My Lucky Day

I didn't post a blog yesterday.  Instead, I met my friend Paula for lunch at the Olive Garden in Boulder.  The restaurant was my choice.  I'd been craving that all-you-can-eat green salad.  The food was great and we had a good visit, but when our waiter brought our checks, things got confusing.  Our orders only differed in that I had iced tea, but he had initially just split the ticket when we asked for separate checks, then realized this was inaccurate and recalculated.  We received a shower of receipts, along with an explanation, but he assured us we would only be charged for the check we signed.  Of course, when I checked my bank account this morning, I had been charged for both amounts.  I called the restaurant and the manager said this often happens with debit cards and she was pretty sure the wrong amount would "fall off" within five days, but I should call her if that didn't occur.  In the meantime she was sending me a gift card.  Thank you Neptune!  (The local astrologer Karen Anderson told me recently that after 144 years, my ruling planet Neptune has entered my sign or whatever and this is like having an ally). 

After lunch I had to pick up my 2010 income tax documents from H&R Block which had been reviewed for free and found accurate. By the way,  after Thursday's rant about the IRS, Uncle Sam was satisfied with deducting the rest of the 2010 taxes I'd been paying on a monthly basis from my 2011 refund and did not take out the monthly payment as well, so I take it all back and I'm a free woman! (Neptune again?).

Then I stopped in Savers which is just next door.  I got a couple of cardigan sweaters with part of the $20 my friend Cindy sent me for my birthday.  Thank you Cindy! (Neptune was on duty.  Cindy actually sent $20 in cash, silly girl, and the post office equipment had tried to eat the card, but the $20 bill was unscathed).

Here are the sweaters.  Identical, but one black and one brown.  They are a little large under the arms but these pleats flatter my "figger," as one of my grandmothers used to say.  No discount (Savers is a notoriously stingy thrift store), but the sweaters were only $6.99 each and I filled a punch card which translates into 30% off my next purchase.



There may be need for those sweaters by tomorrow.  Our unseasonably warm weather which, I believe, is setting records, is ending.  Today it was supposed to be 59F degrees here in the mountains (my thermometer says 60F degrees at 5:30 p.m., so I think it was warmer than that).  NOAA predicted  77F degrees in Boulder.  The Eldora forecast is 30% chance of rain/snow tomorrow with 38 mph winds, 60% chance of snow tomorrow night, 50% chance of snow Monday and a 40% chance of snow Monday night with a low of 17F degrees.  I'm not sure we'll be able to adjust. 

Goodwill was having a 50% off Saturday today, but I decided to forgo the pleasure.  I needed to tote some wood from that pileout by the car in preparation for the return of cold weather...

 
...and I'm saving myself for the Beautiful Junk Sale next Saturday in Golden, Colorado. 

I think this is my third visit.  The subtitle is "Jefferson County's largest bargain sale with 10,500 square feet of discount treasures."  It's held inside at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds' Exhibit Hall.  Admission is $3 and they deduct $1 if you bring two cans of food.  I didn't think the last sale was as much fun as the two previous events, but it's always fun to see what they have and there's never a bad community garage sale.

After Savers I finally got out to the Walmart in Erie where I needed to purchase a gift card for my great niece.  I've given my great nieces and nephews (or is it grand nieces and nephews?) these gift cards for their birthdays and at Christmas for years and they really seem to enjoy them.  I also needed ink cartridges for my printer and those aren't cheap even at Walmart ($32.97 for a Kodak color/black and white combo).  My shopping list had grown considerably waiting for the second Wednesday of March to arrive.  Those of us who receive our Social Security checks on the second Wednesday of the month had one of those months in which that was not until the 14th.  The second Wednesday in February was the 8th.  Those extra days can really make a difference.  Paula and I agreed yesterday that having the government issue these checks on a specific Wednesday each month instead of a specific date really causes hardship.  Why don't they just always issue them on the 10th?  Maybe I'll start a campaign. 

My grand total at Walmart added considerably to their bottom line.  Walmart's owners are among the richest of the rich who just get richer as pointed out in that book I just finished and blogged about, Winner-Take-All Politics:  How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.  (I'm still waiting to hear back from the authors).

According to a December 14, 2011, on-line Forbes article, the "six members of the Walton Family...have more wealth than the bottom 30% of Americans."  "...they are collectively worth about $93 billion."   According to an MSN on-line article dated 8/12/2009, they were worth only $23 billion when founder Sam Walton died in 1992.  In the intervening nineteen years, their wealth had increased by $70 billion!

In a way, it's too bad their prices can make such a big difference in how far a Social Security check goes, let alone the convenience of finding almost everything one needs in one store--I had been wondering where I could find a cobbler (do they even exist anymore?) for some of those sticky traction things you can put on the soles of shoes and boots to keep them from slipping and, lo and behold, there they were among the shoe polishes.  My shopping list went from toothpaste to needles, cat food for the foxes to drill bits, the gift card to the ink cartridges, rubber gloves to poster mount (which I hope I can use like Quake Hold to keep things from vibrating off these shelves next to the cabin door) and I found it all as well as a few groceries. 

I didn't get back until dark.  I have a porch light, but had forgotten to leave it on, so had to leave the car door open for the bit of light the overhead interior light provided, pick my way across the meadow to the cabin, turn on the porch light, grab the flashlight and make numerous trips to unload the car.  My neighbor across the road drove up the canyon behind me and, I think, deliberately left his multiple very bright back porch lights on until I got my car unloaded.  I've only chatted briefly with him once.  Maybe it was coincidence.  If so, it was nice coincidence.

So that's my good luck story.  What's yours?  Teddee

In Search of a Reformer

I have just finished Winner-Take-All Politics:  How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.  The subtitle could just as accurately have been Why Things Are So Screwed Up.

I slogged my way through the entire book--I don't know whether it's age or the fact that it has been so long since I've had to study, but I really had trouble keeping myself focused, which is usually not the case when I read--and was totally disappointed when the authors, Jacob S. Hacker, Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University, and Paul Pierson, John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, gave a detailed historical account of how we got screwed up, but didn't provide any solutions.  Actually, if you see the book in a bookstore and just want to get the gist, go to the last chapter.  They reprise all of the events and actions over the last three decades that landed us at the point at which 56 percent of respondents to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll of registered voters were in favor of replacing the entire 535-member Congress!  Was that why House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) became so amenable in this last go-round?

They approach our current situation as if it were a mystery and they were CSI investigators, so the ending, in which they simply review everything they've presented in the previous chapters, and tell us democracy must "'lift itself up by its own bootstraps'" once again as it did after the Great Depression, a bit of advice attributed to Walter Lippmann, is not very helpful.  Of course, in all fairness, the subtitle does indicate that all they've set about doing is telling us how we got here.  In the last paragraph they quote both Roosevelts, FDR as describing "political equality as 'meaningless in the face of economic inequality,'" and Teddy declaring that "'the supreme political task of our day...is to drive the special interests out of public life.'"  But throughout the book they have made it clear that political equality is threatened by the concentration of economic and political power in the top 1% of the population and don't tell the other 99% of us how we might right the inequality.

I've e-mailed the authors today and will see if I get a response and if they have any suggestions.

Dear Professors Hacker and Pierson--I just finished Winner-Take-All Politics and found the background history interesting and illuminating but was extremely disappointed you did not provide more concrete solutions in the final chapter.  Anyone over the age of 25 probably realizes the current "sit-ins" are of little value other than to draw attention to the discontent, but how do those of us who consider ourselves middle, or now lower, class actually go about organizing with the necessary funds to counteract those in control?  Have you published something since that doesn't just leave us dangling? 

I am college-educated and retired, but currently living in a one-room uninsulated cabin with no running water or plumbing high in the Rocky Mountains that my father built during the last Depression.  I graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1966 when things were still on the upswing.  I can remember earning $125 a week at my first job and being able to put money away in savings.  Like many retirees, I have time but no money to put toward the discovery, election and support of a reformer or reformers who can work to change things in Washington over the next three decades.  We all thought Obama was the answer, but, of course, he is thwarted at every turn. 

Your comments would be appreciated.  

Do you have any realistic suggestions for taking back America from the wealthy and powerful?  Or perhaps you are content with paying more taxes than they do, earning a bare bones wage or having no job at all, being without adequate health insurance and paying more and more to the companies they own for the basic necessities?  Camping out isn't realistic or helpful.  It only gets you cold and wet.  Teddee