Things Currently P*ssing Curmie Off

Given the name of this blog, Gentle Reader, you might be justified in thinking the title of this entry would be a little redundant.  You might be right, but we’re going there, anyway.

Retirement Follies I.  Curmie is trying to negotiate the process moving into retirement, or at least enough of retirement that he’s no longer getting employer-paid insurance.  So now it’s time to figure out Medicare Part B.  I had a question… HR should be able to answer the question, but instead tells me to call Social Security.  Curmie does; is on hold for over an hour before giving up.  They’re not available for in-person (COVID is very, very, scary if you’re a US government employee, just not for the rest of us, who are pretty much required to return to something very much like “normal”).  Dear SSA: hire some more people.

Retirement Follies II: Curmie is now four phone calls into the process of actually extracting some of the funds from his retirement account.  Everyone at the financial services provider has been very pleasant, and they’ve all provided useful information… but it’s taken all four calls to find out that I can do most of this online; it’s just that the link is hidden well enough to be a secret passage in a mystery/adventure movie.  The process is not helped by the fact that two former employers (one of which I left over 20 years ago) still listed me as a current employee (and therefore ineligible to withdraw money) and another requires Beloved Spouse’s signature to allow me access to my own retirement funds.

In the World of COVID.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia’s Regents refuse to require masks on state university campuses, but do so in their own companies.  It’s even worse in Texas, where mask mandates are not merely not required but forbidden. 

Such is the inevitable result of having Regents or Trustees or Councilors or WhateverThey’reCalled be hypocritical political appointees, beholden to especially cretinous governors (Kemp, Abbott…)  BTW, don’t get Curmie started on Regents in general, given what has recently happened at Curmie’s university.  Only the time-honored dictum of “don’t shit where you eat” prevents a lengthy screed about their abrogation of responsibility.

More on Moron Government Agencies I: Curmie’s department has a long-standing exchange with a British conservatory.  We had two students scheduled to come last fall, but COVID intervened.  Then they were set for spring, but that got delayed, too.  So their arrival was pushed off again until this fall.  We worked out their class schedules in March, and they started the process of getting the appropriate visas in April.  We let them know when we wanted them to arrive.  Sometime in the middle of the summer, Curmie got an e-mail that there were delays getting a visa.  We finally heard from them: they couldn’t even get a visa appointment until the day after we needed them here; they finally arrived over two weeks into the semester.  These are student visas.  Curiously enough, academic calendars are a thing.  Dear State Department: do your damned job.

Moron Government Agencies II.  The students unsurprisingly looked for the best rate for their airfare; although there are direct flights, they found a better deal changing planes in Newark.  Then they got held up by the idiots of HSA (apologies for redundancy), without explanation… for just long enough to make them miss their connection.  Luckily, they were able to get a flight later that evening… to a different airport, a half-hour further away from here.  So instead of being able to move them into their apartment about 9:00 p.m., it was after 1:00 a.m.  Luckily, they’re quite lovely and patient people.

Unsurprisingly, Curmie had a flashback to another long night of waiting for HSA to take their thumb out of their ass.  You can read about that one here.

Obviously False Claims.  There’s a commercial that Curmie hears fairly often on the car radio.  It’s for an app called GetUpside.  It claims users can get “up to 25 cents off every gallon” of gas, and that you can “make up to $200-300 a month.”  How can they get away with this crap?  Let’s be conservative and say the user gets the full 25¢ a gallon and gets reimbursed “only” $200 a month.  So that’s 800 gallons of gas in a month.  At a conservative 20 mpg, that’s 16,000 miles in a month.  Let’s say someone can average an unlikely 65 mph.  That means driving over 246 hours in a month.  A full time job, Monday through Friday: a maximum of 184 hours in a month.  So… uh…

Just Stupid Ads.  There’s an ad for one of the ubiquitous foreign-language programs (Curmie can’t remember which one, having done everything possible to forget).  You know the kind, Gentle Reader.  This one talks about an upcoming vacation to Paris, so learning French becomes particularly attractive.  At the end, the “student” cheerfully proclaims that after a mere few weeks he can say “Je suis les États-Unis.” 

Everyone immediately rushes out to buy the product… except that what he says translates to “I am the United States.”  We’ve had a couple of Presidents who might think they follow in the footsteps of France’s Louis XIV, of “L’étât, c’est moi” (“The state is me”) fame.  Any democratically inclined American begs to differ.  Note: the lower-case “d” in “democratically” in the previous sentence is important.

Cable Companies.  No one has anything good to say about any of them.  Ours, Suddenlink, seems particularly inept.  Talking to anyone at the local office is reminiscent of a koi pond, as know-nothing minions exhibit the latest fashion in carp-like gawping.  But at least they’re pleasant, unlike literally anyone I’ve ever talked to in their (ahem) “customer service” department.  A more rude and condescending collection of self-important jackasses has seldom been assembled… and Curmie has seen political conventions.

The internet signal is shaky: rare is the day Curmie doesn’t get a pop-up on the laptop that internet has been “restored”; streaming from PBS, BritBox, Acorn, and Netflix generally involves at least a half dozen pauses while the system buffers, and we get to watch the swirly wheel. 

“It must be raining in Tyler” (an hour or so away, where Suddenlink’s local headquarters is) is code in my family for “the internet is out again.”  This happens maybe once a month.  We’re not talking here about actual severe weather—hurricanes or the nasty cold spell this February—but simply unexplained (and probably unexplainable) outages occurring with grim regularity.

Usually, we’re talking about an hour or so, but Chez Curmie was recently without cable, internet, or wifi for well over 24 hours for no discernible reason.  But you knew that, Gentle Reader.  It’s a cable company.

Apparently Suddenlink is trying to expand into the cell phone business.  Curmie has been less than thrilled with AT&T, but Suddenlink?  In the words of several of Beloved Spouse’s colleagues: Oh. Hell. No.

Final comment: don’t ask about the formatting of this post.  It's blogspot.com being blogspot.com.

Nibbling around the Edges

There’s an intriguing graphic on the New York Times website. It shows, in scale, President Obama’s budget proposal. The bigger the rectangle, the bigger the budget. The chart also gives an indication, by means of color, of whether Mr. Obama is asking for more or less money than last year's budget for each area: green means an increase, red a decrease.

What’s particularly interesting, however, isn’t the graph that first appears on the site. Rather, it’s what happens when you click on the tab that reads “hide mandatory spending.” What happens then is that “spending that is controlled by existing laws and not subject to the annual budget process” is eliminated from consideration. So, for example, the increase in Social Security spending is overwhelmingly mandated: there’s an increase of about $14.5 billion, of which about a half a billion or so, slated to be used for administrative expenses (off-budget!) is discretionary. In other words, about 97% of the increase is prescribed by law. Of the $17 billion increase in Medicare, less than $1 billion is subject to the budget process. And the $63 billion in new interest load just has to be paid.

But even within the realm of what could conceivably be cut, there aren’t a lot of significant declines. There are a handful of programs that are projected to lose 10% or more of their funding: but all of these line items put together generate a total savings of barely over $30 billion, less than half of the increase in interest payments, or roughly equal to the discretionary increases in various areas of military spending (there are also some cuts in specific areas of the military budget, but, significantly, not in personnel, procurement, or O&M).

The most striking thing about the chart that eliminates mandatory spending isn’t that it’s significantly more green than red (although it is), i.e., it represents more areas of increase than of decrease; what’s striking is how much white (mandatory expenditure) space there is. The total budget: $3.69 trillion, up from $3.6 trillion a year ago. That $90 billion increase matches almost exactly with the mandatory increases in interest and social security… and doesn’t count significant mandated hikes in Medicare (the federal contribution to states) and student financial assistance, for example.

The debt and deficit are both huge, and growing. Two numbers a lot of people talk about: the deficit reaching 10% of GDP and the debt reaching 100% of GDP. One number I don’t see a lot: we’re looking at a deficit equal to about 40% of the budget! That means that for every $5 we spend, we collect $3 in taxes. I’m not an economist, but that sure looks to me like an unsustainable pattern. We are looking, after all, at a deficit in the range of $1.5 trillion in this fiscal year.

This means the spiffy new $60 billion budget cut just passed in the House, even if it were to become law (which it won’t, although parts of it might), wouldn’t make a dent in the deficit. That’s not to say that attempts to rein in spending are inherently misguided: predictably, I’m unimpressed with the specific targets of House Republicans’ budget-cutting axe, but a little fiscal restraint wouldn’t be a bad idea. More to the point, the Tea Party proposal, which would have cut an additional $22 billion from the budget, was deemed “irresponsible” by the GOP power base. It would have cut “everything indiscriminately in a heavy-handed way,” quoth Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky. And we can’t have that: Republicans came into power declaring their opposition to federal spending, and they all said that “everything [was] on the table” (Speaker Boehner said so in precisely those words), but of course they didn’t mean their pet projects.

One thinks, for example, of Boehner’s opposition to cutting $450 million for a new engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane. (Here are links to good commentary by Dana Milbank and by Jack Marshall.) The Pentagon declares itself happy with the engine it has, making the cut seem a no-brainer. Half a billion dollars might not be a lot of money compared to the size of the deficit, but it ain’t chicken-feed, either. Yet John “We’re Broke” Boehner opposed the cut. Purely coincidentally, of course, the new engine would be made in Boehner’s little corner of the world. You see, “so be it” commentary about the loss of federal workers’ jobs notwithstanding, the good Speaker really does care about the American worker. Or at least the Southwestern Ohio worker, which is pretty much the same, right? It hardly qualifies as a revelation that Boehner is a hypocritical douchebag, but that knowledge doesn’t get us any closer to a sustainable budget.

What will do so, of course, is a recognition of reality. Protestations from both sides of the aisle notwithstanding, our old friends Waste, Fraud and Abuse are alive and well in most if not all federal agencies. My wife, who is a financial aid director at a community college, for example, sees more than her share of lazy and dishonest people whose “job” it is to attend classes long enough to collect a financial aid check, and then to simply flunk out and start over somewhere else. But Pell Grants and other forms of federal financial assistance per se aren’t the problem; indeed, they’re a central ingredient to a long-term solution. A well-educated workforce is crucial to any hope of a vibrant economy in years to come, and that means we as a nation need to provide a means for our best and brightest young people, not merely our most affluent ones, to attend not merely colleges, but good ones. Closing loopholes without throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, however, takes actual work, actual commitment, and actual thought: neither party seems terribly interested in any of the above.

What this all boils down to, and pay attention because this doesn’t happen very often, is that Rand Paul was right in declaring that the federal government “can cut all of the non-military discretionary spending and not balance the budget.” You read that right. We could cut 100% of non-military discretionary spending and still not balance the budget. And that means next year’s debt payment will be bigger than this year’s, making it even harder to make any progress then. And so on ad infinitum.

I have a friend who is a costume designer. For a long time she had a saying posted outside her office: “Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick two.” The resurgent GOP has to make a similar choice, although I’m not sure they can really have more than one. Their options: maintain military spending, maintain current tax rates, and maintain the slightest hint of integrity in their rhetoric about caring about the deficit. It’s pretty clear, unfortunately, that such real resolve is lacking in the Republican leadership. Getting away with smoke and mirrors in the Reagan and Bush years, when the deficit (and spending) shot up but the rhetoric was always about fiscal responsibility, taught the current GOP all the wrong lessons.

Similarly, the Democrats, having slurped the Kool-Aid that makes them distrust the intelligence of the citizenry, seem far more interested in getting re-elected (by pretending to be Republicans), than in solving problems. There are solutions out there: raising taxes, probably significantly, especially on those can most afford it but ultimately on all of us; drawing down the war in Afghanistan and re-defining the mission of the American military throughout the world; recognizing that federal spending is often, even usually, a good thing, but current deficit levels cannot long be endured.

We’re well on our way to Oz. Here’s hoping we find a heart, a brain, and courage.