Getting A Life

Ch-ch-ch-changes

My lease here in Columbus is almost up. I was going to find another apartment anyway, because with the poor maintenance on this one (when I called them about problems, they did the least work possible to fix them, resulting in unsolved problems) and with neighborhood problems becoming worse, this place has become well-nigh uninhabitable. But my grandmother got sick with pneumonia and has congestive heart failure on top of that and my mother, pretty much her sole caretaker aside from whatever visiting healthcare they get, is becoming overwhelmed. And I was more or less cheated out of a real relationship with my mom as a child, and my daughter needs to be around more people than just me and her father, so we’re moving down there again. How long we’ll be in Louisiana is anyone’s guess but as my little girl’s dad wants to relocate down there to be near us, that gives us one less reason to come back here. I hate to say it, because I love Columbus, but there it is.

In other news, for the first time in almost ten years I’m getting a side of the story with a certain group of people I know that I never got before: an outsider’s perspective. Very interesting. I’ve heard enough to convince me that I don’t care about one of my personal debts which was incurred with that group of people. I cannot put a price tag on how much they’ve hurt me and I could drive them into bankruptcy and still it wouldn’t be enough. So I am merely going to dismiss what I perceived as $3000 worth of debt and leave it at that. And I am going to make plans to hire someone to look for my son in another almost six years. Short of committing Social Security fraud or killing my son, there is nothing his dad’s family is going to be able to do to put off that day. Let’s hope they prepare for it in honorable rather than dishonorable ways for the first time in their miserable lives.

For those of you facing difficult decisions having to do with a child in your life, let me make it easy for you: It’s not about you. The relationship between a child and his birth mother is a primal one, and short of abuse or orphaning there is NO excuse for severing it. Anyone who lets their ego or bad morals get in the way of preserving that relationship is a scumbag, pure and simple, no matter how infertile they are or how much the birth mother’s hurt their feelings or whatever the lame excuse might be. And no, turning the birth mother into a pen pal does not constitute “trying to preserve the mother-child relationship.” Unless you think you would be content with writing letters to your child after someone takes him away from you. Somehow I doubt it.

(I know some adoption rights advocates don’t like the use of the term “birth mother,” but it’s a term a lot of people understand, and some folks like to get into stupid semantics arguments about the definition of “natural,” so there you go. I considered “genetic mother” as a possible term, but what about certain types of surrogate situations? The baby is going to be emotionally attached to the woman who carried her, plain and simple, regardless of genetic origin. Which is why I’m not crazy about surrogate motherhood either, but that’s another topic.)

Too many people let their egos get in the way of doing the right thing. I could have done that. I could have said, “Wait… it would be too hard to turn my husband in for breaking the law. And what about his pay? What about our house? What will the neighbors think when they see him arrested?” Some of us are capable of making the right decisions even when it’s hard. I used to feel guilty about having done that. I don’t anymore. Not when I look at what I could have become. It makes me feel a lot better.

The problem with culture war discussions about taxing the rich

I would hazard a guess it’s not difficult to figure out the politics of AllFinancialMatters when the author posts an article about how Bush’s tax cuts for the rich supposedly favor the poor. It’s not the first time the Bushies have played the “I know you are, but what am I” game, and it probably won’t be the last; he’ll be bleating Newspeak on his way out the back door next January 20th.

Be that as it may, I have several issues with the blog article and the underlying premises.

First of all, let’s be very clear about what we’re discussing here, because AFM wasn’t. AFM wants us to believe that a tax credit is the same as a tax rate, and it isn’t. When politicians speak of tax cuts, they aren’t talking about tax credits, they’re talking about tax rates. So, claiming that the poor get more tax cuts just because they have tax credits is misleading and probably also dishonest, because as a personal finance blogger, AFM surely knows the difference between the two.

Secondly, I find it astounding that so many PF bloggers are such experts on the supposed “fact” that taxing the rich hurts the economy and how cruel it is to punish people for succeeding–more points taken verbatim from the neoconservative Republican playbook!–when they are conflating another couple of important concepts, thereby fleecing the public. I’ll explain:

• Any PF blogger worth his salt knows you get wealthy by spending less than you earn.
• Any PF blogger worth his salt knows that your income does not determine your wealth. You could be earning $500,000 a year and be poor as a church mouse once you factor in your debt load. See point 1.
• Any PF blogger worth his salt also knows that your average wealthy person is likely to be so not because he is earning a high income but because he has leveraged his assets to earn money for him without earning wages. The concept is a familiar one, referred to as “passive income” by most PF bloggers and spoken of in tones of utmost longing–this is the Holy Grail of personal finance philosophy for many of these writers, to be able to make money in their sleep!

With these factors in mind it is just inexcusable that so many personal finance bloggers let themselves be dragged (deliberately?) into the culture wars argument that rich people are rich because they make really high wages, therefore high tax rates for higher wage brackets punish the rich for being successful. Anyone who’s read The Millionaire Next Door knows better than to make this argument. Anyone who understands the concept of net worth and who has applied it fruitfully in his own life doesn’t need to read The Millionaire Next Door to begin with.

But the point is that someone who is truly, honestly wealthy is that way because they have a high net worth, regardless of income. And if you have a high net worth and a modest or low income, you’re a rich person who is not paying high income taxes! This doesn’t even delve into all the nifty little tax shelters, exceptions, loopholes and escape clauses the rich have invented for themselves and inserted into the U.S. tax code. Ask an accountant sometime if you’re curious.

And there’s another factor in play here which makes the discussion particularly irksome. How many times have you seen PF bloggers and other people who discuss personal finance going on and on about how they can’t make ends meet because their taxes are too high? First thing you know, they’re blaming the government because they’re falling behind on their mortgage.

The amusing part is that sometimes in the same breath they will turn around and call welfare recipients lazy or shiftless or whatever because poor people may seem to expect the government to do something about the fact they’re poor. But of course it’s perfectly OK to expect the government to help higher-income people pay a mortgage they took on voluntarily in the first place–which it would be doing if it cut the highest marginal tax rates just because a bunch of higher-income people whined to their Congressmen about high mortgage payments.

And this brouhaha obscures an important consideration: That if these people were half so knowledgeable about money as they’d like everyone else to think they are, it shouldn’t make a difference how much the government is taxing them. The marginal tax rates are published on the IRS website for the whole world to see, you can also find the formula for calculating Social Security tax online, and with a little more digging you can find out how much of your income pie your home state will take from you. Mortgage calculators abound. Regular calculators exist to be used to help you figure out a household budget. Tell me again why it’s the government’s fault you can’t make ends meet.

If you really aren’t making a high income and would therefore be hurt by income taxes then that’s why the government introduced tax credits for low-wage earners. So you shouldn’t be complaining about the high marginal rates anyway, because they don’t apply to you.

So, the two faulty premises: One, that the government is “punishing the rich”–just because someone makes high wages doesn’t make them rich. Two, that the government’s taxation prevents people being able to afford necessities–if you couldn’t afford necessities, it’s likely you owe little to no tax to the government to begin with.

I don’t see this so much as the government punishing the rich. I see this as people who are wasteful with their money, blaming everyone else but themselves for their problems. If it’s not all right for someone on minimum wage to do this in the comments on personal finance blogs, I don’t see how it’s right for higher-wage earners to do this in PF blog posts.

But that’s just me, and your mileage may vary.

Fun with BzzAgent

I recently joined BzzAgent for some reason I don’t recall, and it looks like fun. Right now I am not rated very highly yet, but I have access to their FrogPond feature where they ask you to visit websites and give your opinion of them.

Well, I ran across this nutrition website. Seeing a link for new diabetics, I investigated. I was not very impressed. My summary of the site back at FrogPond:

Honestly, I would rather use the USDA nutritional database than this site; the only way they could improve it is if they would make it more user-friendly. This site buys into the same old stuff about fat being bad for you, weight loss being about calories in versus calories out (generally untrue–depending on my diet composition, as a 226-pound, 5′6″ tall woman, I can eat as much as 2900 calories a day and lose weight, without exercising), and calories being more important than carbohydrates for diabetes control. The latter is particularly egregious since there is scads of good research out there indicating that cutting grains, starchy vegetables, and sugars to the bare minimum in a diabetic diet and upping fat intake is key to good blood sugar control without drugs, particularly in early diabetes. These folks have access to even more research studies than I do, and there is no excuse.

It’s a pretty site, but I need substance as well–good, honest substance that doesn’t buy into hype. People’s lives literally depend on it, with this particular subject matter.

I mean, why do experts do that? When they have access to good information and they completely ignore it even though that means people will die badly, how do you justify that?

I love being proven right.

In the process of reading about low-carb dieting, I recalled some of what I learned in high school honors biology about glucose metabolism. It helped me put together what else I was reading in the same vein about prediabetes/Syndrome X, diabetes, and obesity. Along with this I remembered what I’d been told all my life, that bodyfat is just a way of storing excess energy in case of famine.

All these factors came together in my mind and the lightbulb came on. I thought, Why is obesity being blamed for disease? Fat is just energy storage. Why would it make us sick when it’s there to save our lives?

I decided that the reason obesity has been statistically correlated with things like heart disease and cancer must be that it is sometimes a symptom of health conditions that themselves lead to heart disease and cancer. I felt my position was bolstered, too, by the strong connection between diabetes and heart disease and also diabetes and obesity, and by the fact that cancer cells need more glucose than normal cells do. (This has been a long-understood fact, although researchers did not understand why–do a search for cancer cells and glucose on Google and all sorts of stuff pops up.) Well, it’s like having a severe allergic reaction. Itching in itself doesn’t kill you, but might be a sign of something else that will. Think along those lines.

So anyway, it turns out that two years ago, research emerged that proved me right: diabetes, not obesity, causes death. Score another one for allopathic Western medical practice and its longstanding tradition of treating symptoms instead of disease!

Now, before any Fat Acceptance folks come along and start crowing (if you haven’t seen this already), this doesn’t exactly let you off the hook, because you’ve been telling fat people for years that nobody ever needs to change their dietary habits if they’re fat. Fat people should be able to eat whatever they want no matter what, you proclaim. *bzzt* Wrong! Their obesity still isn’t the central problem, but someone who is overweight NEEDS to get a health workup to discover the cause(s) of their obesity. It’s not as simple as “get up off the couch and get some exercise”–something is going on. If their obesity is related to insulin resistance, which is what leads to type 2 diabetes, they need to change their eating habits permanently. That’s not saying fat people are bad, it’s saying diabetes is bad and should be prevented where necessary. You aren’t the one who’s going to need the dialysis, the seeing-eye dog and the foot amputations, so go preach to your bathroom mirror.

Now here’s one more area in which the medical community needs to get a clue: they’ve discovered that some cancer cells immediately die when deprived of glucose. Now they’re saying they need to develop drugs to take advantage of this, but that the drugs can’t cross the blood-brain barrier, because “the central nervous system… needs glucose to function properly.” Oh, really? This ranks right up there with the medical community’s efforts to come up with a satiety drug when all you have to do to feel full is eat enough fat and cut back your sugars and starches. Now they want to drug a cancer to starve it when low-carb eating is a possible alternative. Can we stop re-inventing the wheel now, please? Because it’s rolling over entirely too many people.

Language of the personal finance bully

Frugal Dad wrote an interesting post about language typically used by the “perpetually poor”, as he calls them. And, well, he’s got a point that oftentimes we argue for our own limitations. (I’ve read Richard Bach’s Illusions and got a lot out of it–if you haven’t read it, you should. Famous proverb from the book: “Argue for your limitations and they are yours.”) However, once again the vultures came out of the woodwork to prance about showing off how enlightened and special they are while tearing down anyone they perceive as inferior to themselves.

The sad part is I don’t think they even know what the hell they are talking about. The truth is they’re coming off as bullies, and since they presumably are writing to help others navigate the world of personal finance, I think “bully” is the last impression anyone wants to give if their self-image is that of a helper.

What do I mean by “coming off as bullies”? Hm. Let’s see.

Criticizing others for complaining. In my observations and my own personal experience, when someone complains, it is because they either can’t do anything about their problem or they don’t know what to do about their problem. I have noted that when someone knows they are capable of solving a problem, they go ahead and solve it rather than waste time whining about it. This is true even of people typically branded as whiners.

Take me, I’m the world’s biggest crybaby sometimes when things go wrong in my life–but if I’m hungry and there’s food in the pantry, gosh-darn it, I eat! If I’m cold, I put on a sweater or turn on the heat. If my child has hurt herself I comfort her. I don’t just sit around going, “I’m hungry… I’m cold… My baby just hurt herself…” and do nothing about it.

Heck, I just had a migraine for most of yesterday. What did I do? Took some medicine and got on with my day. I still complained about it because all I can do is take meds–I have no control over whether they always work perfectly, and this time they didn’t, so I was still hurting. But I had taken some small action to do something about the problem as well.

Don’t assume that just because someone’s complaining, they’re being lazy and unproductive about their problem. For all you know they have exhausted their own resources and the complaining is a cry for help and/or advice. Which leads me to:

Assuming that because someone is worse off than you, it’s because they’re lazy. It must take some staggering amount of arrogance to come to this conclusion about someone about which you know nothing, someone whom you’ve only encountered through a news story (yeah, we all know reporters are completely fair and unbiased, and even if they’re not, their editors surely are!) or a blog comment on the Internet. If you’ve never met a certain poor person in person, you don’t know jack about their situation and are certainly not qualified to comment on their character.

Even if you know the person and see them every day, it is amazing the amount of denial people will indulge in rather than admit that a friend or family member of theirs is grappling with a serious problem such as mental illness or addiction. While there is a certain amount of personal autonomy involved in both these conditions, there is also a certain amount of involuntary behavior involved. Speaking as someone who has suffered varying degrees of mental illness, I can attest to this. Sometimes you just go through motions and you don’t really understand why.

Furthermore, laziness should not be confused with lack of productivity. There are lots of productive people out there who take the lazy route and try to figure out the easiest, most efficient way to do something. This is normal human behavior. (For that matter, it’s standard practice in nature–look up the principles of permaculture sometime.) And sometimes a person just can’t figure out what to do with themselves–possibly due to mental illness or addiction, possibly due to some other factor–and they’re trying to get along in life with as little hassle as possible. If their behavior isn’t affecting you, don’t worry about it. If it is, seek help. Don’t just sit around complaining about them being lazy, which is really funny coming from someone who doesn’t like complainers in the first place!

Pulling the “welfare queen” card. What in the world is it about women below a certain income threshold who stay home to take care of their kids that arouses the ire of just about every personal finance blogger in the Western hemisphere? These same people often write about how great it would be if they (if they’re moms) or their wives (if they’re the dads) could afford to stay home with their own kids. Why do we believe it’s a good thing to stay home with the kids? Because we love our kids and we want to do our jobs as parents and help them grow up right. What makes you think a low-income mom doesn’t have the same desire for her own children?

“But this welfare mother I know just sits around on her butt watching soap operas and letting her kids run wild,” you sputter. You know what you sound like? People who criticize middle-class stay-at-home moms for supposedly… sitting around on their butts eating bonbons, watching soap operas, and letting their kids run wild. It’s the oldest propaganda game in the book. OK, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but I really am tired of hearing it. Even Betty Friedan, bless her heart–and I’m a feminist–once claimed that boys turned homosexual because their mothers stayed home. People love to slam stay-at-home moms. Toss in the fact they’re being supported by tax dollars instead of men’s paychecks and you have quite the volatile mix for a socio-economic rant-fest.

The best part is when people say welfare moms should “get a job” or “go to work,” as though raising children were no trouble or work whatsoever. I think any personal finance blogger who utters this drivel should be sentenced to six months at hard labor chasing two-year-old triplets around the house while keeping it clean enough that, should Child Protective Services be dispatched to the residence due to unusual noises, they will not immediately remove the children from the home. And I wish you the best of luck.

Setting themselves up as representative of the universal human experience. I don’t think I even need to elaborate on this one; we’ve all seen it. “I’ve worked my way out of a homeless shelter in less than six months with my parents’ credit card in my back pocket and good college English at my disposal, so nobody should be homeless!” This is like the ultimate distillation of every other bullying tactic I’ve gone over here. If you’ve ever uttered any variation on “I’ve done X so anyone can do it,” you are immediately disqualified as a personal finance blogger and you may feel free to go work triple shifts at McDonald’s under an irate welfare-to-work mother who hasn’t seen her kids in two weeks.

If you are in the blogosphere to help people, you are not about to accomplish that mission by being a condescending jerk. If your fans step up and defend you by claiming that you have helped them, they probably didn’t need the help to begin with. Or not your kind anyway; I can’t speak to their possible need for intensive intervention before they lose any chance they have left at developing a conscience and a sense of empathy.

The blogosphere can do so much better than this. I know it. You know it. Let’s make it happen.

Re: the previous post…

I let a commenter through on the previous post just to be fair to her, as she was the immediate impetus for my writing the post. However, I did not link to her in the first place because I didn’t want to pick on her; she’s not the only one going around spouting this Law of Attraction stuff, whether or not she gives the concept that particular name, and there’s no reason she should have taken my pitiful pinpoint spotlight for even one second while the rest of the LoA folks were let off the hook.

It doesn’t matter what book you read or even if you read any book at all on the subject; the concept is pervasive enough in certain segments of the culture now that it’s easy to encounter. Simply identifying as a cultural creative, even if you don’t run in New Age circles, means the LoA idea is almost impossible to escape.

And I guess I should also admit at this point to those of you who aren’t familiar with my political beliefs that I identify as a feminist, and it always raises my hackles when I see a woman stating explicitly or implicitly that she blames herself for a man raping her*. These monsters must be laughing themselves silly somewhere to realize that not only did they get away with the physical attack but their victims/survivors continue the brutalization by turning it inward on themselves. I do not blame the rape survivors. It is really, really hard to escape the cultural messages that say a woman somehow “asks” to be raped or that trust of other human beings is never justified. Some women who have been through the hell of sexual assault go through enough of a growth process while healing from the assault that they can realize they weren’t to blame. Some can’t, and some aren’t ready yet.

I have no idea what’s going on with this particular lady, I just know what I read in the language she used, and I’m not going to pry further than I already have. But there is a certain amount of history in the New Age, “alternative spirituality,” and personal development/growth movements of charismatic individuals getting too big for their britches and using others for their own kicks, and I see this use of the “Law of Attraction” concept to blame rape and tsunami and hurricane and poverty victims as just another manifestation of that, and I think this woman is part of the collateral damage.

And it angers me. Dear Noo Wage Personal Development Goo-Roos: If your particular process of “enlightenment” does not closely resemble the process of growing up, you’re doing something wrong. And if you haven’t moved beyond kicking people when they are down or excusing away abuse and intolerance, you have a looooong way to grow.

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*As opposed to “blames herself for being raped.” There is a political message implicit in the use of passive language to indicate that a crime has been committed; if a woman has merely “been raped,” it just randomly happened and no one except possibly the woman is responsible. If on the other hand a man rapes a woman, the man’s obviously responsible. As an intellectual exercise, flip through a few dozen media accounts of sexual assault and count how many times you read rape discussed in passive terms or, worse, as the attacker “having sex with” the victim. It’ll curl your hair.

Sometimes I wish the Law of Attraction would just go away.

It’s one thing when people realize that when they really want something, they are more likely to notice the presence of that thing in their lives, or to discover a way to get that thing. I’m totally OK with that concept. I don’t think it takes physics or intervention from God (although I will not rule out the latter), but it’s a nice, neutral “law” that doesn’t seem to hurt much of anybody.

It’s another matter when someone uses the Law of Attraction to blame themselves because they were assaulted or abused. And I’ve seen this happen. And it’s frightening and sad all at the same time.

Frightening because if enough people blame themselves for abuses and assaults instead of blaming the abusers and assailants, the latter will have free rein to do whatever they please. People who do harm should face consequences for their behavior, not have it swept under the rug because some power-hungry Noo Wage writer idiot came up with new language for victim-blaming.

Sad because people who have been attacked deserve better than to spend their lives beating themselves up a second time for something that never should have happened to them in the first place, REGARDLESS of whether or not they asked for it.

Moral, ethical, GOOD people do not beat, rape, grope, assault, drug-into-oblivion, lie to, cheat on, neglect, or abandon other people. If I left out any bad behaviors there, mentally insert them for me. Or add them in the comments. I don’t care. They apply too. Good people do not do these things*.

On the rare occasion a good person finds themselves with a raging case of cranio-rectal inversion and does one of these things anyway, that good person will stop themselves performing the act as soon as they realize what they are doing, and they will go out of their way to make amends. But they should not expect anyone to trust them ever again.

Meanwhile, if you really want to grow as a person, please do not use the Law of Attraction against yourself. And if you see one of these idiot goo-roos using it against someone who does not deserve to be treated that way, speak out against them, LOUDLY. There’s a reason the major religions rail against false prophets, and it’s not just fear of competition.

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*You will notice I didn’t include homicide. If someone’s about to kill me and I have the chance to kill them first, you better bet I will do it, and I think “good people” have a moral and ethical obligation to save themselves from harm where they are appropriately equipped to do so.