Religious Freedom

A lot of politicians seem to look to our ‘Founding Fathers’ for support for their way of thinking about an issue, such as gay marriage, a woman’s place, etc.  While I respect our Founding Fathers for setting up our country, I think of them as people, not as gods incapable of making mistakes. I have three points to make here.

#1 – A lot of modern  politicians seem to have adopted an extreme religious stand, as I see it, and for some reason, they feel they must shove their opinion and beliefs down the throats of the rest of the country. They may say how much they admire our Founding Fathers, but they completely ignore that the Pilgrims came here to escape religious persecution. And right in the preamble to the constitution, the Founding Fathers asserted they wanted to ‘secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity’. Have you looked up the meaning of ‘liberty’? The very first meaning given in my source is, “freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.” Of course, I don’t imagine any despot actually sees themselves as one. And how can a religious belief be despotic? When people who don’t hold that same belief are forced to act as if they do. If that isn’t religious persecution, I don’t know what is.

#2 – It also seems like these politicians have forgotten – or chose to ignore – that our Founding Fathers lived in a different time period. Not only has the date changed, but technology has changed, our language has changed, and our social morals have changed. These people want to pretend that times were much better when our Founding Fathers were putting together our nation. Really? I’ve used outhouses, sweated through summer camping trips, cooked over open fires and wood-burning stoves. That’s enough to convince me that I don’t want to go back. I’ve also been inoculated against small pox and polio, suffered through gall bladder attacks and have friends who have had a knee replaced, allowing them to walk again. Do I want to forego modern medicine to be crippled or die in agony? No thanks. The present is where I want to be, at least until the future gets here.

#3 - How would the Founding Fathers feel about being used to support a particular religious belief as a political stand? I don’t think very many would like it. The Founding Fathers were a varied lot; Roman Catholics, Episcopalian, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Methodists, anti-clerical Christians and deists. If they were trying to incorporate a particular religious bent to their plans for a nation, how could they possibly have agreed what that bent would be?

Our Founding Fathers were capable of thinking for themselves, did not cater to their religious beliefs while trying to formulate a plan for a new nation. I can only hope that modern Americans can think for themselves enough not to mix oppressive religious beliefs with political issues.

Blood from a Turnip

I hear from friends about their (mostly) grown children still living at home – or coming back to live at home – because they mis-calculated how far they could make their paycheck stretch, and suddenly, they didn’t have enough money to cover the rent and groceries, along with everything else. Most of us went through something similar when we were that age, so we agree that it’s part of growing up. It’s how they’ve learned all their lives; push their boundaries until they get pushed back. Unfortunately, when young ones push their financial boundaries, it might take them years to get their finances straightened out again.

Even more unfortunate, some people never learn how to handle their finances.

But most of us do. And we manage to live most of our lives paying our bills fairly regularly, even if we are  living paycheck to paycheck.

Unless something breaks. We get laid off. A family member becomes terribly ill. You are forced into retirement in the midst of an ‘economic downturn’. That last one means that you (hopefully) get a pension, but it will be a set amount, month after month, while the cost of living goes up and up. Because of your age, you see the doctor more often, have more prescriptions to be filled, etc. And you no longer have any chance of working overtime, no chance of getting a raise to make it easier to pay those bills.

Suddenly, the collection phone calls coming to the house phone are no longer for my oldest kid; they’re for me.

What a revoltin’ development.

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.