Installment # 40

In California we live in a middle-class neighborhood, and generally both husband and wife have jobs other than home-maker.  I can’t say they all work “outside the home,” because these days a lot of people work from home or have home offices, but they have jobs “other than homemaker.”  So literally the middle class is the “working” class (two jobs per family), and the poor do not have jobs, or at best are trying to raise a family on one minimum wage paycheck. I heard a speaker once say that he had been “broke” a few times in his life, but he had never been poor, explaining that “broke” describes a temporary financial condition, while “poor” is a state of mind that tends to be permanent.  I think that is a useful distinction.  I’m tempted to say that Dad’s “little guy” had a permanent state of mind that would not allow him to improve his lot in life, except maybe to vote for a politician or political party that might help him.

These days the man who stands for the “little guy” stands for the unemployed and impoverished, people on government assistance programs, and others who do not pay income taxes and often don’t bother to vote.  I was just reading where 17% of households paid no federal income taxes back in the 1980s under president Ronald Reagan, that it climbed through the Clinton and Bush presidencies to 30% and now under Obama has reached 47%!  Even allowing for the huge population bulge of “baby-boomers” reaching retirement age and no longer earning enough to trigger a federal tax liability, there still has been a dramatic and scary increase.  My sense from my economics training is that 50% is the tipping point, where our system is no longer sustainable.  We’re getting close!

As a quick aside, an “Op-Ed” columnist recently pointed out that our social security system has a basic math problem: When first implemented under President Roosevelt (FDR), the minimum age at which one could begin receiving retirement benefits was 65, and the average life span was 63 (that should work!).  Currently, the minimum age to start receiving benefits is 62, and the average life span is 78 (oops!).  On top of that, benefits were extended to people with disabilities (real or imagined, some would say).  So, contributing to the 47% is the pool of people (how large I don’t know) who will not work if they don’t have to.  Perhaps I am one of them.  If Sandy and I were not drawing social security, it would be “work or starve or go mooch off relatives.”

In recent years we have also heard a lot of discussion about who is and who is not paying their “fair share” of federal income taxes.  To the extent that we could agree that the primary role of government is to keep us all safe (from external and internal forces, including each other), and would acknowledge that each life is equally valuable, we could say that each of us is getting the exact same benefit from government and should therefore be paying the exact same amount.  Well, based on year 2009, the top 1% paid close to 37% of all federal taxes received by government; the top 5% paid over 58%; and the bottom 50% paid only 2% (including the 47% who paid no federal income taxes).  The “fair share” voices are saying that the wealthy should pay more, and the middle class – whoever they are – should pay less.  This is why conservatives call it confiscation, redistribution of wealth, or penalizing success.  I question who the so-called middle class really is because the top 50% of households paid 98% of all federal taxes paid, and the bottom 50% paid 2%.  So the middle class is the middle of what?  It looks like the middle of poverty…the working poor.

When I am driving and come upon some road work and a flagman directing traffic, I remember how Dad would “rail against the system”, saying that the flagman was probably getting $5 per hour for standing there basically doing nothing.  (At the time, the minimum wage was around $1 per hour; and Dad didn’t have a job, anyway).  He figured the union was forcing the construction company to assign an unneeded flagman to each road construction job – highway robbery…literally!  It didn’t take many years of driving for me to appreciate the safety issues, both for the workers and for the motorists, addressed by the flagman.  In recent years I have also considered what a lousy job it would be for me to stand on my feet for hours on end in the hot sun or freezing cold, breathing the auto pollution, directing traffic.  I also figure that the flagman represents an unskilled, entry-level construction job, one that hopefully will give that person a chance to learn some skills and advance to a higher-paying job on the construction crew. 

In my ideal economy that is how it works.  Older men and family men should not be working at low-paying jobs.  That is where they should have started when they were still in school, or before they proved themselves, maybe as teenagers or people in their early twenties.  With a few inevitable exceptions, we shouldn’t have a whole class of people from their 30s to their 60s working in such jobs.  The exceptions have to do, of course, with self-image, attitude, mental ability and the like.  I mention men above only to illustrate an idea.  Women in the workforce are a whole other subject not meant to be excluded in any way.

To be fair, I also received my love of music from Dad, and my sense of humor from both Mom and Dad.  He liked to tell jokes in small group settings, some of which I heard many times, and Mom just had a good sense of humor, could see the folly in everyday situations, and had a comical way of commenting on things.  One time we were driving passed an ugly house and Mom said, “It looks like some guy had a nightmare, then woke up and painted that house.”  When Amy’s ex husband, who managed a Goodyear tire outlet, cheated on her and caused their divorce, Mom said “One of those tires must have fallen on his head, or something.  Maybe he was inhaling too many fumes.”

I remember a time when Donald and I were wrestling on the front room floor in our pajamas, either right before bedtime or first thing in the morning.  We didn’t wear underpants under our pajamas, and these had the opening in the front for boys.  Well, Mom got my attention and said, “Tommy, you’re taking my picture!” I was only about 10 years old, but it didn’t take too long for me to catch what she was trying to tell me.  To appreciate the way she put, remember the state of the art of professional photography in those days, where the long lens points out from under the black cover.

Since as long as I can remember, I have always liked to make people laugh.  Mom encouraged this by seeming to get a big kick out of things I said, and she would repeat them sometimes and laugh some more.  One evening during our time in North Massapequa – maybe I was 12 or 13 - Donald was reading something and came across the term habeas corpus.  Not knowing how to pronounce it, he asked out loud to whoever would answer, “What does ‘heebus corpus’ mean?”  I knew it was a legal term of some kind, though not exactly what, but what immediately came to mind from the way he pronounced it was the combination of “Heeb,” which was one of our terms for Jewish people, and “corpse”.  So I said, “It means a dead Jew.”  Mom laughed for hours and then for days, as she retold the story.  In fact she brought it up many times over the years as an example of my sense of humor.

It was around the same timeframe that another quip of mine had her in stitches, and she delighted in the retelling.   We were all piling into a car one day, leaving the beach.  I was in the back with Mom, and someone was in the front passenger seat holding her baby.  The baby was looking at us over the woman’s shoulder, and Mom commented on what beautiful blue eyes the baby had, whereupon I piped up with, “Yeah and the brown one is not bad, either.”

To back up a second, “Heeb” was of course the first syllable of the word Hebrew.  In our part of the country, in those days, and perhaps among the less educated, everyone had to be labeled and pigeonholed by nationality, race or religion.  Before we learned anything else about a person, we had to know what category to put him/her in and therefore what nicknames and slurs to use in describing them.  If it is still that way, surely it is a lot less so now than it was in the 1950s. I didn’t think much about it until I lived in California for awhile and finally noticed that people didn’t talk that way, or even think that way here.  Did I mention that I am not the most observant and aware sort of person?  It takes awhile.

Anyway, thanks to Mom and Dad’s encouragement, combined with my natural literal bent, I have enjoyed mixed up definitions over the years, and have created some myself.  Just recently I told Sandy that an ‘agnostic’ is a farmer who doesn’t plant anything at all.  It just came into my head.  I think I originated the twist, “A waist is a terrible thing to mind,” which was my excuse for not succeeding at Weight Watchers.  As another example, I remember sitting having coffee with Sandy one morning when she was coming into her menopause years.  She explained that at a certain time of life, women have these hot flashes.  I told her that in a certain time of life men have “horney” flashes, which was a way of suggesting (facetiously at the time)  that a man’s sex drive sort of comes and goes as he ages, instead of being in the constant “on” position.  Then I said, “Hey, this may work out really well.  Imagine if I was having a horney flash at the same time that you were having a hot flash!”  We both had a good laugh over that one.  I have shared that with our kids, and they all grimace and shudder and wish they hadn’t heard that.  I don’t see what the big deal is.  It’s just funny.  Well, maybe the big deal is that it is not funny, therefore just embarrassing to hear me say.

If you are familiar with the lament that a problem with Chinese food is that, seemingly, “two hours later you’re hungry again”, then you will appreciate my twist: “You know how it is with Chinese women – two hours later you’re horney again!”  Within the various running groups that I used to run with there were some married couples, which was a little rare.  Most couples consist of one runner and one non-runner, or they take turns with kids and chores while the other one runs.  But for those who ran with us regularly I came up with, “The couple that sweats together sticks together.”  They all seemed to think that was clever.  We are all familiar now with the clever questions based on the oddities of the English language, such as “Why do we drive on the parkway, and park on the driveway?” or “Since they are so close together, why do we call them apartments?”  My original thought has to do with the way we say that we started to say something or do something and then “thought better of it.”  Don’t we mean we thought worse of it…decided it was not a good idea?

Lastly for now under the category of original thinking let me include the story of the “big thinker” and the “little thinker.”  There is a saying to the affect that whenever there is a piano to be moved, there is no shortage of people who will immediately go for the stool – the bench that the pianist sits on.  For many years I thought of this only as a humorous way of pointing out that a lazy person will be quick to find a way to avoid the bigger job by being occupied with the smaller but also necessary job.  Only in recent years did it come to me that another and better way to look at this is: The big thinker knows that there are any number of people who will see that the bench is in the way, and opt to move it.  The small thinker will reason that the crew that picks up the piano and tries to relocate it will immediately bump into or trip over the bench, so that the first thing to do is to move the bench.  He may also realize that if he takes his time with this, there is a good chance that he will not be part of the piano-lifting crew.  Again, the big thinker is confident that this little detail will be taken care of by some detail-oriented person.  He doesn’t waste any time worrying about that.

I explained this to Kevin Helash one time recently, in a way that was intended to be both complimentary and chiding.  Kevin is forever misplacing important things, like car keys, wallet, I-Pad, etc, causing us all to run around looking for them when he is needing to leave on business.  I told him that he is the big thinker who needs to keep his eye on the grand objective while we little thinkers deal with the important, but mundane things.  Just as you can’t move the piano without getting the bench out of the way, you can’t come prepared to lead an important business meeting if you can’t find the topic or directions or materials you had planned to distribute, or whatever.  Truth be told, though, Kevin has more energy that anyone I have ever met; has a “can do” attitude about everything from business to sports to family.  He balances, juggles and succeeds at everything, seemingly without breaking a sweat.  I’ve told him that he doesn’t just “think outside the box,” he doesn’t have a box.

One of Mom’s favorite stories was the time Donald spilt a hot bowl of soup onto his lap.  Aunt Patty was visiting, and Donald was just old enough to be embarrassed about being stood up on the chair and having his pants and underpants pulled down, which is what Mom immediately did.  When the hot soup hit his lap, Donald started screaming, so Mom got the hot clothing away from his skin as quick as possible.  As Mom would tell it, the sight of Donald and his white body, standing on the chair with his pants down around his ankles, totally red in the face and screaming from pain and embarrassment, struck Aunt Patty as funny, and she started to laugh.  Soon we were all laughing, which added anger to the pain and embarrassment on Donald’s face.  We knew, or at least the adults knew, that we shouldn’t be laughing, but it got funnier and funnier as Donald’s face conveyed the combination of emotions, and of course the more we laughed, the angrier he got, and the angrier he got, the more we laughed.  Fairly soon the pain subsided and his pants were pulled back up, and things settled down.  We all felt bad for laughing, and he probably stalked off to his (our) room.