at the concert that’s going on there tomorrow evening.

These concerts happen continuously, and you have to be fairly affluent to be able to drop $20 here, $30 there, and more every time you turn around. I can’t afford to go out to lunch, for godsake, much less trot around town to expensive evenings in performance halls.

{sigh} I was dismayed enough to blurt out that I just couldn’t afford to do that, and I got a look like I was a man-eating whale that had just flopped up the sidewalk on the lam from Sea World.

Well, said they, the cost has been reduced to ten dollars.

Yeah.

And that amount the COBRA bureaucrats told me I’d be paying each month? Wrong! After I went down to the COBRA office and forked over the $313 they announced I was to pay at first of this month, this week they served me with a past due notice for another big chunk of dough and then demanded over $200 for next month’s premium!

That alone might have been manageable, but combine it with the grocery restocking mission and you have…yes! Penury!

Everybody’s got their hand in your pocket. And that also would be OK, if there were something in the pocket for them to lift. But right now they’re scraping out the lint.

What concerns me is that if I take $2,400 out of the money I squirreled away to carry me through this year and to serve as a stopgap when (not if) expensive emergency bills arise, there won’t be enough to protect me.

All it will take is one huge veterinary bill, one spate of dental work, one car accident, one transmission failure, one small housefire, one good storm that blows the devil-pod tree onto the roof and I’ll be screwed. Screwed, screwed, ge-screwèd!

Speaking of dental work, one reason the COBRA bill is so high is that they didn’t cancel the Delta Dental, as I’d asked them to do (because I knew I couldn’t afford it…). Confronted with this little surprise, I decided to keep the coverage—only another two months remain, and I may be fixin’ to extract a fair amount of benefits from that outfit.

They will cover half the cost of a crown. That’s still not enough to keep the dentist from bankrupting you: half the cost of a crown is still $400 or more. But it’s better than the full freight.

I’m still grinding my teeth. Damn it. I thought the tooth-grinding would stop once I got free of the University from Hell. But noooo. Two more molars are cracked, and a crown that was put on another of the molars I split in my exuberant jaw-clenching is broken. So that’s three new crowns I need.

That’s $1500 or $2000 right there, and we’re only in February.

How do I get off this train, anyway?

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From 1946 to 2009 (a total of 64 years), the United States has racked up an impressive $10.303 trillion dollars in red ink. I'm not just adding up the deficits in this equation and leaving out the surpluses - this figure includes the surpluses as...

Hey! Funny about Money won in its first round at Free Money Finance’s March Madness Competition!

Thanks so much to all of you who voted for Truth, the Highest Thing. This is a great first step toward winning the $500 donation (I hope!) for All Saints.

FMF’s second round is now under way. I’m sure when you consider the sheer number of “games” in each March Madness round, you can extrapolate how much work this project entails. So I hope you’ll participate in each round! The current ones are here.

I have no idea when Funny’s round two entry will come up, but I’ll let you know when it does…and then will hope fervently that you’ll kindly vote again.

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