Monday, March 28, 2011

A Grain of Salt


According to Paul Krugman, Nobel prizewinning economist and columnist for the New York Times, there is a divide among the nation's economists. The economists who reside in the center of the country, known as the freshwater economists, firmly believe in the "invisible hand of the market," the ability of the market to self-regulate. They believe that goods and services will always find their correct price. They are against government regulation and have limited tolerance even for using monetary policy (like when the Fed decreases interest rates, or increases the money supply) to address contractions in the economy. Economists who reside along the coasts, the saltwater economists, believe that while this is generally true, sometimes people are irrational, and because of that, things (like, say, houses, or internet companies) achieve prices that don't have actual value to back them up. And that, when the emperor notices that his glass house doesn't actually have any walls, there'd better be something (like, say, monetary policy or even (horrors!) government spending) to smooth things out while we're waiting for the market to stabilize itself. There have been two bubbles in the past ten years, bubbles that apparently occurred while the invisible hand of the market was busy doing something else (possibly playing with the invisible penis of the market). I don't know much about economics. I studied it for three quarters at a community college thirty years ago, and even then I kept confusing elasticity (which is an economics term) with flexibility (which is more about yoga), but any school of thought that simply ignores the bubbles that put me out of work, consumed a healthy bite of my retirement savings and flooded the streets of Madison, Wisconsin with protesters for longer than it took to effect regime-change in Egypt seems to be overlooking something pretty important. I think I'll take my macro-economics like I take my Margaritas: with a grain of salt.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

My Little Town Tuesday, Only on Saturday. And in Canada.

The amazing Georgina Dollface graciously allowed me to do a post for her. If you don't know Georgina, she's well worth the trip!

Sunday, March 20, 2011

How Much is Enough?


Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil's Dictionary, defined enough as "too much." And it's true. We tend to measure "enough" at the upper boundary, rather than the lower. Apparently, this is also true for the very wealthy. In the April edition of The Atlantic, a survey of households with more than twenty-five million dollars (that's right, $25,000,000) revealed that most don't feel financially secure. In fact, the cutoff for fiscal confidence appears to be a cool billion dollars. As I read through the article, which focused on the many ways that vast wealth fails to make people happy, it occurred to me how fortunate I am.
  • I have a job.
  • Old Dog has a job.
  • We're both healthy.
  • Our mortgage pays off in a few years.
  • We've got a little tucked away for retirement.
All of that could change tomorrow. One (or both) of us could get sick, we could lose our jobs, and God knows the retirement account has been a real roller coaster ride over the past few years. But, for today, we're okay. Although we'll never see even one million dollars, we have enough. Which makes us richer than most of the 115,000 wealthiest households in America. How about you? Do you have enough?

Friday, March 18, 2011

Thought Food: F. Scott Fitzgerald


"At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look, at forty-five, they are caves in which we hide."

Monday, March 14, 2011

What the Earthquake in Japan Tells Us


That we're on a planet that was once a ball of molten rock and is still cooling. I heard on the radio today that the governor of the Tokyo prefecture (or some such thing) says the quake and tsunami are divine retribution because people in Japan are so selfish and materialistic. But that can't be true, because, if it were, Wall Street would be a freaking crater by now.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Pig in the Python, Part 2: Do-It Yourself Death Panel


My Grandmother Robertson was widowed when she was in her forties, left with five children. She relocated from eastern Kentucky to Dayton, Ohio, where she opened a boarding house, cooking and cleaning for half a dozen strangers so she could feed and shelter her kids.

She was a skinny little woman, fiercely independent, who was still climbing up and down ladders painting ceilings (and doing her own housework, and cooking, and cleaning, and gardening) into her eighties. But when she was eighty-three a series of temporary ischemic attacks, small strokes known as TIA's, shorted out enough of her wiring that she was forced to move to a nursing home.

Over the next few years, recurring TIA's robbed her of her ability to read, to speak and eventually even to recognize anyone.

One night when she was in her early nineties, her heart stopped. By chance an aide found her almost immediately, and resuscitated her. My aunt called me the next day.

"Thank goodness that aide came by," she said, in the tone of one reporting a miracle, "or we would have lost Mom."

But, for me, my feisty grandma had ceased to exist long before.

By the time this brush with death occurred, she spent her days tied into a wheelchair, wearing diapers and eating pre-mushed food because she couldn't remember to chew. She cradled a plastic doll she believed was my Aunt Lorena, the infant she'd lost to whooping cough.

Grandma lived five more years after that, and if she'd been capable of lucid thought, I'm convinced she would have been disgusted that her escape had been foiled.

So what does this have to do with the pig in the python?

Our society is unprepared to deal with the mass of Baby Boomers who will require long-term care. And, although we can't avoid growing old, we can take steps to limit how long we linger, drooling and building up bedsores even as we soak up every available dime from American taxpayers.

After watching what happened with my grandmother, I am determined to avoid sharing her fate. And I'm not asking my daughter to make this decision, because, after seeing my aunt's reaction, I know it's not a fair thing to ask.

Instead, Old Dog and I have set up Living Wills that specify that, in the event something bad happens, no extraordinary means will be taken to keep us alive.

Because I, for one, am not waiting for the Death Panels.

Monday, March 7, 2011

The Red Pump Project


Every 35 minutes, a woman tests positive for HIV in the United States.

My daughter, who works for the Columbus AIDS Task Force, asked me to write this post. She is concerned that the continued growth of AIDS among women is under-recognized, under-funded and under-treated.

To show you just how serious I am about this, I actually wore red pumps to work today.

In case you don't understand the significance of that, one of the reasons I married Old Dog is because he's precisely my height and I knew if I married a man no taller than myself that I'd never be pestered into wearing high heels. Well, that plus he's totally adorable.

So here I am, posting their badge on my blog AND tromping my little-old-lady feet all over campus in my red pumps to make a statement.

So please check it out.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

The Pig in the Python

Last Sunday, our minister (who's in his early 50's) stated that we Baby Boomers are the most selfish generation to ever grace this planet. As a card-carrying Boomer myself, I wondered: is this a general perception? So, I Googled "boomer selfish"... ...and found a post by a Samuel J. Scott, a Gen-Y member. His gripe: we're working too long, hogging all the good jobs, so that his generation has to stay in school running up student loans or live in their parents' basements. Then I found a post by Debbie Schlussel that says we're as selfish in near-death as we were in life. Her beef? That many of us plan to spend all of our wealth before we die, rather than passing it on to our kids. And then, on a site called Die, Boomer, Die (I've realized at this point that we're about as popular as Stephen Colbert at an RNC meeting) I read complaints that we're retiring too early, eating up all the Social Security and Medicare money. By now I'm starting to feel like the grandparents in Willie Wonka, the ones who'd been bedridden for twenty years while Charlie and his mom slaved to feed them (not to mention changing out four bedpans, which must have been truly disgusting.) And on top of that, it turned out Grandpa Joe was sandbagging the whole time, because as soon as the golden ticket showed up he started leaping around like a grasshopper on a griddle. I'm not denying that we're selfish. The ability of my generation to ignore facts, reinterpret history and even reconfigure reality to justify doing whatever we want is more mind-blowing than the drugs we experimented with in the 60's. But, folks, we only have three options: 1) Work longer (retaining all the good jobs) 2) Retire early (sopping up all the Social Security and Medicare money) or 3) Use our savings to fund our retirements (leaving nothing for our kids). Okay, I guess there is a fourth one, scheduled suicide, but I'm not willing to entertain that, even if it would make me popular among the younger set. If you wanna be pissed, though, be pissed at medical research, which has extended the average length of retirement from 18 months (back when Social Security was first put in place) to 20 years (as of 2007). It's only when you take the massive size of my generation and multiply it by how long we live in retirement that the problem reaches truly epic proportions. Next week: some options for addressing this issue.

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