2011 November

	2011, NOVEMBER

November 27

Somehow it just seems so unfair that when you get old your body gets thicker and your hair gets thinner.

November 22

There’s another movie out about Shakespeare’s ghost writer. I guess you have to write your dissertation on something, but it seems like every English professor in the world has it in for the Bard. Nobody ever credits somebody else with writing Milton’s sonnets. Nobody says Petrarch was some slug who got acclaim for someone else’s work. You rarely hear any suggestion that Homer didn’t really write the Iliad, even though there is some evidence that Homer didn’t even exist. Has anybody seen J. D. Salinger lately? Or ever? How about Thomas Pynchon? Are they real? But does anybody question who wrote Catcher in the Rye? Not for a minute. So what do the academics have against poor Will Shakespeare?

November 17

An open letter to Ben Bernanke:

It’s always a relief to hear you announce from month to month that inflation is not a problem. I have suspected you believe this because your chauffeur is the one who fills the limo with gas and your housekeeper buys the groceries, so I thought I should point out what’s happening to the rest of us.

Butterball turkey at Von’s was on sale for $8 last Thanksgiving. It’s $11 (also on sale, if you can call it that) this year: up 37.5%

Triple-milled lavender soap from Crabtree & Evelyn was $4 two years ago, $5, last year, $7.67 this year: 25% in 2010, 53.4% in 2011 or $91.75% in two years. Crabtree says they can’t help it, their costs are going up. OK, $4 soap is a luxury to begin with, but my wife likes it. $8 soap (with tax and shipping) is a luxury she is giving up.

The average college textbook cost $57 in 2007-2008, and is now $61. That’s a paltry 7% in three years, but that’s little solace for the student whose tuition at the University of California has gone up twice in a matter of weeks. The “projected” increase is 16%, but the projections of late have been wild underestimations. The Cal State system, which used to be the low(er) cost alternative to higher education in California, is up 37% this year, and they just announced another 9% hike. If you factor in the progressively lower quality of the state’s public education, the “value-adjusted cost” (a term I just invented, but no less valid than the concept of inflation-adjusted dollars) is far worse.

Airfare is up 20% from last year, and that’s just the fare; the variety of extortionate fees they’ve tacked on aren’t even considered.

I submit that in the world I live in, inflation is a major problem. Ten percent of us have no income at all and the rest of us (bankers and hedge fund managers excepted) are earning less—less in actual dollars (the numbers on our paychecks).

Those are the dollars I’m using in my examples, by the way. If I used what you economists like to call “real dollars,” adjusted for inflation (and without excluding food and energy which I have to buy even if you don’t consider them part of the Consumer Price Index), things look pretty bleak.

I know lowering interest rates is supposed to stimulate investment and the Fed wants desperately to do that. But you can’t get much lower than zero, and it doesn’t seem to be doing much good. How about trying something else for a change? How about climbing on the other end of the seesaw? Maybe if we could afford to buy things, the economy would actually get better.

November 9

I have a cell phone. It makes calls and sometimes receives them as well. That’s all it does—no photos, no directions to the nearest pizza, no instant connection to everyone and everything. I have no desire to inflict my every 140-character thought on the rest of the world (I need more than 140 characters anyway) and even less desire to face a barrage of such from others. I don’t want to book my face and, based on the occasional updates I get from my thoughtful daughter-in-law, my life is much calmer if I don’t see the details of what my grandkids are doing.

But I do have a phone that’s just a phone and I must admit I think it’s a useful tool. I pay $25 every three months for the service and that more than covers my needs. I actually have $246 worth of airtime on my prepaid account because it rolls over if I add another $25 before the three months expires.

I just learned how long three months is. I used ATT’s automated system on Friday to add my $25 and the machine told me my balance was good until “the end of the day February 3rd.” Because I almost missed the deadline last time, I kept pushing buttons until an actual person (yes, there is one) came on the line, said her name was Diane and how could she help. I asked what time the end of the day was and she said her name was Ruth and she couldn’t tell me. “But Peggy,” I said, “last time your machine told me my minutes had expired on the morning of the last day, even though your automated message is pretty unequivocal about it being the end of the day. I don’t want that to happen again. So when is the end of the day?” She admitted that it could be any time on that day, even a minute after midnight, and advised me to refill my account “a day or two” early. December and January have, if I remember correctly from kindergarten, 31 days each, so “three months” ought to be 92 days. The machine promised me 91, but the last one is only a millisecond long, so three months is a couple of days shy of three months.

I still think the cell phone is a good idea, even if only to call 911 or to call home and tell Jeanine I forgot what I was supposed to bring home. But now, even at $8.33 a month, I feel cheated. And I bet they don’t give me an extra day when I buy time for February through April.

November 5: I don't get it.

Like everybody else, I try to park as close to the door of the gym as possible, so I don’t have to walk too far to get my exercise. But my old gym recently closed, and the new one is two stories, with the cardio machines on the ground floor and the weights and resistance machines upstairs. Given the structural constraints, I might have done it the other way, but that’s neither here nor there.

The new gym has an elevator.

I presume it’s for those who are confined to wheelchairs or otherwise unable to negotiate the stairs, although the only people I’ve seen use it look pretty able-bodied to me. As with all elevators, it has a sign on it: “In case of fire, do not use elevator.” If you can’t walk, throw yourself down the stairs and hope for the best.

But that’s not what I don’t understand. Frank McCourt is what I don’t understand. When he and Jamie split up, they owned four homes in Los Angeles, one in Colorado, and two in Frank’s home state of Massachusetts. Why anybody would want to own seven homes is beyond me, but that’s not exactly what I don’t get, either.

When Jamie threw him out, why did Frank move into a hotel?

November 2

Did you catch the latest performance by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke? Today he said the economy would grow, but slower than he thought, revised down from 3.9% in January to 2.9% in June to 1.6% today. Look for a number below 1 next time. He said it wasn’t his (or the Federal Reserve’s) fault and he didn’t plan to do anything about it. Not surprising, since the only thing he knows how to do is lower interest rates and it’s hard to lower them below zero.

Then, in another shocker, he said job growth was happening, but slower than he thought. But my favorite was when he was pressed about the growing income inequality in this country, he replied that the way to address that would be to create more jobs. Only a guy who pays his barber $100 to trim his beard could come up with a statement like that. Oh, It’s accurate enough: give a man making zero a $15-an-hour job and the gap between his salary and that of the CEO of UnitedHealth Group would drop to $101,930,000. Now admittedly that’s an extreme example; if you take the average pay of the top 10 CEO’s excluding Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group (I have to exclude him because my calculator only goes to 8 digits), the gap would be a mere $45,286,000. And if you drop down to the level of CEO paupers, Mike Thaman of Owens Corning (#100) only makes $14.23 million more than our mythical new hire.

Sorry, but the obscene income inequality was a growing problem here long before unemployment made the headlines. It will continue, and keep getting worse, until the “99%” lobby forces some changes in the rules. Let your Congressmen know that they won’t be reelected by CitiGroup.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect--well, yes, come to think of it, I guess they do.

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