And more living wage: Chocolate

From The Anchoress.  Go read.

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Where does the money come from to pay a living wage for workers?  It comes from your profits.  In order to pay your workers enough, you must give them some of that money you wanted to keep for yourself.

–> For this reason, there is not an obligation to pay your workers out of your own need.  “Need” as in need.  But if your company is reporting profits?  If you are taking home more income than you need to meet your basic needs?  [Hint: Your needs are about the same as all the other human beings.]  All your workers need to be paid their entire wage.  That is, no less than the amount necessary to live. You get to take home extra money after you have paid all your bills.

Profits are not evil.  Profits are good and necessary.  Profits are desirable.  Profits are what you use to invest, to grow your business, to produce more wealth.  But if your profit depends on taking advantage of the misery of others in order to cheat them of their daily bread that you might live in greater luxury?  Then you are a) not a successful businessperson, and b) evil.

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I don’t usually go in for bizarre economic regulations and all that.  But this is in area where responsibility rests with employers.  A boycott is good, but ultimately consumers are not auditors.  There is a legitimate role for government oversight if employers are habitually abusing employees.   But I’d rather see good third-party auditing instead.  For all the shenanigans of accounting firms, at least when one goes bonkers, it can fall apart and be gone — not so easy to dissolve a government agency.

Auditing wages is something accountants could do and do well.  You can count on an accountant to look straight at you and say, “No, actually your kid doesn’t need dance lessons.” Accountants don’t fall for lines about cultural integrity and hermeneutics of inadequacy and blah blah blah.  We say things like, “Oh, guests are coming over.  Guess we ought to turn the heat on then, people expect to take their coat off indoors, don’t they?”  And then we turn the heat back down soon as those luxury-wallowing parasites get out the door.  No, accountants will not make you overpay your workers, you can be sure of that.

‘Till now we’ve wondered how we could possibly simplify the tax code, what with all the accountants that would be out of work.  But look!  Problem solved!  Free them all up to audit something useful for a change.  Then write just the bare minimum of a law needed to bring the facts about hiring practices to the light of day.

On being poor in America

Great post by Anthony Layne.  Go read.

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Something I think that is confusing to many of us today is the sheer amount of stuff floating around the US.  Things that you used to have to save up for — electronics, a roomful of toys, a pile of gadgets — these things are just there.  How can you be poor if you have a microwave or a TV?  Try selling either one, and see how much food you can buy for the difference.

Growing up (not poor – middle), we had one PC that was highly valued.  Not something a poor person could own.  I have in sight as I type 6 — six — working laptops that are hand-me-downs nobody wants.  Not ones we bought, ones other people gave us because they were of no value.  Even the kid I know who invents things with old electronics doesn’t want them.

Our brains are stuck in 1986 when we say things like, “How can you call yourself poor if you have six laptops?”  The answer is: Those things are knick-knacks.  Worthless.  I could sell my decorative sea shell (next shelf over) for more — at a garage sale I might get 25 cents for the sea shell.  (Dear thieves: Please do not take my sea shell.)

Poverty in America is weird.  Very weird.  But it’s real.  Living wage? Have I mentioned living wage lately?  I’ve been remiss.

Are we all middle class?

The Economist seems doubtful about the 91% of Americans who identify themselves as “middle class”.  Not strictly middle-middle-class.  The 91% number is the sum of people who consider themselves either lower-, plain old middle, or upper-middle class.  Can this be so?

I’ll argue yes.  Here’s why:

1. We really are that rich.  As a nation.  The trappings of wealth — quality electronics, barely-worn clothing, cute little decorative accents — can be had for little or no cost,  just for the luck of being nearby when some richer person decides to upgrade.  Thrift stores ship old clothing by the bale off to some other place to be dealt with, because no one in the US needs bother learn how to mend or make-over some outdated or worn garment. There comes a time when your nation is wealthy enough that bottom percentile brackets do not necessarily indicate poverty.

2. We really are that educated.  Class is in part about education.   I have to go back four generations to find an ancestor who has less than a high-school diploma.  Unless you are fresh off the boat, these days everyone goes to high school.  And if you don’t graduate your first go-through, you can go back and get a GED later.   The Economist says that a college degree was the mark of middle class cultural identity.  I disagree.  Both sets of my grandparents were high-school-only, WWII-era young adults.  A high school education alone, combined with job success, firmly launched them all from working-class to middle-class.

3.  Income is different from class.  I knew this when I was a kid: If you were a teacher, even though you didn’t make any money, you were definitely middle-class.  It was your education and your line of work that made you qualify.  I think teachers earn more now than they did then.  But now I know an awful lot of people with college and graduate degrees who live at the poverty line, income-wise.  If you choose a lousy-paying career-field, have a stay-at-home-parent, and enough kids, guess what?  You get to be poor.  Financially.  But you’re still educated, well-spoken, able to navigate the world of the middle-class (often: upper-middle class) comfortably.  In a survey about class (not income), you’d pick middle.

4.  Income isn’t nothing.  So say your formal education isn’t impressive, and  your line of work is not so white-collar.  If you make enough money to afford a comfortable home, put your kids through school, never have to worry about clothes or food, or medical care, and on top of all that you can buy yourself any number of little luxuries . . . how is that not middle?  You aren’t poor, for sure.  Maybe your origins and even your tastes run “working class” (though my experience is that once income is removed as a factor, tastes in food and drink vary independently of family of origin).  But sooner or later you get too rich not be middle class.

5. The top is so very high.  There’s this point on the salary scale where you just aren’t middle, income-wise.  I’d hazard it’s somewhere around the $200k/year, thereabouts, less or more depending on your perspective and your life situation — though if you want to put the figure higher or lower, go ahead.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s this point, whatever it might be, where people (both writers at The Economist, and also the people who really are in the financial middle of the income distribution), start to laugh at you when you say you are merely “upper middle class”.  And you are wondering why they are laughing.  Because here’s what: You who are now rich know that a) you really aren’t that rich compared to the super-rich people, b) at any time your paycheck could dry up and you’d go back to being a normal person, c) you don’t have any of the trappings of upbringing and connection that rich people have, because you are, um, middle class.  Your cultural identity sticks.  You’re a son of the middle class who happens to have a lot of money right now.  It is the exact same thing as the PhD living below the poverty line, only at the other end of the income spread.  (He’s probably your brother.  Literally.)

Anyway that’s my take.   The Economist says you can’t talk about about class in America.  I think it’s more like, there’s not a lot to say.  We’re a vast middle.  I would assume that 91% of us feel that way anyhow — that we belong to this giant cultural lump, bonded by the real hope of three-bedroom homes, shoe clutter, and free public high school education.

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And in light of my perfect contentment living here deep amongst the middling-types, has anyone read Fr. Thomas Dubay’s Happy are the Poor?  If yes, I’m keen to hear your thoughts.

Health Insurance Regulations – Go Comment

The Impractical Catholic has a very practical link to how to submit your comments on the new health insurance regulations.  Click on his link, it is very easy from there.   You can scroll through the regulations to make sure you know what you are talking about, and then submit the comment of your choice.

Naturally I forgot to copy mine for posterity before it submitted, by my talking points were this:

• I quoted the bit about how the goal of the religious exemption was to protect houses of worship.
• I observed this was too narrow a view of “religious institution”, that did not represent the reality of religious institutions such as hospitals, schools, and other benevolent works.
• I proposed a compromise, in which employees of such institutions could choose either to accept the employer-provided plan, or use a cash allowance of the same value to purchase the plan of their choice from another source.
• In that way, the religious employer is not required to directly fund a health care plan that includes treatments contrary to its religious tenets, but employees remain free to choose some other plan as they see fit.

I didn’t say it, but it’s a bit like the difference between saying, “every employee shall be given a per-diem allowance to pay for travel expenses at a hotel or brothel”, versus specifying a per diem amount per day, and leaving it to the employee to decide where he wishes to lodge.

So that’s what I wrote.  Go write something yourself.  It is so easy and fast.  Really, it is.

 

Okay, here’s the link directly to regulations.gov that I followed from Impractical Catholic’s post.  Go.  Now.  Seriously.

 

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Also: Reconsider giving your nine-year-old a blog on the same blogging program you yourself use.  I almost posted this on a hot-pink ProudKittyCat blog.  That woulda made the grandparents raise an eyebrow.

Saturday Linkfest

I’ve got another episode from the Homeschool Photo Contest to post, but am waiting for just the right time.  Ha.  Meanwhile, here’s how you should goof on instead:

1.  Read this article from the Apparent Project on Why You Should Not Mail Peanut Butter to Haiti.  No, really, take it out of the bubble-wrapped package and eat it yourself.  Haiti thanks you.  Because it turns out that shipping bunches of free stuff to impoverished countries undermines local businesses.  That make peanut butter.  Or would, if only Haitians weren’t getting boxes of the stuff from other countries.  Go read.

2. A longtime friend, engineer, amateur gunsmith, and EMT, sent us this YouTube video on Gun Safety.  PG WARNING: If your head is screwed on straight, there’s at least one scene that is objectionable even for comedy noir. It also means you aren’t the target audience.  [Hint: If you have given up watching action-adventure shows because all the egregious gun safety violations– by law enforcement good guy characters no less!!– have caused you to throw your tv out the window, you aren’t actually the target audience for this clip.]  But it is funny. With proper parental guidance as required.

3.  Look, Sarah Reinhard one of my favorite writing friends, has a new book out:

She let me look at one of the later drafts, and it is a really nice little book.  If you are looking for a family-friendly Advent Book, I’d give it a recommend.  From what I recall, it is protestant-friendly.  But just e-mail her and ask if you have any questions or concerns, she is one of those extroverted writers who likes to talk to readers. Or leave a comment in her blog combox.  She’s totally chatty.  Super Nice Person.  Happy to talk about her books any day.

4.  And is just me, or does it look like the new John McNichol book is now out on Amazon?

Serious coolness.

Not for people who don’t read genre fiction.  But highly recommended if you are looking for fun, readable Catholic GKC Sci-Fi Alternate History goodness in a package your boy will enjoy.  Do you know of a different book that will cause an 11-year-old boy to beg to read Huck Finn?  Maybe you do.  Or maybe you think that no day is complete without the threat of an alien attack.  In which case, McNichol is your man.

Hey, look, a Tollefsen article!

Yeah, it took me by surprise too.  You’ll be relieved to know it’s on a nice, quiet, non-controversial topic, Contraception and Healthcare Rights.  Here were my thoughts as I read:

1. Yay!  A Tollefsen article my readers will actually like!
2. Ooops.  Nope.  More mad readers.  Uh oh.
3. No, never mind, I think it’s good after all.

So, er, read at your own risk.  It’s written philosophy-style, of course, so you’re constantly behind the curve, never really sure whether you agree with the guy or not.  But I’m pretty sure he makes sense.  In that special philosopher way.*

 

 

*Keep in mind that professional philosophers have to work day in and day out with people who aren’t strictly sure they exist, or perhaps are sure they exist, but also that they only turned up at the conference or the coffee bar on account of their molecules making them do that.  I’m not making fun.  That’s what a subset of real live tenured philosophy professors actually think.  I’ve taken the classes . . . I know.  You’d write reaaally caaarefullly if you had to present your papers to those people.    (I mean, for a living.  If you’re a student, you could just write normally and live with the B.)

Living Wage Explained

Look here.  This is what we’re talking about when we say “living wage”.  Specifics.  The real deal and why it matters, and what the numbers are.  Read read read.

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FYI I’ve gone back to submersion here.  My apologies to those of you who are in my e-mail backlog, I will get to you soon.

CRS – Somalia Famine

If you are looking for a way to feed refugees of the famine in Somalia, Catholic Relief Services is there.  Here’s the CRS main page.  (H/T to Red Cardigan for the head’s up.)

 

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Utterly unrelated, but it has to do with CRS: Larry’s Beans makes really good coffee.  100% fair trade, shade grown, and either organic or transitioning to organic.  And wow, good.  Good.  CRS is one of their partners, though I learned about it through an evangelical friend who used to own a coffee shop, and now runs a local Larry’s Beans purchasing co-op.  Yes.  Sometimes (okay, usually), I think of my evangelical home group as a The Gluttony Group.  Because we eat that well.  But we also talk about God and stuff, so it’s a wash.

Wolves, Economists

I saw this post from Darwin in my feed reader, but I didn’t read it for the longest time, because the title made it sound too smart for me.  But look at this:

As soon as people starting thinking of the economy as some great machine with levers just waiting to be pulled (whether it’s liberals convinced that if only we could put through a couple more trillion dollars worth of stimulus everything would be fine or conservatives convinced that we can always raise tax revenues by lowing tax rates) they set themselves up to cause more harm than good.

Yes.  Yes yes yes.

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In White Fang  news . . .

I finished the book.  It got so much better after it started to be about a dog and not about some whiny guy being chased by wolves.*  Here’s what I’ve concluded is necessary in order to enjoy White Fang:

1) A dog of your own.  Because it’s a novel about the psychological development of a dog.

2) A good sturdy head cold.  Because, well, it’s a novel about the psychological development of a dog.

Once I had both of those conditions in place, I totally enjoyed the book.  And all the doggy procreation is firmly offstage, so now I don’t feel so nervous about having sent our other copy to camp with my 6th grader.  I was nervous there for a few minutes.

 

 

* I myself would be very whiny if wolves were trying to eat me.  For your own sakes, hope I never get to write any autobiography about such things.

Under Water

Submersion continues.  But look, Brandon at Siris is writing about Usury!  Yes!  Oh I love it! And there’s more here, that I haven’t had time to read yet, but I know you will, since you are so desperately bored without me.

And many smart people (including Siris) have already posted the famous First World Problems music video, but if you resisted watching, no really, it actually is pretty funny.  A tad heavy-handed at the end, but probably if you watch TV normally you won’t notice so much.

To finish the theme, here’s a day in the life at a third-world small business.

Enjoy.  Have I mentioned I have an inordinate passion for air-conditioning this time of year?