The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. The meaning of these statistics is unclear, except to say that I am thankful for people who read my writing in this space.
Best wishes for a happy new year.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,300 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Food and sundries are the second highest cash output in our budget and December has been a doozy. Suffice it that we have plenty of food in the house.
The phrase “food and sundries” is indicative of the fact that things like water softening salt, facial tissues, cleaning supplies hygiene products and other household consumables get lumped into this budget category. When we lived in Indiana, it was too much work to segregate the two expenses since mostly they were purchased at the grocery store.
That has changed a bit with growing and bartering for more of our food. I am loathe to change something that has been a basic part of our budget process for decades.
Is there budgetary savings by living off the refrigerator, freezer and pantry? Hope so. That means cooking more and I look forward to a few traditional dishes.
January will be a month of main courses designed from beans, chick peas, grains, nuts, rice, eggs, tomatoes, frozen vegetables, pickles, sauerkraut, soups, and bits and pieces from the pantry. Real cooking, and real downsizing. It should mostly be good.
As for the budget, I haven’t quite adjusted to buying at the warehouse club, so for now, a curtailment of intake is in the cards. That too should be good.
LAKE MACBRIDE— We hear a lot about income inequality and for me, those able to amass wealth should be congratulated—then they should pay a fair share of taxes. Neither happens with any regularity.
Feigning moral outrage at the wealthy getting wealthier isn’t possible for me. There are no massive scale opportunities for vertical integration of businesses like the railroads, steamship lines, oil companies and telegraph like there were in the Gilded Age. Investors like Warren Buffet vertically integrate segments of their business, and reap substantial profits for doing so, however theirs is a portfolio of diverse and far reaching business activities. The failure of any one wouldn’t matter much in the broader scope of their enterprises. That Buffet et. al. are skilled businessmen goes without saying. Let them have their loot and plunder, I say.
For the rest of us, the plight of the rich only matters when it impacts us directly. For the most part, it doesn’t. If a percentage of each consumer purchase filters back to some palatial estate, as long as we can afford basic necessities, what does it matter? We won’t be going backward from industrialization. The benefits of manufacturing particularly, whether it be home construction materials, food, clothing, transportation or modern health care, are worth more than the antiquated idea of doing everything by and for ourselves. We should be self-reliant, but take advantage of labor saving products and devices with reason.
When it comes to sustainability, there are paths though the seven stages of man that yield respect, viability and a light footprint on the earth among the small percentage of people who own the vast majority of wealth. We don’t want to admit it, but we are peasants all, and that is a tough life, but not terrible.
Next up on my reading list is The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson.
Written in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash, the initial chapter is rich in a way today’s narratives about social and financial matters are not. There is a lot of information I didn’t know or had forgotten. I look forward to reading the book in what is normally one of the coldest months of the year.
We know part of the story.
In a direct line from the industry and frugality of founding father Benjamin Franklin, a group of men seized the opportunity of an expanding frontier following the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. They made their mark converting an agrarian economy to one based on discovery, exploitation and manufacturing using natural resources that were part of the commons.
“Shortly before or very shortly after 1840 were born nearly all the galaxy of uncommon men who were to be the overlords of the future society,” wrote Josephson. This coincides with the settlement of Iowa after the Black Hawk War, and indeed my life and those of my forbears touched the industrialization of the country. Everything from my great, great grandfather buying land in Minnesota from the railroad, to the method of land surveying, to living along U.S. Highway 30 where the Rockefeller trust anonymously bought land at every intersection they could. Their fingerprints remain on much of how we live our lives.
Today, some revere the wealthiest in our society. I am willing to give them their due, but that’s it as our post-Sept. 11, 2001 country approaches what can be called living a plantation life.
In the 1962 forward to The Robber Barons, Josephson wrote about revisionists who would change the contemporary popular dislike of the robber barons. “This business of rewriting our history—perhaps in conformity to current fashions in intellectual reaction—has unpleasant connotations to my mind,” Josephson wrote. “Recalling the propaganda schemes used in authoritarian societies, and the ‘truth factories’ in George Orwell’s anti-utopian novel 1984.”
Little has changed since the 1960s, except the rich continue to get richer, as they run out of resources to exploit in our global village.
There is an intellectual case to be made about the social problems of income inequality, but who believes what politicians and media pundits (or even academics and social scientists) say? Some of us would rather consider the riches in our own lives than seek justice from the wealthiest people. We are a long way from reaching a tipping point in public opinion that would yield a different result.
The American public is asleep on the importance of income inequality to their lives. Just as the continuing resolution to fund the government passed two weeks ago without notice, people don’t seem to care as long as their lives continue as expected most of the time.
Income inequality is not good, but it has been with us for a long time—going back at least to the Peasant’s Revolt in 14th century England.
The lesson is we had better take care of each other because the rich don’t care as long as their wealth increases. That is advice upon which we can sustain a life.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Long form reading was slight in 2014. A daily hour or two of reading articles from screens displaced reading books, and my reaction is mixed.
Part of me wants there to be more long-form reading, and part of me understands the new dynamic of staying in tune with what is going on in the world through reading many articles on multiple topics. It is unsettling.
I keep close track of the books I read. If there are less of them, each one played a role in daily affairs. No real clinkers made it to the following list of the twelve books I read this year:
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook
Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The Home Place by Carrie La Seur
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Wrong David by Christa WoJo.
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen
The Pruning Book by Gustave L. Wittrock
Gardening with the Experts: Pruning by Moira Ryan
Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska translated by Joanna Trzeciak.
The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester.
My Life by Bill Clinton.
Two of these are the result of being on social media, The Home Place and The Wrong David. They would not likely have been read if I hadn’t been on twitter. I know Carrie La Seur from before she returned to Montana, and reviewed her book on Amazon.com. Christa WoJo is an Internet marketer and writer living in Panama. WoJo describes her book as about “drunken Americans behaving badly in France.” Both were quick and engaging reads primarily for diversion.
In a way, all of the books were read for diversion from a life too full of low paying jobs. The most practical reading was Hillary Clinton’s secretary of state memoir. If she will be running for president, I felt it important to know what she did in that role with more detail than may be found in a single article. Besides, like her husband, she is an interesting person.
Suffice it to say that I want to read more in long form. My new year’s resolution is to work toward that end.
LAKE MACBRIDE— It has been a quiet Christmas holiday and that’s okay.
Our family has never been very big, even when nieces and nephews from both sides are considered. There are shirt-tail relatives, of course. If we connect the threads, that could include all of humanity, something that may be wondrous, but is not practical for a holiday gathering.
Our daughter came home for Christmas the weekend of Dec. 12, so the holiday decorations have been up since then. In past years we started decorating on our wedding anniversary, and continued until Christmas Eve. With decorating done early, there was one less thing to do on the actual holiday.
Christmas day I visited my mother and we talked for two and a half hours—more than we have in a long time. After that, I came home where there was not much action because of illness. I made baked falafel and Kalamata olive sauce for what turned out to be my Christmas dinner. Like with the quiet, I was okay with that. I took the first photos in my new project.
We don’t exchange gifts any longer, but I bought a couple of books which arrived Dec. 23. I’m halfway through Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. It will be a quick read and I won’t be buying any winter tomatoes in the foreseeable future. In queue is Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. Mailer was prolific, and the new tome already has been a valuable research tool on contemporary writers.
We went to the New Pioneer Food Cooperative in Coralville together. Going to NewPi is a couple of times a year trip for me. I placed some rolls from the bakery, vegan sausage for gumbo, and some fair trade organic cocoa mix in the wagon. I can’t help but price compare with the warehouse where I work, and the coop is sky high with brands both places carry.
The benefit of NewPi is the wide variety of organic and local foods. They even have bottles of vinegar made with the same mother as the jars we have in our pantry. I don’t know how they manage a diverse inventory when the grocery business is going the opposite direction, but I am glad to be able to visit them once in a while.
I wrote 61 newspaper articles for three papers in 2014, with the last one making yesterday’s front page. It has been a learning experience to freelance, and a different kind of writing. Some editors have been better than others, and each has provided solid lessons in the craft of writing. I am thankful for the opportunity our local paper provided to get me started, but glad I moved on to the Iowa City Press Citizen. More articles are planned in 2015.
The holidays are in full gear. With my work at the warehouse, I’ll stay busy until Jan. 1 as we want to end the year with zero carry-over product demonstrations. That means I’ll be working almost every day until we are finished. For a while, the warehouse work is my only job—the first time since I can remember there has only been one. And that’s okay for a while.
LAKE MACBRIDE— When the U.S. Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund the government (CRomnibus) on Dec. 13, who knew what was in it?
The folks at CoOportunity Health, an Iowa nonprofit insurance cooperative established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), should have. If they didn’t, they would find out three days later when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) notified them and the Iowa Insurance Commissioner that it would not provide solvency funding in the amount of $60 million.
CoOportunity had booked 2015 accounts receivable from the federal government in the amount of $125.6 million to meet projected claims. The shortfall in CRomnibus funding triggered a process wherein the Iowa insurance commissioner, Nick Gerhart, petitioned and was granted a court order appointing him as rehabilitator of the nonprofit.
The bottom line is that CoOportunity created health insurance policies under the ACA offering a very low premium—based upon the government subsidizing the risk. They attracted more customers than expected. A subsequent adverse claims experience resulted in deterioration of the companies financial reserves, and the funding cut in CRomnibus crippled the company. (Read analysis by the Lincoln Journal Star here).
Like it or not, Iowa is involved with fallout from the health insurance marketplace.
What does all of this mean to individuals and businesses who participate in the marketplace? The insurance commissioner was clear in a Christmas Eve press release:
The Iowa Insurance Division determined that CoOportunity Health is in a hazardous financial condition. On Dec. 23, 2014, Insurance Commissioner, Nick Gerhart, applied for and the Polk County District Court issued an order appointing the Commissioner as rehabilitator of CoOportunity Health. The company will continue in existence, but the Commissioner, as rehabilitator, is granted authority to manage the company. The Commissioner will assume management of the company; attempt to correct existing problems; continue operations; maintain policyholder accounting; and develop a plan of rehabilitation or petition the court for liquidation.
Most policyholders may find it in their best interests to find other coverage before the end of open enrollment, which ends Feb. 15, 2015.
Will people who signed up for CoOportunity health insurance on the marketplace be insured in 2015? According to the commissioner,
Yes, if you enrolled on or before Dec. 15, 2014, and you continue to make your premium payments.
No, if you signed up on Dec. 16, 2014 or later you will not have coverage with CoOportunity Health. You have until the end of open enrollment, which ends Feb. 15, 2015, to enroll in another plan.
In simpler language, Republicans can and will do anything they can to de-fund the ACA.
The other ACA-related issue that affects Iowans is the U.S. Supreme Court case King v. Burwell wherein the plaintiff seeks to strike down the health insurance subsidies provided by the federal government where states chose not to manage the health insurance marketplace. If the court strikes the subsidies, it is an open question what Iowans will do to secure coverage in the ACA marketplace, as federal subsidies are a basic idea of what the law does. Without them, participants could ill afford to pay the entire premium amounts.
Here’s what we know and knew before recent events:
It is better not to get sick, even if one has health insurance.
After taxes, health insurance is the biggest single cost in our household, representing significantly more than the mortgage payment was when we had one. We must face the music and pony up the health insurance money as a first priority.
It would have been cheaper for the federal government to put people my age into Medicare early, than to pay the subsidies to insurance companies.
For those of us fortunate enough to have had a health insurance plan throughout our adult years, the CoOportunity plan offered in the marketplace was inexpensive, but was new, and a bad deal. It did not have the network of providers we wanted. For example, instead of seeing a doctor three miles from my house, we would have had to travel to Cedar Rapids for treatment with CoOportunity. In the end, CoOportunity had inadequate capitalization and the idea of a member-owned cooperative was not sustainable, at least in Iowa.
The political will to take care of people’s health care needs, whether by the government or by other means, does not exist in Iowa and elsewhere. We are on our own when it comes to sustaining a life in a turbulent world.
There is a lot more that can be said about the ACA and the Republican opposition to it. Here’s hoping Democrats built enough resilience into the law.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Is it better to use home electricity to power devices or batteries? As readers can see from the image, I opted for battery power and here’s why.
I already own a Kodak EasyShare Z1285 camera that takes two AA batteries.
While cameras come and go in the course of a person’s photo taking, extending the investment in currently owned equipment is more convenient and less expensive. Both of those things matter.
There is also the issue of coal and nuclear generated electricity coming into our house from the rural electric cooperative. While I don’t know how these alkaline batteries were initially charged, they are made of common metals—steel, zinc and manganese—and do not pose a significant health or environmental risk as burning coal and disposing of nuclear waste do. Heavy metals, mercury particularly, were eliminated in alkaline batteries in the 1990s.
The large pack of batteries also frames a project for the new year with the highest resolution digital camera in the house. When the batteries are gone, the project will end.
For now, I am batteried up with energy to create.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Christmas is a busy time for retail workers. The end of year holidays, stretching from Halloween until the Super Bowl are a key time for companies to close sales that impact annual results. A lot of part-time and seasonal workers are needed to get everything done.
The working poor I know have their hands full of wage-earning opportunities at multiple jobs. For most, having Christmas Day off is not a benefit. It is a time to bank wages for the slow times coming later in winter. If hours were available Christmas Day, many would gladly work them.
My previous retail work ended when I left home to attend college. It was a part-time job stocking shelves in the drug department of a box store. We handled everything from sanitary napkins to record albums. As long as I had money to fuel my car, eat out with friends once in a while and buy some personal items, most of the dollars went into savings for college. In retrospect, it wasn’t many dollars, but a dollar had more buying power in the late 1960s.
My high school job is an example of how some view the current role of low wage jobs in society. They are dreaming. It bolsters an argument to keep minimum wage where it is, or eliminate it altogether. The truth is today people pay living expenses from low wage jobs like I had, and work at more than one job to earn enough to keep the bill collector from their door. Low wages are not about getting people a start in their work life. Working poor is a never ending vortex of not enough money to pay expenses with little time for a break, let alone a vacation or holiday.
There is help for working poor and I don’t refer to government social programs. It is social networking. Car broke down? A loaner is offered. Don’t have a car? Rides are shared. Turned out of your apartment? There is a couch or extra room. Need a job? Maybe you can work where I do. Social networking has always been around. When working poor it is a necessity and way of life.
We live by the choices we make in life, and no one chooses to work poor. The progressive lament that working poor is wrong isn’t helping as life goes on and we make up for losing a day’s wages somewhere else as one of our employers closes for the Dec. 25 holiday. There is no holiday when working poor.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Budgeting. We think of spreadsheets and calculations that determine our balance sheet— and ensuring there is enough action in the works to produce enough income to pay expenses. In December, it’s about considering this year and preparing for the next, and it is not all about finances.
What shall we do next year? Once some answers are framed, the budget process begins. Two things are clear this holiday season. Our household is in better shape this year than last, and there are opportunities beyond basic survival.
Our household relies upon a mix of part-time jobs to fund expenses. I outlined my approach in 2013, and the basic framework is unchanged. Where the financial budget is lacking will be made up by new adventures in part-time work.
This year’s challenge is how to use time.
As readers will recognize, my time has been spent gardening, writing, cooking and in part-time paid work. This won’t change. However, there are some new things on the horizon.
We need to downsize, and there is a full-time job just doing that. Next year will partly be about that.
I want a book to sell at speaking events. Framing topics, writing and editing one is high on the list. Most likely it will be a collection of past writing, which fits in with downsizing.
We moved to Big Grove in 1993, and our house is showing wear. It is time to make a list of projects and work on some of them.
While this isn’t much of a plan, it is a framework of how to spend a year. That is a beginning to proper budgeting.
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