This is a Minimum?

Like most US families these days, money is a source of contention. All the bills keep going up, month after month, year after year. My little family has been slowly sliding toward the bottom of ‘Middle Class’ for over a decade. But on paper, it looks like we’re a long way from poverty.

That got me punching keys on my calculator, trying to figure out just what ‘poverty’ is. Politicians talk about people in poverty as if poverty was a minor inconvenience.

So, let’s take a look at this. A family of four, I heard recently, lived in poverty if their income was less than $23,000 a year. A full-time job is 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, so how hard could it be for a family to make that much? Not that easy, it turns out, because a single bread-winner would need to make $11.06 per hour.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. (This is NOT the minimum in all states. However, NO state has a minimum of $11.06.) A full time job at minimum wage only nets about $18,000 a year.

I know what you’re going to say; the other parent needs to get a job. That would push their income up to $36,000 a year. Good point. But who says this family has a second parent?

And even if it does, who will care for the children? 20 years ago, I was lucky to find a neighborhood woman who would watch 2 children for only $100 a week. I’m sure they want more than that now. If you want to take your children to a licensed day care, you will probably pay every after-taxes penny made by that 2^nd worker. What about family values? Are you a firm believer that children are better off being raised by a neighbor lady or a hired staff rather than their parents?

Another possibility is for the parents to work opposing shifts, to eliminate child care. This might work once the kids are in school, the night-shift parent could sleep during the day. But the parents would hardly ever see each other. Is that family-friendly?

I have my thoughts on how this ‘inconvenience’ should be addressed. I haven’t lived in poverty, but I have been that 2^nd bread-winner, and I’ve been the 2^nd bread-winner with 2 jobs when the 1^st bread-winner had 3. It should not be necessary for 1 family of four to have that many jobs in order to put food on the table.

Who Would Have Thought?

So, Mr Warren Buffet – a wealthy man I have come to respect – has been taunting other wealthy people to ‘pay their fair share’. The first response to his jibs was, “If you feel so strongly about this, make a donation to the government.”

To which Mr Buffet returned, “I will if you will.” So far as I’ve heard, he’s only matched the donation made by one other person, even though that person had made his donation before this spitting match began. I have not heard of any other elected officials – wealthy or otherwise - making any effort to personally alleviate the budget crisis for Mr Buffet to match.

Reminds me of that old saying, “Put your money where your mouth is.” Only, I think that refers to gambling, right?

Then Mr Buffet started talking about how unfair it was for him to pay a tax rate of about half what his secretary pays. He feels the wealthy should pay at least the same tax rate as the middle class. A LOT of people have mulled that over, and according to the polls I’ve seen, over 70% of the American people think that would be fair. Mr Obama thinks it would be fair. Somebody actually introduced ‘The Buffet Rule’ to Congress.

Well, who would have thought? It never came to vote, even though it had a simple majority of support. (Anybody know which Republicans supported it? That might be interesting to know.) But to keep it from being voted on, the wealthy Republicans banded together and filibustered. I’m sure the idea of having to pay more taxes than they already do seems like a personal attack on them.

Have they ever stopped to think what their lifestyle would be like if the 99% of the population who are NOT wealthy suddenly decided to ostracize them? No cooks, no maids, no butlers or gardeners or chauffeurs, no nannies for the kids, no pilot for the private jet. Now let’s get serious about it; no secretaries, no receptionist, nobody to work in their factory or office or whatever. Nobody to serve them in the restaurants or the night clubs or the bank … Who would have thought the 1% could be that dependent on the good will of the 99%?

Even Keys Are Complicated

In the last couple weeks, it seems like almost everybody I know has needed to get some keys made. A senior citizen wanted several copies of her house key, for the kids, the family friend, anybody who might be called upon to look in on her in her home. That wasn’t too difficult; her door lock is old enough that the key is still fairly simple to copy.

Two friends decided they needed to get a new key made for their carc. One because one of his keys stopped operating in his ignition switch, and the other because she had apparently lost one of her keys. Both were nervous about mis-placing the only one s/he had left.

Adam – let’s call him Adam – went to several key makers to get a new key made. Strangely, these new keys would work in his car door, and the trunk lock, but not in the ignition. Eventually, he went to the dealer and got a new key made. It only cost him $60-$75. Since I didn’t hear this story straight from him, I’m not sure how much it was.

His mother, Betty – also not her real name – was at a local hardware store for grass seed and a new drill when she remembered she wanted a new key made for her ‘new’ car. (She’s had it a couple years, and it wasn’t new then, but it’s far newer than the ’91 she’d been driving for over a decade, so she calls it new.) She handed her lone remaining key to the key-making person, who promptly handed it back with the information, “I can’t duplicate that. It’s got a computer chip in it.” So Betty also will need to go to the dealer, and instead of a couple bucks, it will cost BIG bucks.

This is ridiculous. THEY (corporations, in this case) came up with a way to ‘protect’ us from having our keys stolen and duplicated for the purpose of stealing our cars. Really? If someone steals our keys, they have access to stealing our car. So what it really means is that when WE (the customer) loses a key – which is always a possibility – we get to pay THEM big bucks to duplicate that key, instead of paying a smaller amount to a smaller, local company. Talk about squeezing blood out of a turnip.

Revamp the Tax Codes

My husband has grown increasingly frustrated trying to make sense out of filing taxes. Unfortunately, they have to be done. This year, he handed me the folder of papers and asked me to take it to a tax preparer.

A couple decades ago, we used to get some substantial refunds back from both the federal and state. It gave us a chance to take a chunk out of our debts, even if we had ‘loaned’ it to the government without getting any interest from it. The kids are pretty much grown and gone, and it happens that we are no longer paying enough in taxes.

Yeah, that’s right. We are looking at paying a bill to both the feds and the state. We not only are trying to clean up some Christmas debt, and stay on top of our regular debt, pay our real estate taxes, license all our cars and pay this year’s insurance premiums, now we have taxes to pay.

“Where’s the problem?” I asked the tax preparer. “For years, our taxes have been withheld at the appropriate rate for ‘married, no dependants’. We assumed that would at least put us in the approximate neighborhood of what we would owe for the year. But just in case, I instructed my part-time job to hold out extra.”

I was told that the W4 we fill out for our employers has little to do with what we will owe in taxes. Each employer withholds as if that job is our only source of income, which puts us in a lower tax bracket. Then when we file our taxes, our sources of income are combined, which puts us in a higher tax bracket. Suggestions for ‘rectifying’ the problem was to change our “married, no dependents” to “single, no dependents”, ask them to hold out extra. One last suggestion was to contact my pension plan manager and ask them to hold out a higher percentage of my pension for taxes.

I seem to vaguely remember one of the President Bushes cutting back how much was deducted from our paychecks. It was heralded as a means of stimulating the economy, a way of giving the middle class a few extra dollars in their pocket. This doesn’t really make sense to me. A couple extra bucks in my paycheck doesn’t go far enough to do any good; it’s not enough to pay a bill, it’s just enough to get a frappachino I really don’t need. I’d much rather ‘loan’ the government a couple extra bucks each paycheck and get a refund rather than a bill.

Why do we have to jump through hoops just to break even?

Customer Service

How many times has it happened to you? You’ve got errands to run with your family or friends, there’s not enough time to do everything, and you decide to pick up some fast food. At the drive-through microphone, you place your order; 5 assorted sandwiches, 4 fries, 1 onion rings, a chocolate milk shake and 5 large drinks.

Now you drive to the window, pay the bill, and they start handing items out; 6 drinks, one of them a shake, and two bags of food. You drive home, toss a comedy in the CD player, kick off your shoes and start to divvy up the food. What do you find?

The chocolate shake is strawberry.

There’s only 3 fries, but 2 onion rings.

There’s only 4 sandwiches, 1 of which bears no resemblance to anything you ordered.

You check the receipt; everything you requested is listed, and in the correct amounts. You lose your temper, call the manager to complain. His response? “Are you sure we filled it wrong?”

Welcome to the new customer service, where they are so concerned with getting orders out fast, they don’t bother to make sure they’ve gotten it right. And how can you prove anything is wrong? You’ve driven away. You could have done anything with your order since it was given to you.

I know people who don’t use the drive-through anymore. But even going inside and placing your order ‘to go’ doesn’t mean they’ll get it right.

A Place to Sit

A few years back, a friend went to a specialist. Walking had become so difficult, she couldn’t go a full block without stopping to let her knee pain fade. She was just past 50, and even though the doctor agreed that her arthritis was bad, he felt she was ‘too young’ to have a knee replaced. He gave her a pair of knee braces to help keep the bones in proper alignment and suggest she lose weight. But the braces tended to slide down her legs, which didn’t keep anything in alignment, and without being able to use her knees for exercise, it was pretty impossible to lose weight.

About 5 years later, she returned, braced to receive shots of fake lubricant in her knees, even though that stuff had to be renewed (more shots) every 3 months. NOW he was ready to replace one of her knees, but felt she could ‘put up with’ the other one a while longer. He still wanted her to lose weight.

Today, she is doing better. Only the one knee has been replaced, but the ‘old’ knee only occasionally gives her any pain. She belongs to a gym and works out fairly regularly, but has only gotten up to 1.5 miles on a treadmill. She enjoys theme parks and shopping malls, and used to enjoy a nature walk from time to time, but she really can’t do those any more. Why not? Because a lot of these places don’t have benches in the locations where she needs them.

For instance, at a theme park, you are expected to walk from your car somewhere in a sea of a parking lot to the entry gate, stand in line to get in, and then walk some more before you come to a snack place that might have a bench. And after you’ve spent the day walking and standing in line (with only a minute here or there sitting on a ride), you are expected to walk all the way back out the gate and to your car, if you can remember where you left it.

She had a handicapped sticker for her car for 3 months while she recovered from her surgery, but now she gets to park out with the regular people, beyond the handicapped stalls, the pregnancy stalls, the taxi stalls ... and there won’t be a bench for her to catch her breath when she finally gets to the mall door, either.

I don’t think a day goes by that you don’t hear somebody mention that today’s citizens are aging, that the ‘baby boomers’ are starting to retire. So why can’t anybody install a few benches scattered along the pathway?

Entitlements

I’m sure you’ve heard this word a lot lately; the Republican candidates have assigned it a negative connotation. I’m not sure exactly what they include in the ‘foul’ embrace of ‘entitlements’, but they certainly have been pushing my buttons.

Social Security – I’ve worked over 40 years, have been paying into Social Security since my mid-teens. When I can start receiving an ss check every month, then … darn right I’m entitled to it! It’s MY money! Politicians talk about the trouble social security is in. I remember hearing – years ago – that Congress saw social security as another pocket they could dip into whenever they felt like spending. Has that money ever been put back in? It’s just like a pension plan, right? Of course it breaks down if the company dips into the pension plan to buy office furniture! But that isn’t the fault of the people who have been paying in.

Medicare – I have heard horror stories about Medicare, like a 96-year-old falls on a patch of ice and breaks a leg (at least), and Medicare argues that it wasn’t ‘necessary’ for the ambulance to take her to the hospital, and they wouldn’t pay for that. But the fact is, businesses don’t continue paying any of your insurance premiums once you retire. And buying your own insurance is not feasible. I know someone who pays over 1/3 of her pension to her mortgage. She recently got a quote for health insurance that would take another 1/3 of her pension each month. If she wants to eat, have water to drink and keep her house above freezing in winter, all her other bills would go unpaid. So she’s gambling she won’t get sick, won’t slip on any ice patches. At least, not until she can sign up for Medicare in a few years.

The fanatics who are fanning the flames against ‘entitlements’ must either be rich, or they have ‘forgotten’ that old people don’t just disappear when they retire. After working for decades, retirees are hoping for a few years of relatively good health when they can enjoy themselves. Possibly they still have one or both of their own parents who are now relying on them for assistance, a ride to the doctor’s office, or so on. What do these fanatics do when their mother falls? Do they say, “Oh, well, she’s past her prime, and we can’t expect any more productivity from her, so just leave her there.” Or do they call for an ambulance, take her to a doctor to be checked out?