State of Affairs October 2017

Okay home from the hospital, well I've been home since Sunday. The better parts of stress and anxiety finally got the better half of me. My blood pressure was extraordinarily high, and I am lucky enough to have escaped without permanent damage, well I think so anyway. So, after Los Vegas, hurricanes of epic proportions, and what appears to be a country flying apart at the seems, nothing is getting done, we are more worried about NFL players taking a knee (oh the humanity), we are worried about people calling the president a moron, one who should be impeached, and my god, where to start?

Of all the problems, of all the crap hitting the fan, and I am being literal here, our priorities are so messed up its not even funny. So where do we go from here? We step back a moment, take stock of the problems, all the problems, we assess the situation at hand, and then we step back into the fray to pick up the pieces and put them back together. Until we step back, we are going to continue to fight the wrong battles, in the wrong wars, and continue the status quo, which is the problem, regardless of your political ideology.

Problem: Potential nuclear war. This one right here is scary as hell, I don't care who you are. In only two times during humanities limited history have we witnessed the destruction of atomic weapons on civilian populations. Twice in human history have we used them in battle, and the results are far beyond devastating. Here we are all these decades later, and the effects are still being felt by those subjected to it. Nuclear weapons were meant to be a deterrent, the ultimate don't mess with us weapon. The option of last resort, so to speak. Yet here we are, almost seventy years later, and we have a president who wants to bolster our nuclear arsenal, and who is apparently unconcerned about using them. Neglecting the fact that, that when you drop the bomb, that fall out is going to eventually reach our shores in some capacity (and I'm not talking about a retaliatory strike). That type of warfare is indiscriminate, it takes out everyone and everything. While I agree that North Korea doesn't need nuclear weapons, I will also say that I don't believe anyone needs nuclear weapons. North Korea, the United States, Great Britain, Israel, China, Russia, South Korea, Japan, or anyone else for that matter needs access to those types of weapons, and as it stands the US only has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet nearly twenty times, by ourselves. You throw in all the other known and unknown nuclear powers, and its a recipe for irradiating this planet for the next million years. This is a problem, and its one I don't have the solution for. Its a shame we don't have a remote viewing time machine, where we can pile in all the world's leaders, send them back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the moments before the bombs fell, so they can get a first hand view of the destruction and the aftermath. Maybe that would wake them up to the effects, the fear and pain, the utter destruction brought by a single weapon.

Problem: The rent's too damned high, along with health care, food, vehicles, utility bills, and everything else. The truth of it is, the cost of everything is too damned high. Want a place, yeah, better pony up some money son. Even in the bad side of town, rents are insane, for even the smallest of rat holes. There are places where you are paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a small, five hundred square foot apartment, just because you are in a specific city. I pay $650 for a little eight hundred square foot place, that is falling apart around me, on the wrong side of the tracks. This is actually one of the cheaper places I can live. If I cook in the summer and freeze in the winter, never watch TV, use the computer, or turn on the lights, I can keep the bills down to around $200 a month. If I use the AC, which I've had to since my hospitalization, I'm looking at $300-400 a month, or more depending on how hot it is. I've literally encountered a $900 power bill for using the AC in the dead heat and humidity of the summer months. The power company says its my air conditioning running up the bill, so I call my landlord and his general impression is, its my problem. So, call up a service company, they come out, check the AC (which isn't cheap), they say the AC is fine, they haven't a clue as to why my power bill is outrageously high. Go to the power company, request they check the meter, $60 later, they say that the meter is fine, its never the meter (did I mention the city owns the power company?). Well, at least I can drive in my car, since the public transportation system runs from 7am to 10pm, and it costs $15 a week to use, right? Cheapest cars around here are several thousand dollars, and the interest on the loans is enough to choke a maggot. So, I can go in on a used car, and pay as much in interest as the initial asking price. Now, I did get a decent enough deal from my cousin who owns a used car lot (Its not what you know, but who you know), the car needs a lot of work (seriously just watch the original Ghostbusters for the joke here), but hey, he isn't killing me with interest and has offered to get some of the more pressing parts, if I'm willing to do the work myself (which thank god, I can). Lets not talk about healthcare, poor enough to not be able to afford it, wealthy enough to not qualify for the government programs. I dread seeing the incoming bills from my stay in the ER. The prescriptions weren't horribly priced, $36 in total for three of them, with a prescription discount card. Though I am sure my blood pressure problems wouldn't be as severe if I was eating more than one meal a day, that meal consisting of Raman Noodles. Speaking of the costs being too damned high, pay attention to your grocery bill the next time you go to the store. Have you noticed that in the last several years, you spend as much at the store, but walk out with less and less food? I know I have. I knew I was in trouble when I walked out after paying $40, and only having enough bags that I didn't need a cart to ferry the food to my new junk car. I remember my parents bitching about spending $40 for groceries, and walking out of the store with two carts worth of goods (1986). Kind of like my Dad bitching that his truck (a Chevy K3500 dually) taking $50 to top off (1996). But hey, it could be worse, right?

Problem: I need a job!? I keep hearing some refer to a Federal Jobs Guarantee, and thats great. Really it is, but every time I get into this conversation, I keep hearing supporters say that this jobs program should be administered at a state or local level. I always have to be the guy who points out that states and localities aren't always the most upstanding of organizations. Each state and locality has differences, they tend to do what works best for them, and in some instances, corruption rots the government. In places I have resided, and even reside today, you are more likely to get a job based on who you know, not your skill set, not your education level, or even your race. If you know the manager or owner, you are more likely to get a job. If you know someone who is good friends with the owner or manager, you're more likely to get the job. FFS, I applied for the same position as my sister, and she got the job over me, because she personally knew the manager. Those advocating for a jobs guarantee rarely take this into account, maybe its because they figure that there will be so many jobs, that won't happen. Sadly, no matter how many jobs you have out there, this will happen, but in a different way. The premium jobs, the jobs that pay the best will go to those who know someone, while the rest of us will be left with the lower end jobs.

Problem: Healthcare please!? Yeah, I am walking around with high levels of stress and anxiety. Unable to find stable work, dealing with keeping the lights on, food on the table, and now at the time when I shouldn't have to worry about medical bills, I have this added stress sitting on my table. Now I can ignore the bills, which is where I am heading, and the negative impact on credit that comes with ignoring the bills, or I can try and struggle through paying them (a painful but better alternative). Seriously its 2017 people, healthcare should rank as a “everything's great problem.” Basically, healthcare shouldn't be a problem for anyone in the US, yet we are having this god awful debate about repeal and replace the current “Gold Standard” of healthcare. Both of these options are horrible, the PPACA has some points, but it sucks. Yeah, it insured millions of people who were previously uninsured, and for many people that makes it a success, but its not. The replace portion of the debate is even worse, because as best as I know, there is nothing replacing it. The PPACA did nothing to control costs, which have been increasing at a horrible rate. What good is health insurance if you can't afford to use it? Well, certainly having a $1500 bill is a lot better than a $15,000 dollar bill (for a doctor drawing some blood, giving me medication for high blood pressure, and something for indigestion). But that's $1500 on top of the $1000 a month I would have had to pay. Guess I don't need to eat, so I can have health insurance.

Solutions: Yeah, I got nothing solid here people. Lots of ideas, lots of potential solutions, but not enough ears willing to listen, pick up the phone (if they have one) and make a few phone calls. A Federal Jobs Guarantee would help those who are unemployed and unable to land anything, but I am concerned about letting states and localities run the show. Sorry, but local and state governments have proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted to keep the best interests of their citizens at heart. A Universal Basic Income would help, I am not saying give everyone $20,000 a month for the next hundred years, but say, $2000 a month for households earning under $150,000 a year. At the very least, it would put everyone who is working close to lower middle class, if they cant find work like me, that puts 99% of the people close to lower middle class (which would help with private sector jobs). Combine the two programs, you've essentially lifted anyone who wants out of poverty, out of poverty. It won't make life simple, given the amount of debt most people hold, but it makes getting caught up marginally easier. That in and of itself is a good reason to use both programs in conjunction. The way many think, we wouldn't be able to cut taxes, but we wouldn't need to raise them unless demand exceeded demand, and inflation started growing. Increase the Minimum Wage, the tried and true method of boosting the economy, raise the minimum wage, and people have more income, everyone spends it, but how people spend it is different. While you might take that extra $10-20 dollars a week and eat out once, I am more inclined (when working) to spend that money on paying bills. Hey, an extra $10 a week helps get those pesky bills paid off a little faster. The problem with the way I doing things, the way many of us do things, is that that money is a sink. It disappears, it doesn't benefit anyone outside of the company you are paying. Sure, they employ people, but paying bills only pads their profit margins. Want to help make money go a little further, go to a Single Payer System. Say what you will about paying for other peoples healthcare (if I can't pay my medical bills, your taxes will cover that while I repay it), or more accurately health insurance, but its cheaper to have insurance for everyone than this current hit and miss system we have now. Besides, with health insurance, people will be healthier, therefore less money will be spent on treatment. Who knows, if I would have had usable health insurance, I would have been getting yearly physicals, and I might not have ended up in the hospital. Chain of events ladies and gentlemen. Cost Controls, in order to ensure that massive amounts of funds aren't going out in the expense of survival. Look, I understand that profit is good, but at some point we have to ask ourselves how much profit is too much profit. Right now profit is coming from lower wages and higher prices. I have long believed that profits can be achieved by better pay and lower prices (hint: you'll sell more if your employees can afford the products/services you sell). The problem is, companies don't want to take a loss while everyone is catching up. I know, not making as much profit for a year or two is horrible, and the truth is, for some companies, the difference could come down to even turning a profit. Some companies, the Ma and Pa types of small business are often barely holding on, and while they often charge more, the truth is the service is often better. Break up Big Business, yeah, the tried and true break up the monopolies. Break up Wal-Mart, which is one of the largest employers in the US, a chain that has stores in just about every city, town, and state. Wal-Mart has no real competitors, they are the top of the food chain, if they move into a new area (which is hard for them anymore), they have so much working capital that they can price check competitors into oblivion. Seriously, go look at the prices at your local Wal-Mart, then go look at prices for the same product at your local grocery store. If you have one of those Wal-Mart Market places, check the prices there also. The Wal-Mart market is cheaper than the Wal-Mart Supercenter, which is still cheaper than your local grocery store chain. Now, some places like Kroger and Food City offset these higher prices by offering savings on gas, but they are also large chains, but not nearly as large as Wal-Mart. Break up companies like Wal-Mart, and you take away their capital advantages, you allow smaller chains to compete as they are all on an equal footing. How many of you have seen Driving Miss Daisy? The chain store shown is Piggly Wiggly, which eventually become Kroger, Safeway, National Tea, with a handful of Piggly Wiggly stores in various states. It introduced competition for Piggly Wiggly, and while it is still around and doing well for itself, it no longer has a market cornered. Imagine what it would do if Wal-Mart was broken up and left to be regionalized. National Weed Legalization for funding if you are concerned about how you're going to pay for any of this. Legalize weed, legalize all the drugs if you want, set up dens where people can go and use these drugs, tax the use, higher security and doctors for these dens, and go from there. Of course, you might be saying, “Oh hell no!”, and hey I don't blame you for it, so we have a few choices, we could always cut military spending, what's it up to these days? $600 billion a year, $700 billion? We could do a lot with $300-350 billion a year. But it would mean that things would have to change in how our military burns through money, we might even have to consider not being the US Military World Police. But lets be real about cutting military spending, that's never going to happen, because “terrorists”.

There are other things that people can think of to fix things. We could finally call Trickle Down Economics the failure that it is, and reverse the trends. Well, at this point not really, free trade has given most of the deck to businesses, and even now as their tax rates plummet, and profits soar higher and higher, they say “But our taxes are too high sir, please cut them?” and we are more than happy to oblige them. Yeah, I know, raise their taxes, they'll just off shore more jobs, driving wages lower, laughing all the way as their profits grow larger and larger. Things need to change, we can't put the genie back into the bottle, so we have to work with what we have, which isn't much. Free trade, as much as many dislike it, isn't going away. I seriously doubt that there will be renegotiation to make these treaties more “equitable” or fair to us. We will have to work around it. Offshoring of jobs isn't going to suddenly stop because taxes are being cut, if that was the case, the jobs would have been trickling back. What we have to do is realize that Trickle Down doesn't work as intended, and the damage is done. So, lets find a situation that actually does something while working around the problem. Take anything I listed in bold earlier, take a combination of plans, all of them if need be, because we got into this mess with a handful of putrid ideals left to rot the core of this nation, while oppressing a large chunk of the population, financial oppressing the majority, and the reason was those who could have stopped it drank the koolaide. They believed Trickle Down worked. So now we are left having to throw multiple potential solutions at the wall, and hope that it injects enough capital into the hands of the people that we can start eliminating the problems we face.

I just read an article which stated that nearly a third of people are not comfortable with their financial situation. A comment on the article surmised the actual number was around fifty percent of the people are not financially secure, in the wealthiest nation in the world. Think about that, fifty percent of those who took a survey. That would be adults people, adults are concerned about not being able to save enough money for an emergency expense, concerned about not having enough money to pay the bills. And if you think its irresponsible spending habits, then you need to step back and really look at the whole situation, not just your view of it. There are serious problems here, and not all of it can be blamed on poor spending habits. It is not a case of living within your means, because lets be honest, right now, a lot of people are living beyond their means by trying to keep food on the table.

Nineteen days to go, till November 1, nineteen days till this household has any kind of money, and I was supposed to schedule a followup appointment for next week, just to make sure that my blood pressure isn't continuing to go crazy. So, no on renewing the gym membership, no traveling even to the store, and going to have to hope groceries last that long. And certainly no follow up appointment to ensure that my blood pressure doesn't get out of control again, causing other more serious health concerns. Look, none of those solutions are easy, most aren't even realistic in this current climate. All I can do is write them out to a blog, share the resulting link, and call those who are supposed to represent people like me in DC, tell you and them what I think, remind them that they work for us, not for anyone else.