Category Archives: What? Are They Nuts?

Strike!

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“We need to go on strike!” My friend Lido Bruhl shouted.

From the You Can’t Make this Stuff up department.

“They can’t rise if the minimum wage is too low to live on,” democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said in a speech Friday.

The minimum wage is the least an employer can pay an hourly employee; it has been pegged at $7.25 an hour since 2009; some states and cities have raised their minimum wage higher than that.

Many politicians want to raise it to $15/hour.

Just 4.3% of hourly workers 16 years old and older earn at or below the prevailing minimum wage but 42% of all U.S. workers earn $15 or less. Since about 60% of the U.S. workforce of some 122.9 million full time workers overall are paid hourly, more than 70 million workers now make less than that magic $15/hour. (BLS defines full-time workers as those who usually work 35 hours or more per week.)

“We need to go on strike!” Lido “Lee” Bruhl is a now retired newspaper editor who lives on Social Security with help from his wife and his daughter Greta.

Wait.

What?

What’s a state-run lottery?
It’s another extra tax on people who can’t do math.

Let’s start with some basic facts about Social Security today.

“If it weren’t for Social Security more than one-third of us older Americans would be living in poverty,” he said. “As it is, we worked all our lives and now we’re living on minimum wage!”

Wait.

What?

Regular readers may recall a chart I created last year to compare the minimum wage with the Federal Poverty Line. People working for minimum wage have consistently earned more than the Federal poverty level every year since 1957. Here are those figures updated.


2016 Minimum Wage Chart

Among “elderly” Social Security recipients, 22% of married couples and about 47% of unmarried persons rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income. Ouch!

There are 41,362,000 elderly recipients. About half of them receive the average “benefit” of around $1,300 per month or less. That’s about $43 more per month than minimum wage. And it is considerably less than that after deducting for Medicare premiums.

The definition of poverty is income below $11,770 this year. Working 40 hours at minimum wage earns you $15,080. (Heck, if you work 35 hours at minimum wage, you earn $13,195.) And the average Social Security check will bring in $15,988 this year.

We don’t need to argue about whether “poverty” in the United States doesn’t look at all like the hand-to-mouth existence of the poor in, say, Mexico. If you can afford cigarettes and a smart phone, you aren’t poor.

“I don’t smoke. I can’t afford it,” Lee said. “I don’t have a smart phone for the same reason.”

Now for the politics (and you thought I’d never get here).

The American retirement system is designed so smart politicians can keep American workers and retirees alike in servitude to the government but the idea of raising the minimum wage is designed for people who can’t do math.

Want to know why politicians want the minimum wage to rise?
The income tax you pay goes up when your paycheck goes up.

Want to know why politicians want wages to rise?

It’s simple. The income tax you pay goes up when your paycheck goes up. The income tax rate you pay goes from zero at minimum wage to about 13%, meaning you’ll owe $4,060 when your paycheck goes up to $15/hour. All those new taxpayers.

What happens when 70 million people get a raise to $15/hour?

The first thing that happens is a brief surge in government revenues as payroll taxes skyrocket.

The second thing that happens is 25 million people get their hours cut. The politicians forgot that part.

The third thing that happens is 25 million new unemployment applications. The politicians forgot that part.

The fourth thing that happens is 10 million pissed off workers because they no longer make more than minimum wage. The politicians forgot that part.

The fifth thing that happens is an inflationary spiral. The politicians forgot that part.

The sixth thing that happens is an increase in the Federal Poverty Level. The politicians probably remembered that part.

And almost 21 million Social Security recipients won’t be able to afford the stamp to write to their Congress Critter because they will suddenly be back under the poverty line.

My friend Lee Bruhl was right.

We need to strike.

He’s just wrong about the reason.

 

It’s a Gas!

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Hillary2.0 began the first rally of her campaign with a sharp attack on Republicans. “There may be some new voices in the presidential Republican choir,” she said. “But they’re all singing the same old song.”

Would those lyrics be “Dem policies cost too much, cost too much!”?

I drove the east coast last week, right through the heart of red states and blue states.


3-Month Gas Price, US v. San Francisco

The cheapest gas I saw was in South Carolina at $2.339.

Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were “firmly in control of the government of South Carolina at all levels. The state Republican Party was little more than a country club group… [but] from 1964 to present, the Republican Party has gradually gained strength and by the 1990s it became the dominant party of the state.”

It turns out that the Hillary constituency digs deeper at the gas pump than most North Puffin Perspective™ readers. Drivers in Santa Barbara, for example, pay 75 cents more per gallon than drivers in Tulsa, OK. The pattern repeats in all the liberal strongholds from the Left Coast where gas prices are on the wrong side of $3.50 per gallon to New England and the Northeast where $3 per gallon is the rule. The solid Republican regions across the Midwest and South have the nation’s lowest prices, well below $2.50 per gallon.


3-Month Gas Price, Vermont, NY, and South Carolina

On my road trip last week, I paid more for gas in the Peoples’ Republic of Vermont than in the Keys. In fact, I paid more for gas in Vermont than in any other state.

Florida $2.639 (in the Keys)
Georgia $2.459
South Carolina $2.339
Virginia $2.499
Pennsylvania $2.799 at the Sunoco at Davisville Road (I didn’t buy any)
New Jersey $2.429 (the attendant pumped it and washed my windshield)
New York Northway $2.839
Vermont $2.839

Blown away I was when I saw the price at the pump over the bridge in Vermont was exactly the same as the price in New York State. I drove into Vermont on fumes because I refused to pay that New York price.

New York stations have always charged a dime or two more than Vermont stations because New York gas taxes total 62.9 cents per gallon but Vermont gets “only” 48.9 cents per gallon. Now that extra 14 cents is going straight into gouging in an oh-so-very liberal state but that’s another story.

As a general rule of thumb, every penny we save on a gallon of gasoline results in about $1 billion of money that you and I can spend on stuff. That’s not trivial, even when all the 140-ish million U.S. car owners have to split it. Let me do the math for you. A penny puts seven bucks in your pocket if you drive an average number of miles. I get more because my truck gets lousy mileage. A dime at the pump gets us $71 each. A dollar difference at the pump means my road trip from South Puffin to North Puffin cost me $100 less.

One hundred dollars.

So, here’s the $64 question: Why do liberals vote against their own self interest, let alone against yours and mine? I mean does the liberal really like paying more for gasoline and food and doctoring and taxes and Kool Aid™?

 

Sex on the Beach

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Titillating.

According to Wikipedia, there are two general types of the cocktail: one made from vodka, peach schnapps, orange juice, and cranberry juice and one made from vodka, Chambord, Midori Melon Liqueur, pineapple juice, and cranberry juice. The former is an International Bartenders Association official cocktail but the latter is listed in the Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide.

Both come with the warning that “this drink is not the for the faint of heart.”

A Google search for “sex on the beach” turned up about 313,000,000 results in 0.27 seconds.

Sex on the Beach
Apparently, that’s not for the faint of heart, either.

A Florida couple convicted in May of having sex on the beach up in Manatee County faced up to 15 years behind bars and must register as sex offenders for “illicit public sexcapades.”

The jury deliberated for about 15 minutes after watching sex-on-the-beach video during the 2-day trial.

A grandmother on Cortez Beach in Bradenton filmed the couple in what we once called “in flagrante delicto.” The prosecutor showed the video in court. The Associated Press reported that the video “showed [a 20-year old woman] moving on top of the 40-year-old caballero] in a sexual manner in broad daylight. Witnesses testified that a 3-year-old girl saw them.”

Illicit public sexcapades?

The couple declined the prosecutor’s plea deal offer. “We gave them a reasonable offer, what we felt was reasonable, and they decided it wasn’t something they wanted to accept responsibility for,” the prosecutor told The Miami Herald. “Despite the video, despite all the witnesses.”

A Google search for “sex on the beach video” returned only about 213,000,000 results in 0.25 seconds although none of them were the Bradenton grandmother’s production.

Ya gotta wonder about that granny, shooting a bad porn video on the beach. Why wasn’t she prosecuted?

A different bad guy attacked and stabbed a person he had followed home from the Wells Fargo in Sarasota. Cops believe the suspect is a white male in his twenties with short dark hair who drives a mid-nineties 4-door Mercedes Benz.

Not caught. Not prosecuted.

On the other hand, a Manatee County couple will spend time behind bars animal cruelty at their Manatee County shelter. The couple was charged last year after sheriff’s deputies raided the Napier Log Cabin Horse and Animal Sanctuary and confiscated some 300 animals. Convicted in February, she was sentenced to 270 days in county jail followed by three years of probation. he got 36 months followed by four years on probation. Both are also prohibited from owning or possessing animals.

Ya gotta wonder about a prosecutor spending a couple of days at trial and pushing for 15 year sentences on a couple making love. I guess they were the low hanging fruit, far more important than stabbings or abusing 300 animals.

I’ve never figured that sand was particularly lubricious, but if SWMBO or Caitlin, or Fanny, or Liz, or Missy wants to try geezer sex on the beach, I’m sure we can find a spot where Bradenton Granny isn’t around to shoot porn with her video cam.