Category Archives: Politics & News

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

We Fed Them KOOK a COLA but They Drank the KoolAid

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“It’s the economy, stupid!”

We’re back! There is no inflation. The Cost of Living has not risen yet again and seniors get stiffed for the second year in a row. I wrote this column in April but there have been developments:

The Associated Press reports that “the government is expected to announce this week that more than 58 million Social Security recipients will go through another year without an increase in monthly benefits.

“It would mark only the second year without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation were adopted in 1975. The first year was this year.

“Based on inflation so far this year, the trustees who oversee Social Security project there will be no cost of living adjustment for 2011.”

Cost of living is by definition the cost of maintaining a certain living standard.

Employment contracts, pension benefits, and government payments such as your Social Security check can be tied to a cost-of-living index, typically to the CPI or “Consumer Price Index.” Federal law requires the Social Security Administration to base its Cost of Living Adjustment on the consumer price index changes in the third quarter of each year (July, August and September) with the same quarter in the previous year. Remember that.

The CPI reports the average price of a lot of stuff — what is called a constant “market basket of goods and services” — purchased by average households. According to Bloomberg Business News, the CPI wonks add up and average the prices of 95,000 items from 22,000 stores and 35,000 rental units. Those prices are weighted by assuming that you distribute your spending along strict percentages. Housing: 41.4%, Food and Beverage: 17.4%, Transport: 17.0%, Medical Care: 6.9%, Other: 6.9%, Apparel: 6.0%, and Entertainment: 4.4%. Taxes are exempt from the CPI totals so when your property tax or sales tax or income tax or ObamaCare health tax or gasoline tax or telecommunications tax or blue cheese tax rises, it doesn’t actually cost you any extra.

In calculating the CPI, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a formula that reflects the fact that consumers shift their purchases toward products that have fallen in relative price. Although this substitution game means the BLS reduces what we pay by “living with” store brands instead of name brands, BLS says my analysis is incorrect. Their objective “is to calculate the change in the amount consumers need to spend to maintain a constant level of satisfaction.” As long as the BLS gets to define “satisfaction.”

Where, oh where is Mick when we need him?

The Social Security Administration writes, “Since 1975, Social Security’s general benefit increases have been based on increases in the cost of living, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. We call such increases Cost-Of-Living Adjustments, or COLAs. Because there has been a decline in the Consumer Price Index, there will be no COLA payable in 2010.” Or 2011.

Did your cost of living go down?

  • Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup costs between 80 cents and $1.29 per can in most markets today. Do you remember when it was 40 cents? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
  • A five-pound bag of flour costs about $2.49 in most markets today. Do you remember when it was a buck? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
  • Gasoline prices dropped in the third quarter but its cost is flying upwards again; it will be over $3 before I get back to Florida this year. Do you remember when it was $0.999? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
  • According to USAToday, health insurance premiums cost about $13,375 per annum in 2009. (And despite the new law, insurers say they do not have to cover kids with pre-existing conditions.) Do you remember when a family policy cost $2,500? I do. But your premiums will still go up. And, of course, the Cost of Living has declined.
  • Milk costs between $3.50 and $4 per gallon in most markets. Do you remember when it was $1.75? Or $1? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
  • Property taxes on the Vermont house are $3,869.96 and $3,892.26 on the Florida house this year. Do you remember when they were each $900? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.

The AP report continued, The stagnant Cost of Living Adjustment is “not seen as good news for Democrats as they defend their congressional majorities in next month’s elections.

“Last fall a dozen Democrats joined Senate Republicans to block an effort to provide a bonus payment to Social Security recipients to make up for the lack of a COLA this year.”

I wish stuff didn’t cost so much but even more I wish our “leaders” didn’t lie to us about stuff costing so much. Oddly, I still cannot vote myself a raise.

Bob reminded us last time this appeared that “taxes don’t go into the CPI” so I updated the list to include property taxes. I didn’t include the little increases in government programs “recovery” on the phone bill or the increasing number of cities and towns implementing local sales tax “options.”

44 million Americans subsist below the poverty line because the cost of things we buy has skyrocketed past our incomes. Guess how many of those Americans depend on Social Security?

It is likely that Medicare Part B premiums will remain frozen at last year’s levels but premiums for Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program, will rise.

Federal law requires that the Cost of Living Adjustment be based on the CPI changes in the third quarter of last year to the third quarter of this year. Well, Ollie, some of the items in the CPI haven’t changed much, so seniors are now behind the same eight ball as they were last year.

Except their taxes, insurance premiums, drugs, heating oil, and cable TV subscriptions are all going to cost more.

Good thing there is a sale on cat food down to Price Chopper, isn’t it? Mmmm. Cat food.





Parking Poaching

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I am pugnaciously pissed by parking pad pulverizers. They don’t have their pinkies on the pulse of passengers pressured and pushed to be pedestrians. In fact, their pundits want to punish by puncturing our pickups and sending them to perdition.

I think they’re just punks.

Poaching a Parking SpaceThe Burlington Free Press reports that cars claim about 24 acres in Burlington, Vermont’s, municipal lots and spaces based on the area of a typical 10-foot by 20-foot parking space.

Burlington celebrated global “PARK(ing) Day” last week. The five-year-old secular holiday aims steal back automobile parking spaces and reallocate them as something else.

My mom always said, “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Science has shown that idiom to be factually wrong, at least for fruit flies; the tiny fruit fly likes sweet balsamic and apple cider vinegars better than honey, perhaps because the vinegar is easier to sip. Or because they like, well, fruit.

Anyway, Mom’s human relations rule proffers that we should not provoke the very people we want to persuade.

The PARK(ing) holiday began in 2005 when San Francisco art and design studio Rebar Group converted one nearby parking space into a mini park. They added a roll-in tree, a park bench, and laid sod atop the asphalt. Rebar maintained the “park” for just two hours. This year Burlington, Hangzhou, China, and Tehran held their first events.

It appears PARK(ing) organizers don’t care what we do with the “reclaimed” parking spaces as long as we don’t let cars use them.

One Burlington bright spot has occupied a “car-sized space” on Cherry Street for about a year. Outdoor Gear Exchange reduced the space for its truck loading zone, added a car parking space there, and installed a grand multi-bicycle “parking station” in front of their own store. It’s a bright spot because no one drives any farther to park and we have made room for additional green uses.

Want to persuade parkers? Pilfer a bit of pedestrian pathway next to the parking plot you want to point out and create your public park there. People will get the point. Particularly when they park right next to you.

Parkers have a sweet tooth (after all, there are never any empty spaces in front of Maple City Candies in St Albans), so my mom wasn’t wrong. Making me drive around burning gas to park somewhere else is more of a stick than a carrot cake and is unlikely to make me plug or praise your paradoxical-parking project.





Anger Management

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There, I said it.

Come to think of it, I am downright vexed. See, everywhere I look, people are trying to exasperate me and that just pisses me off.

BP, the company so many Americans have come to hate. They screwed up. The government screwed up. And the public got screwed. Meanwhile, 153 days of media coverage exacerbated the anger and fanned the flames. BP blamed the government which aggravated everybody. People on the ground blamed BP which antagonized BP but pleased pretty much everyone else. The media blitzed the scientists by offering conflicting reports, then blaming the experts for not knowing the answers. They took science down another notch which irks me. Lot of anger in that paragraph.

Anybody been to court lately? When our Visigoth neighbors decided some of our land was their land, they dragged us before the local zoning board, then sued us in both Vermont’s Superior and Environmental courts. They lied which inflamed me. I resisted which affronted them. Lot of anger in that paragraph.

“The only litigation more contentious than a divorce is a boundary line dispute,” our lawyer said. He, at least, was happy.

It goads people (“goad,” not “goat,” although it probably gets some goats, too) when I say this but Islam galls us. Some Muslims enrage us. One of the reasons they do, aside from claiming “religion of peace” status whilst trying to kill us, is simple: raving Muslim terrorists stir up embittered Muslim illiterates to blast unsuspecting Americans while ruffled rank-and-file Muslims stand idly by. Lot of anger in that paragraph.

Jealousy. There’s a biggie. In another arena gekko said “jealousy became more important than the relationships I craved.” Proverbs reminds us that Anger is cruel and destructive, but it is nothing compared to jealousy. Still, when Anthony Lozano threatened, bound, and tortured his girlfriend who eventually escaped the home they shared, all allegedly because he found a post on her Facebook page from another man, he certainly acted out his exasperation, irritation, and temper.

Take politics (sounds like a Henny Youngman joke). Here in Vermont, Demorat Peter Shumlin is riling his supporters (and the opposition) to a full boil over the Repuglican Brian Dubie’s hateful stand to renew the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant license. Mr. Dubie has maddened his supporters (and the opposition) by calling Mr. Shumlin a liar and a liberal. Lot of anger in that paragraph.

I’m a political junkie. I have chaired political committees, sat in political booths at field dayses, and walked the streets registering voters. I have run for office. I am now a “Librarian” but I started out as a Republican. I stuck it out until the party started to rant and rankle. I generally like the ideas individual Tea Party peeps discuss, but the Tea Party as a whole scares me because they monger anger. Their invective leverages agitation, outrage, and seething, steaming umbrage to whip voters into the mob frenzy independent of the thought process.

All extremists favor those tactics. The media who know that if you bleed, it leads. The lawyers who charge by the infuriating hour. The religious freaks who bristle over a Bris. The control freaks who flip over Facebook. And the politicians, whether they be home grown “officials,” terrorist fanatics, miffed militia men, or radical revolutionaries.

Provocation pays.

Here’s my plan for the 43 days until November 2 (and all the days in the future):

  • If you are in the media and you pump out lies designed to get on my nerves, you will succeed and I will not buy from your sponsors.
  • If you belong to an extremist religion and continue to support the people who want to kill me, it will offend me and I will ask that you lose your tax exempt status.
  • If you are a politician seeking my vote, stop. If you name your opponent it will anger me and I will write my own name in on the ballot.

Breaking News:
I am just sooooooooo tired of these airheads: The NYTimes reports that, “Democrats are deploying the fruits of a yearlong investigation into the business and personal histories of Republican candidates in an effort to plant doubts about them.” !@#$%^ing !@#$%^ers.





Vermont Most Expensive

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Vermont is the most expensive state in the Union in which to do business.

A dollar’s worth of manufactured goods costs 95.9 cents to produce here, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay above — like 15% more than — the national average of 83.3 cents. In contrast, the cost is 93.5 cents next door in New Hampshire, 93 cents in Rhode Island, and 79.3 cents in 43rd-ranked Connecticut. Oregon, where it costs just 70.6 cents to produce a dollar’s worth of manufactured goods, is the least expensive state for manufacturing.

A new University of Connecticut study, High Wages, Low Costs: A Connecticut Paradox, calculated the costs of labor and materials used in production, taxes and license fees, and annual capital costs such as depreciation, rental payments and interest, for every state.

“The November election will bring a new round of claims about Connecticut’s high wages, exorbitant rents, burdensome taxes, overall lack of competitiveness and resulting job losses,” the study claimed.

Greg Hayes, United Technologies CFO, told investors “any place outside of Connecticut is low cost.”

Although Connecticut voters incorrectly accept the mantra of their “unfriendly” business environment as fact, Vermont workers, struggling with years of rising taxes and rising costs, are not so lucky.

The two selling points for building boats in Vermont were the “Made in Vermont” branding and the access to one-third of the U.S. boating market within 600 miles.

One of my clients, a small foundry with operations in the U.S. and Canada, has shut down most operations in Vermont. “It’s just too expensive,” the owner says.

The study showed that Mr. Hayes was partly wrong but that my own analysis and my clients are right.

The extra $151,000 in cost for a small business like mine to manufacture a million dollars worth of goods here generally comes right out of the owner’s pocket. And that, in a dragging economy, hurts Vermont workers.

Small businesses create more jobs even than the Feds but even the New York Times has noticed that ObamaNation tax policies will at best not help small business and will actually make it more difficult for them to grow. And that just piles on top of what happens here in Vermont. Bye bye jobs, doncha know.

A business can cut jobs, cut the cost of labo(u)r, and cheapen up on materials. When building costs, rental payments, and interest get out of hand they can move. What do they do when they have done all that?

http://erin-m-flynn.com/2010/01/sailing-away-nautical-trend-4http://www.posters.ws/18681/popeyeTaxes and license fees, and tax policies such as depreciation write offs are political. Too bad that we have J. Wellington Wimpy at the helm of a government that believes in raising taxes, raising the debt limit, and (by the way) raising spending, all when we don’t have the money for even one cheeseburger.

I wonder. What would Popeye do?





Scrap the Dinosaurs

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The aesthetics police are alive and well in Vermont.

Vermontasaurus is (not really) held together with bubble gum and duct tape but nothing really is level or plumb. On the other hand, the Downing’s cross is straight, true, and well lighted. Really well lighted.

Vermontasaurus is a 25-foot-tall, 122-foot-long Americana folk art “dinosaur” that Brian Boland and a host of volunteers found in a scrap wood pile at the Post Mills airport in the town of Thetford, Vermont. The airport caters primarily to hot air balloons and gliders. The Town required a $272 permit for it. The state Natural Resources Board notified Mr. Boland he would need an Act 250 permit.

Richard and Joan Downing built a 24-foot cross outside their private chapel in Lyndon, Vermont. They light it during holy seasons. Lyndon’s development review board limited the number of days it can be lit. Officials now want the cross removed under Act 250 rules.

Blasphemy. Both cases.

Vermont’s Land Use and Development Act, Act 250 of 1970, created nine District Environmental Commissions to review large-scale development projects. The 10 criteria have changed little in 40 years; the reach of the environmental commissions has extended into everything from crosses to parades.

“It’s art, not edifice,” Brian Boland said. I agree.

Mr. Boland, a hot-air balloon designer and pilot, runs the 52-acre Post Mills airfield. He had a pile of broken wooden planks and other debris on the edge of his property. Volunteers spent nine days with splintered two-by-fours, half a bunk bed ladder, the rotted belly of a guitar, and one rule: no saws, no rulers and no materials other than what was in the scrap pile.

The result of random carpentry is a Shelburne Museum -sized slice of roadside American folk art that made the Smithsonian Magazine.

Lyndon’s Municipal Manager Dan Hill said that Act 250 decision came because the cross’ “aesthetics it did not meet the character of the neighborhood.”

Right. The Downings own about 800 acres of rolling Vermont land. They opened the chapel five years ago, in 2005, for their family of seven children and the 35 foster children. The chapel is open to the public. They added the cross two years later. Three other Dozule crosses have been built in Vermont.

The neighbors who apparently do not drive around looking at holiday lights in the neighborhood at Christmas, say the cross looks like a neon sign for a business.

“We just think that they’re infringing on our rights to practice our religion, and I think that they’ve gone a little too far in this case,” Mr. Downing told News Channel 5.

The state has not yet decided if a permit is required or, as Mr. Boland says he might have to dismantle Vermontasaurus entirely.

Lyndon expects a court ruling on the cross in November.

A man’s home apparently is no longer his castle in (liberal) Vermont where the neighbor and the state knows better than the landowner.

Here in Vermont, people believe the ultra-restrictive state land-use law can override the Constitution and that this is a good thing.

The Boland and Downing position is very simple. They have every right to do pretty much anything but spread bedbugs or shoot at their neighbors on their own land.