The new car, part 2

Let's make a deal

I am a mission-oriented shopper. Decide in advance what you want. Get in, get out. Done. Browsing is for bookstores only. Nothing else. Unless, of course, it can't be helped.

It could not be helped when my car died a couple of days after Christmas. When the service agent told me how much it would cost to bring my vehicle back to functional life, I asked to be referred to the sales department. Before long, I was in the clutches of an eager sales representative. Let's call him “Pete.” We immediately embarked on a magical mystery tour that I have yet to understand, but which I will strive to relate. Except for some small details and slightly rounded numbers, this is exactly what occurred.

New or used?

Pete asked me where I wanted to go, the used-car lot or the new vehicle showroom. There were some holiday specials to make the new cars more attractive, but I preferred to see what the used lot had to offer first. (I really didn't expect to end up pricing the new automobiles; I'm more of a bargain hunter than that.) Pete had two cars on offer that he thought I might like, especially since both were updated versions of my deceased vehicle. One was a 2007 hybrid and the other was a 2006 V6. The V6 was perky like my old car (also a V6), but the 2007 hybrid was no slouch. The hybrid was listed at $13,500. The V6 was a year older, but was listed at $18,000. I took each car out for a test drive and decided on the hybrid. I wanted to move into the 21st century.

It was about 4:30 when I made my choice, mere hours after my old car had been pronounced dead. I didn't haggle. It's not my nature. I was ready to go. I was not, however, taking into account the time-consuming rituals required by the process of car purchasing.

I had my checkbook in my pocket and I was ready to pay cash. The sales rep turned me over to his manager. The sales manager was bluff, unkempt, and overly friendly. I didn't really care. I could pretend to be buddies for a while. He handed me some paperwork to fill out. The manager—let's call him “Jim”—disappeared for several minutes into the rabbit warren of offices adjoining the sales floor while I sat on a plastic chair at a Formica table and sipped some water that Pete had fetched for me. When Jim returned, he pulled out the chair next to mine and took a look at the form I had filled out. He scratched out a big chunk of it because I was not applying for credit.

“With tax, license, and fees,” he said, “it comes to fifteen-five.”

It seemed sufficiently shrug-worthy. “Okay,” I said. ”Exactly fifteen thousand five hundred.”

“That's right,” he said, and watched while I wrote out a check. But he left the check where I placed it on the table. “Hang on a minute and I'll be right back,” he said.

A special offer

This time it was a longer wait. I was getting fidgety and irritated. I just wanted to get it over with and figured that a trouble-free customer like me should have been whisked through with a little more efficiency. But only half an hour had trickled by since I had said, “That one.” It was hardly at the ordeal level yet.

Jim was back. He sat down at the table. He had a piece of paper in his hand. It bore an easily-read number: $16,600. I scowled. My check for $15,500 was still on the table in front of me.

“We're going to be giving you a discount,” he said.

I kept quiet. In my opinion, the number in his hand did not reflect a discount. Jim was ready to explain how wrong I was.

“Your car was posted on our website at a special price, which we have to respect for walk-in customers, too. We're dropping the price a thousand dollars for you.”

Okay. That did sound like a discount.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“And we're going to offer you a two-year extended warranty on the car's electrical system for only twenty-one hundred, which is a great deal for a hybrid like you're buying.”

Ah. An extended warranty. Dad used to make a lot of money selling those extended warranties to customers who purchased consumer electronics from him. Dad's advice to family members: Never buy an extended warranty.

“No, thanks,” I said.

Jim acted startled. Maybe he was.

“It's a great deal. The whole thing comes to only sixteen six.”

“Yes, I can do the math, but I'll pass on the extended warranty.”

“You sure?”

“Quite sure.”

Jim pulled himself together and stood up, the piece of paper still in his hand.

“Okay,” he said. “I'll set things up.”

“What do I do with this check?” I asked.

“You won't be paying that much,” he said, so I tucked it back into my checkbook.

Pete came over while I was loitering at the showroom windows, watching the sunset. He asked me if I needed anything.

“No. I'm just curious how much longer this is going to take.”

“Oh, no more than another five or six hours,” he said.

I gave him a sharp look. “Just kidding!” he assured me, an awkward smile on his face. I was not particularly amused.

Happy ending

We had killed an hour and a half by the time Jim emerged to conduct me into the inner sanctum where their finance guy was ensconced in a messy, paper-crammed cubby. With a heavy Slavic accent, the finance guy asked me to take a seat in front of his desk. He proceeded to collect my signature about two dozen times on about fifteen different documents. (I'm not even counting all the places I had to initial.) The finance guy mentioned that they had a special offer on an extended warranty for my car's electrical system. “This is a very good deal for a hybrid. They are very complicated.” I assured him I was declining the opportunity. He mentioned it three or four times before I was done signing papers. He finally stopped after I inked a document that stipulated I had been offered the extended warranty and had turned it down in the full knowledge of how wonderful it was.

“Do you know how much this car is going to cost you?” asked the finance guy.

I was wondering if I would be ambushed at the last minute and end up refusing the deal.

“I already cut a check for fifteen-five,” I said, “but Jim says that's not right.”

“Yes, no way are you paying that much.”

That, at least, seemed the right response. He punched some numbers into his computer, scribbled things on the final document, and turned it toward me for my perusal and my signature. I was paying $14,150.

“This is it, then? I can cut a check for this amount?”

“Yes. That exact amount.”

In retrospect, nothing makes more sense now than it made that night. The dealer could have sold me the car for $15.5K. I even cut the check. Then we went through this rigmarole where they tried to get me up to $16.6K. When the fat lady finally sang, I was paying only $14.2K. What was up with that?

It sure wasn't my steely-eyed resolve and virtuoso bargaining skills.

Check and mate

Several moves ahead

The president's most devoted advocates believe that Barack Obama is a political genius who plays eleventh-dimensional chess, always several moves ahead of his opponents. I was thinking about this a lot before the election, right after his bloodless performance in the first presidential debate spread dismay among the ranks of his supporters. Had he lost his touch?

I had been confident of the president's re-election. It shook me to see his Electoral College lead shrinking in Nate Silver's projections and his likelihood of winning falling to sixty percent. I wanted him back at eighty and, indeed, he gradually climbed back up there after Joe Biden kicked off the recovery phase of the campaign with a drubbing of the over-matched Paul Ryan.

In retrospect, I recall the worries I had in thinking that Obama was likely to put Romney away in the first debate. Sure, I wanted a stake driven through the heart of the Republican presidential ticket, but the governor's definitive defeat would divert huge rivers of SuperPAC cash from Romney-Ryan and funnel that money instead into regional campaigns for House and Senate seats. I was afraid that the result would be a solo victory for the president, while Democratic candidates were washed away in a tsunami of unregulated special-interest dollars.

The temporary Romney surge (the “Mittmentum” that horse-race-obsessed talking heads kept babbling about long after it faded away) put an end to my fears about down-ticket races. The Romney-Ryan effort would continue to soak up all of the available cash. Ironically, we have learned after the fact that Romney's vaunted management skills were not equal to the task of using his resources efficiently and effectively. Those monies he controlled directly through his campaign team were often squandered in over-priced media spots costing much more than the president's political ads. Obama's superior bang-for-the-buck may have neutralized the independent outside money that came down on Romney's side.

To borrow Ross Perot's term from an earlier presidential campaign, the “loud sucking sound” we all heard was the Romney-Ryan campaign vacuuming campaign dollars into a black hole of wasted opportunity. Did this Republican profligacy save the Senate campaigns of Jon Tester, Heidi Heitkamp, Tammy Baldwin, and Tim Kaine? Perhaps not, but it sure didn't hurt.

The Republican ticket was clearly hurt by incompetence at the top, with that negative impact trickling down to the state-level races. Did the president help the GOP fall on its face by pulling his punches in the first debate? Media reports that he was pleased with his performance suggest otherwise. Perhaps it wasn't eleventh-dimensional chess after all.

Did not do the math

An example of undercutting

If a large fraternal organization invites you to be the speaker at its annual fundraiser, you should definitely accept. If that same organization asks you to contribute a signed copy of your novel for the silent auction, you should provide it. If they reserve a table in the lobby for a local bookseller to hawk your book, your delight should exceed all bounds!

However...

If they put a starting bid on your book of $25 when it's being sold for $21 in the lobby, don't be surprised if your book is left behind on the auction table. Oops!

Just sign here

Getting serviced by the financial sector

Most junk mail is pretty easy to ignore. Of course, when it comes bearing the label of your bank, it's important to give it a quick scan to ensure the “Important Information About Your Account!” is something significant (“We are pleased to inform you that we are raising our fees to serve you better!”) and not just another gimmick to sell you something you don't want (“And our protection service comes with valuable premium points that you can redeem for free gifts and services!”). This particular letter from Bank of America offered a streamlined mortgage refinance option. I had to consider it seriously.

As a fortunate survivor of the housing bubble, I'm in a home that hasn't lost value and isn't even close to being “under water.” (Hurrah.) A few years ago I did a refinance with BofA that shaved a point off my interest rate and took my monthly payment down a notch. Was BofA's offer an opportunity to do it again? I pondered awhile, but eventually called the 800 number.

“Barbara” was delighted to receive my call. She pulled up the information on my current mortgage, asked a few questions, and then gave me a tentative quote that would have a very nice positive impact on my bottom line. I could get my mortgage rate lowered by another full point. Since I used to have a two-digit interest rate in the “good” old days, I was duly impressed that my already-low rate could go even lower. Furthermore, it looked like the streamlined process was genuinely streamlined. My previous refinance had been recent enough that BofA was waiving the appraisal and a bunch of other potentially costly (and time-consuming) hurdles in the mortgage process.

I said “looked like.” Isn't it cute how naïve I can still be, despite my advanced years and allegedly keen intellect? The first detour from the refinance superhighway seemed innocent enough, as Barbara explained that she was not a BofA employee: “I'm an independent mortgage broker who does the initial processing on each account and then turns it over to an account manager at the bank. I'm a contractor rather than a bank employee.”

“Okay, I understand,” I said. “BofA doesn't have to provide you with any benefits since you're an independent contractor.”

Barbara laughed.

“That's right, but it also frees me from the bank's schedule and it's up to me how much time I put in and how many mortgage applications I process.”

Sort of like a piece rate in a sweat-shop. But I didn't say that.

Barbara told me I would receive a couple of application forms in my e-mail. I was to fill them out and return them to Barbara's account manager. The account manager, as an actual bank employee, would take the next steps.

And that's what “Deborah” did. She sent me a nice follow-up e-mail confirming that she had received the initial refinance information from Barbara and would appreciate receiving my responses to the information forms within a week, so as to expedite the process.

It still sounded good to me.

I quickly sent in the forms and then got a second message from Deborah: Could I please submit a notarized certification of my living trust and a letter of explanation concerning some confusion over my residence address? I didn't know what a “trust cert” was, but it didn't take long to get that straightened out and obtain one. The address matter was even simpler. I sent a letter explaining that my home was in the same neighborhood as the apartment complex where I had once lived. Thus I had resided in two different locations with very similar street addresses. The confusion in my address was apparent rather than real. Please disregard the earlier (but similar) address.

Done!

Then silence. I sent Deborah a message after a few weeks. What's up with my refinance application? She wrote back that she would find out for me. But then I heard from “Liu” instead. While Deborah was on the West Coast, Liu was calling me from the East Coast. She now had my refinance application and wanted me to know it was in good shape. However, she needed me to provide a “trust cert” and a letter of explanation about a supposed ambiguity in my residence address. I explained that these had already been submitted to Deborah. Weeks ago, in fact. Liu explained in return that she did not have these documents in her Florida office and would I please send them again? It seemed the course of least resistance, so I resubmitted the information.

More waiting. We were not simply off the refinance superhighway, we were chugging along on the local bus, stopping over and over again. I finally got another message from BofA: Had I renewed my homeowner's insurance policy? Was BofA the beneficiary?

They were concerned that I had less than 90 days before my policy would lapse, so the renewal was a matter of interest to the bank. I wrote back:

“While the existing policy is less than 90 days from its expiration (though I will not let it lapse), this is not my fault. I began this refinance process in December 2011, over 50 days ago.”

So there!

I had, of course, no idea what the bank's next response would be. As it turned out, it wasn't from the bank.

“Hello, Mr. Ferox. My name is Brenda and I'm following up on your application to refinance your Bank of America home mortgage. I need to ask you just a few questions before moving your application to the next step.”

“Yes, Brenda. Thank you. What are your questions?”

“First of all, I need to know if you have a notarized certification of trust and, second, I need to get some clarification about your residential address.”

I heaved a loud sigh into the phone.

“Brenda, I have already submitted both of those things. Twice.”

There was a short pause at the other end.

“Well, that figures,” she said.

“It does?”

“Oh, yes. Happens all the time. Where did you send the information?”

“First I sent it to a BofA office in San Jose and then I sent it to a BofA office in Florida.”

“Okay,” she said. “They're passing your application along, but they're not passing along the accompanying information. I suppose it's just simpler to keep asking you to send it each time. My company works for BofA in processing loan applications and I see this all the time. Sorry.”

“So what do I do?”

“If you give me your e-mail address, I'll send you a message that you can reply to. Attach the documents again and I'll get them directly.”

“So it's just simpler if I send them again?”

“Sorry, but yes. Exactly.”

I sent them again. Three times now. And counting. The financial “services” sector seems to bear an inappropriate name.

I hope that they keep using my phone number and my e-mail address. I'm afraid that if they mail anything they'll send it to my old address. (I should probably send them an explanation!)

The dollar-sign alternate universe

Not always for sale

Remember California's Governor William Matson Roth? You probably don't. How about U.S. Senator Norton Simon? (I know: you're thinking, “Isn't there a museum named after him in Pasadena?”)

Here's a pair of easier ones: Governor Al Checchi? U.S. Senator Mike Huffington?

You're catching on, aren't you? Let's clinch it:

Governor Meg Whitman?

Yeah, right.

While Ms. Whitman still has an outside chance of beating former governor Jerry Brown on Tuesday, most people are now aware that her attempt to purchase California's governor's mansion is falling short. (The joke is on her! Jerry rejected the governor's mansion during his first term in the 1970s and the Reagan-designed mediocrity in Carmichael was sold as a white elephant.)

All of the people cited above were (or are) multi-millionaires who decided the best route to elective office was a self-funded campaign. While Whitman is taking the cake with over $140 million having been dug out of her deep, deep pockets, her predecessors were pikers only by comparison.

Norton Simon accurately appraised U.S. Senator George Murphy as a light-weight party hack out of touch with the California electorate and decided to challenge him in the 1970 Republican primary. Murphy was a former Hollywood song-and-dance man who had won the seat in a kind of fluke in the Johnson landslide year of 1964, breasting the Democratic tide by beating Pierre Salinger, the short-term placeholder senator who had been appointed when the elected senator died in office.

Simon's dollars, however, could not dislodge the “senator from Technicolor.” Sen. Murphy won the GOP nomination (although he lost in the general election).

In 1974, former University of California regent William Matson Roth decided on a similar good-government tack. Once again, a millionaire spent freely to gain political office. As a self-funded candidate, Roth would of course be beholden to no one, since there would be no financial strings on him. (Sound familiar?) As it turned out, he would not be beholden to many voters, either, since they cast their ballots for other candidates. He came in fourth in the Democratic primary. The winner? Jerry Brown.

For a while, it looked like U.S. Rep. Mike Huffington, a Republican from a California coastal district, might be the exception to the rule that rich candidates can't buy political office. He had displaced his predecessor, a long-serving Republican congressman from Santa Barbara, by washing him away in a tidal wave of money in the 1992 GOP primary. All told, Huffington spent $5.4 million dollars for a congressional seat (but at least he got it). Naturally political consultants and media outlets rejoiced and salivated when Rep. Huffington began to gear up in 1994 for a U.S. senate race against incumbent Dianne Feinstein.

Again, money flowed like water—$28 million this time. But Mike never became a U.S. senator. In rapid succession, Huffington lost to Feinstein, announced he was gay (or at least bisexual), and divorced his wife Arianna. (She probably didn't mind, though, since it was now clear that Mike was not her ticket to becoming First Lady.)

These lessons were lost on former airline executive Al Checchi, who thought it would be nice to be California's governor. He never made it to the general election. In 1998 he dropped $39 million into the Democratic primary, but lost to Gray Davis, who spent “only” $9 million.

Enter Meg Whitman, today's self-funded, no-strings-attached candidate. If nothing else, she is a walking and talking (but not very much) one-woman stimulus for California's political economy. She could have gotten a lot more bang out of her $140 million if she had spent half of it on charity instead of those incessant, aggravating, and mind-numbing advertisements. (Meg, ever heard of diminishing returns? How about diminishing election returns?)

Is it ironic or merely amusing that Whitman's opponent in Tuesday's election—the once and future governor Jerry Brown—made his political career back in the 1970s by sponsoring the Fair Political Practices Act, which created the reporting mechanism that tracks all of this wacky campaign spending and established the state's disclosure rules (which the federal government would do well to emulate)? The Fair Political Practices Commission recently released a report that makes for some sadly entertaining reading: Breaking the Bank: Primary Campaign Spending for Governor since 1978. Shake your head and cluck your tongue while scanning the cost-per-vote data for the losers, who clearly had more dollars than sense (or votes).

Let's give Jerry Brown the last word. From an article by Bill Boyarsky in the Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1973, when Brown was California's secretary of state and gearing up for his first successful gubernatorial run:

Democratic Secretary of State Edmund G. Brown Jr. proposed Thursday that he and the other prospective candidates for governor spend no more than $750,000 each in the 1974 primary election.

Defective dossier

Failing to get the straight poop

One of my favorite restaurants offers—pushes, even—a “frequent-flier” program that offers discounts to its regulars as well as e-mailed coupons and birthday greetings and promotional materials in your mail. I'd rather not, thank you, despite having received the sign-up forms about a dozen times over the last couple of years (usually whenever some new server has yet to learn that Professor Z is not a joiner). I do not want to stuff yet another card in my wallet, get more junk mail in my mail box, or more spam in my e-mail.

And I sure don't want them encircling my table on my birthday and singing to me.

The regular prices on the menu are reasonable and I am fortunate enough not to have to cut every possible corner (or I'd stay home on Saturday mornings, scramble my own eggs, and read my newspapers at my dining room table instead of at my usual corner booth).

I admit, however, that I do already have a couple of these special “loyalty cards.” One is from Borders Books and the other is from Safeway. The Safeway card was a fluke. One day the checker asked me for my discount card and I replied that I didn't have one. Since he recognized me as a semi-regular, he was surprised. He reached into a drawer under the cash register, pulled out a card, swiped it through the card reader, and handed it to me. He didn't collect any data from me. No name, no birth date, no address, no phone number. Nothing.

I stuck the card in my wallet and it's resided there ever since, one of the least intrusive loyalty cards ever. The less I carry around, the happier I am, but the Safeway card takes little space and its discounts have added up without snooping into my life (unless Safeway has figured out another way to tap into my personal business).

But what if they did? What would the consequences be? One possibility provided me with a peculiar moment of amusement while reading The Clan Corporate, the third volume in “The Merchant Princes” series by Charles Stross, a writer whose work I always enjoy. An undercover agent from a parallel universe accidentally exposes his presence in our world through an act of carelessness:

He doesn't own an automobile or a pet dog or a television, or subscribe to any newspapers or magazines. He uses his credit card to shop for groceries at the local Safeway twice a week, and here he screwed up—he has a loyalty card for the discounts. It turns out that he never buys toilet paper or light bulbs. However he does buy new movie releases on DVD, which is kind of odd for someone who doesn't own a DVD player or a TV or a computer.

Busted! Because a Safeway loyalty card showed a pattern of purchases at odds with a normal existence. No toilet paper or light bulbs. Obviously a visitor from a parallel dimension.

To be fair, the person being described has other peculiarities that had drawn the attention of the spy agency that ends up snooping through his purchasing record at Safeway. Too bad for him that he didn't have a blind card like I have.

And good for me that I do.

I have, you see, never purchased toilet paper from Safeway. Never. A few light bulbs, yes. But no toilet paper.

I'm not sure why the inter-dimensional agent didn't need bathroom tissue—easier to pop over to the loo in his home universe?—but I can explain my own situation. I just hope our national spy agencies find it persuasive and don't subject me to hideous medical experiments on the theory that I have world-walking powers embedded in my brain tissue.

It's simple. I go to more than one supermarket.

Shocking, I know. But it's allowed, you see, even if you have a “loyalty” card. My business is divided between two local supermarkets. Safeway is within easy walking distance in my neighborhood. The other is on my commute route between home and school. All bulky purchases are made at the store on my commute route. I have my car and a handy trunk to store things in. Plenty of room for large 9-packs of toilet tissue purchased at long intervals.

Safeway, on the other hand, is where I pick up small random items as the need arises. I stroll by on foot, think of something I need, and pick it up. No big items. Hence no multi-pack bundles of rolls of toilet paper to juggle on the walk back home or for Safeway to record in its corporate database.

So you see, I'm actually not a world-walking secret agent from a parallel dimension who is here to collect data on you people. Honest!

And I'll bet you one hundred of your Earth dollars that you can't prove otherwise.

Freaky Friday

Saturday was pretty weird, too

The four high holy days always find me back at Mom & Dad's in California's Central Valley. It's the ingrained behavior of a dutiful son. Besides, I don't want to miss the nice dinners that occur at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas (even if the religious aspects may get a big cloying). I can visit with family members and catch up on the latest developments—and latest additions (six of them in the last six years). Name tags might help.

I did say four, but I mentioned only three. Were you keeping count?

The fourth high holy day is a slightly movable feast that occurs between the end of summer school and the beginning of the fall term. It's associated with the birthdays of my mother and my goddaughter. A joint birthday party is held on some convenient weekend (bundling in some other, less significant, fall birthdays). The combination of both Mom and Becky reaches critical mass for me, so it's practically a command appearance. And there's usually a nice picnic, cookout, or barbecue, so it doesn't fall too far short of a holiday feast.

Timing is everything. This year I rashly headed south on a Friday. My usual pattern is an overnight Saturday-Sunday visit, but the birthday celebration was being held at my youngest brother's home on Saturday. It was easier to travel down on a Friday, stay at Mom & Dad's, and then head north for home after the Saturday event.

That meant, of course, that I was at my parents' on Friday evening, which for them involves a standing dinner date with a coterie of friends. The Four-Wheelers have scarcely a four-wheel vehicle left among them, advancing years underscoring the imprudence of gadding about in Jeeps and muscle trucks, but the label has stuck. Having devolved into a kind of once-a-week supper club, the Four-Wheelers assemble religiously on Friday evening to break bread and bust the chops of the great Communist-Democrat conspiracy to destroy America.

Naturally Mom & Dad insisted I join them as their guest at the Four-Wheelers gathering. Oh, goodie.

On the road again

We did not go directly to the restaurant selected for that evening's event. My parents chose to leave early to allow time for a social call at the home of my father's widowed first cousin. My octogenarian father insists on being the driver instead of a rider, so I climbed into the passenger seat and Mom relegated herself to the back seat. (This is the configuration they insist on whenever I'm down there.)

Fortunately, Dad has preserved an unblemished driving record and is still fairly trustworthy on the road (except when he wants to show off how much horsepower he has under the hood, but then he has to listen to Mom grumbling like Marge Simpson from the back seat, so he usually refrains). On this particular occasion, Dad waxed eloquent about the many improvements being made to long-neglected county roads. Miles of old macadam were being built up, repaved, and restriped. The smooth, dark surface flew past beneath the car's tires as Dad nattered away.

Then he abruptly shut up, pressed his lips grimly together, and squeezed his hands like vises on the steering wheel. A bright green sign had come into view. The road projects Dad so dearly loved were being funded by President Obama's stimulus package. Apparently he had forgotten about the sign that said, “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” He waited tensely for his radical-communist-socialist son to make some mocking quip and he did an unusually good job of keeping his eyes on the road—a good way to avoid seeing the small smile on my lips.

I let a few seconds trickle by. They were long seconds. Then I let him have it:

“The curves are nicely banked, too. You won't have to worry about standing water during the rainy season.”

No, the tension didn't suddenly drain out of my sire, but he did ease up just a fraction and began to tell us of the days when the roads were all dirt or gravel and how he could date the period because he remembered riding through the area with his uncle, who returned to the Azores when Dad was still a young child.

The maestro

We reached his cousin's house. She and my father are first cousins by virtue of having fathers who are brothers, hence sharing a family name. She had always been ferociously proud of her Ferox heritage, even to the point of making invidious comparisons between the accomplishments of her father's family and those of her husband's. It seems especially odd in retrospect, given that her husband built up and maintained a dairy farm every bit as large and as successful as our family's.

But de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Her late husband had achieved a posthumous canonization in her mind and become the exemplar of Azorean pluck and diligence. Dying in a nasty farm accident can do that to one. We all spoke glowingly of his accomplishments during our short visit and admired the memorial display of photographs in the living room, many months since he shuffled off the mortal coil. There is no nice, neat “closure” after such an unforeseen end to a six-decade marriage, so Dad's cousin is certain to mourn for however many years are left to her.

We made small-talk and she got distracted, which I'm sure was at least part of the reason my parents wanted to visit her. My rare appearance could also be counted upon to cause some gushing from Dad's cousin, because my professorial rank (even in the modest station of a community college) apparently evokes prideful recollections of our mutual family heritage. The label faz tudo is applied to someone who “does everything” (the literal translation of the phrase). My father and his cousin share a faz tudo great-grandfather who sported the island nickname of “mestre Francisco.” (Nicknames are important in the Azores, where it seems that ninety percent of the men share the names António, Francisco, João, José, and Manuel.) The most mundane translation of mestre is “teacher,” but to American ears that lacks the weight of the Portuguese connotations, which are better matched by “master” or even maestro.

It took no effort on our part to get Dad's cousin to recount once more the legend of mestre Francisco, who bundled up his family in the 1860s (or thereabouts) and sailed to Brazil. “Sailed” is not quite right. Francisco and his family booked passage on a paddle-steamer, which unfortunately broke down before making port in Rio de Janeiro. The ship remained becalmed in the Atlantic for two weeks while the crew unsuccessfully sought to repair the damaged drive train for its paddles. Eventually my great-great-grandfather presented himself to the captain and offered his services. In desperation, the captain let him try his hand at repairs. The mestre then spent two long days working on the ship's warped and broken gears—wooden gears—while his son fetched tools and supplies for him. When the mestre succeeded and the ship steamed into Rio, the captain gave him letters of introduction that set him up in business as a highly recommended craftsman in Brazil. Mestre Francisco prospered in Rio and eventually took his family back to the Azores with a tidy nest egg.

This was the first time I had heard the story from Dad's cousin, although it was familiar to me from tellings by my paternal grandparents. It was a good story, foreshadowing as it did my own grandfather's decision to gather up his family and seek his fortune in the New World—except that the mestre returned to the Azores after his Brazilian sojourn while my grandfather's family put down American roots too deep to transplant back to the islands. I had included it in my unpublished novel, taking advantage of the parallelism between the lives of my grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. To my surprise, the version told by Dad's cousin included details that I thought I had made up in fleshing out the tale in my manuscript. Perhaps I had heard them before and had forgotten. In any case, I was smiling at the end of the story. Our cousin showed us a photograph of her grandfather, who as a boy had helped his faz tudo father repair a paddle-steamer.

The theme of man-versus-machine runs through the manuscript of my novel, which should not surprise anyone familiar with farm life. While my great-great-grandfather experienced it in a different context, farmers spend daily life among potentially lethal devices. This my father's cousin knows all too well, but she was cheered by our visit and I kept to myself my thoughts about the travails of mestre Francisco amidst the gearworks of a paddle-steamer and the fate of our cousin's husband amidst heavy farm equipment.

She waved happily at our car as we left and turned back onto the communist-funded county roads.

Dinner among the ruins

The Four-Wheelers circulate among a handful of favored restaurants. I was familiar with the evening's choice. My family used to go there frequently during my adolescence. The subsequent forty years have not been kind to it. The plastic booths, Formica tables, and linoleum floors all look to be what's left of the originals, however patched or worn they may be. A policy of deferred maintenance has been religiously adhered to, although I assume certain minimum steps have been taken to assuage the concerns of the local health inspector.

I was surprised to see no condemnation notice posted in the window.

The real proof of a restaurant, of course, lies in its meals. Therefore, in fairness, I have to report that my cheeseburger earned a passing grade. In the tradition of old-fashioned family restaurants, the portions were generous, too. My parents and their friends—at least, those not under doctor's orders—ate hearty.

By happenstance (I think), I was seated near one end of the table, sitting next to Chuck and opposite his wife Darla. Chuck's name is familiar to me, since it appears on most of the execrable, crazy-ass, wingnut spam that my father sometimes forwards to me. (It's the kind of dreck immortalized at MyRightWingDad.net.) No doubt Dad has complained to Chuck and the other Four-Wheelers that I do not belong to their coterie of conservative conspiracists, so Chuck looked just a little uncomfortable at my presence.

I was, of course, as sunny and cheerful as ever. Darla seemed rather taken with me. Chuck eventually relaxed a bit, perhaps surprised that I had not insisted on singing the Internationale before dining or interrupting all conversations with pithy quotes from Chairman Mao. Nope. I just hunkered down and endured the occasion, munching on my burger and refraining from any action more overt than declining to guffaw with everyone else when a quip was made about the obvious hoax that is global warming. Hilarious. (They are, of course, also concerned about the completely unrelated gradual decline in average rainfall in California as average temperatures tick upward and both plant and animal species adjust their preferred ecological niches northward.)

Chuck and Darla are exactly the sort of people that Mom & Dad would have once avoided with a disdainful sniff and backward tilt of the head. I forget exactly who has what, but Chuck and Darla have seven marriages between them. The family values clique is overloaded with people who apparently value marriage over and over again. To quote Candide's Doctor Pangloss:

Why, marriage, boy,
Is such a joy,
So lovely a condition,
That many ask no better than
To wed as often as they can,
In happy repetition.

A brilliant exposition, even if I do say so myself.

The dozen or so people in attendance at the Four-Wheelers' dinner had a good time and no one appeared to glance askance at me too often. Even so, I expect the conversation was much more mild-mannered than usual and I would love to have an audio recording of the next week's event. No doubt Dad hung his head and confessed he did not know where he had gone wrong.

Silly Saturday

Since so little steam was let off at Friday's dinner, I suppose the built-up pressure was too much to withstand by Saturday morning. Dad was in high dudgeon.

“I see where Obama has endorsed the Ground Zero mosque!”

I was having breakfast in the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table with me. Dad was yelling from the adjacent dining room, where the computer is set up.

“Indeed?” I said. “I hadn't heard.”

I turned back to the Fresno Bee, not intending to say more. There was no point in mentioning that it wasn't really a mosque and wasn't really at Ground Zero. But now it was Mom's turn.

“That's not a surprise. He's a Muslim, after all.”

I started. This was much worse than usual. Caught by surprise, I was unusually blunt.

“No. He's not. Don't say stupid things, Mom.”

Her feathers were ruffled, but she wasn't backing down.

“He is, too! He's even admitted it himself!”

“Don't be silly. He's done no such thing.”

“I heard him myself!” she declared.

Now I was angry.

“No. You. Didn't. You can't have heard it because he never said it.”

Dad is fairly hard of hearing (especially when he wants to be), but we had raised our voices. Naturally he came to his spouse's rescue. Obama's voice came booming out of the speakers of Dad's computer:

“I know, because I am one of them,” said the president's voice.

I got up from the breakfast table and stalked into the dining room.

“Now this is just crazy! I'm supposed to take an out-of-context excerpt as proof of this idiocy? What's the antecedent of the pronoun, huh? What does ‘them’ mean, huh?”

I get like this sometimes. It's not one of my more attractive features and I am usually careful to avoid intellectual bullying, but I was white hot. It also feeds my father's martyr complex about the over-educated with their fancy degrees looking down their noses at him. When I catch myself doing it, I try to ease up, but I didn't parse my question into little one-syllable words for Dad. My father's not stupid and his vocabulary was equal to the task. Was he just a bit shamefaced when he scrolled back the video clip?

Dad had the YouTube video “Obama Admits He's a Muslim” on his computer screen. He had neglected to play the preceding six seconds of the president's address to the Turkish assembly. Now it came out of the speakers:

Many other Americans have Muslims in their families, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know because I am one of them.

“Some proof!” I scoffed. “He's just saying he has Muslims in his family and has lived among them—things everyone has known for ages! Some proof!”

But Dad left the video run a bit longer. Unsurprisingly, there was the truncated clip from candidate Obama's interview with George Stephanopolous:

You're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my “Muslim faith.”

The quotes aren't visible in spoken dialog, of course. (If only he had used “air quotes”!) But the intent was obvious (even if not to poor little George) and I wasn't having any of it:

“Good grief! Obama was just saying the McCain wasn't going around claiming that Obama was a Muslim, unlike some of McCain's supporters. That's all! Damn! It's embarrassing when my parents go around saying stupid things!”

I marched off before it got any worse.

Later, of course, I wondered if Dad even bothered to read the candy-ass cover-your-ass disclaimer at the beginning of the video. I suspect he just bleeped across it:

Legal Disclaimer: The writers, producers, editors, and publishers of this video are not stating, claiming, or implying that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, or that Obama himself claimed or admitted to being a Muslim. Rather the writers, producers, editors, and publishers of this video are only examining the evidence surrounding the rumor that Barack Hussein Obama might be a secret Muslim.

Yeah, right. This is about as persuasive a disclaimer as those at the beginning of half-hour paid-programming adverts for miracle cures:

The statements made in this program have not been evaluated by the FDA. The products offered here are not claimed to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease.

Now let's learn how to cure cancer!

(Naturally my mother has a copy on her shelf of a pseudoscientific cancer-cure book by renowned health expert Suzanne Somers. I'm afraid, she's a sucker for this kind of nonsense, which infuses the health-related stories on most of the right-wing news sites. It's not just the left-of-center Huffington Post.)

Fortunately, the cooling-off period took hold and the afternoon birthday party came off without a hitch (even if I had to circle a couple of identical-looking blocks in my baby brother's neighborhood before finding the home I visit an average of less than once a year). Most of the attendees were lineal descendants of my parents or spouses of those descendants, but my sister and brother-in-law brought an old friend of theirs who quickly button-holed me and quizzed me about my novel. He had read my sister's copy of the manuscript and wanted to know when it would see print. Out of my parents' earshot, I explained that it was under review and no decision would be made till later in the year.

One of my cousins was also present. I took the opportunity to inoculate him against possible future distress in the unlikely event that he ever starts reading books—in particular, mine. I mentioned that I had written down many of the family stories in fictional form. I recounted our visit the day before to Dad's cousin and her retelling of the mestre Francisco story. I explained that I covered the big family blow-up from nearly thirty years ago, when we battled over our grandmother's estate. My cousin shook his head in recollection of those dreadful days. And he seemed unperturbed at the thought that his counterpart was in the pages of my book.

“If you wrote it as fiction, then people can't assume that real people did what your characters do.”

Yeah. Do please keep that in mind. Did I mention your father is the bad guy?

Lucy Van Whitman runs for governor

The campaign budget is peanuts

The insight was not mine. It was a friend's daughter who said, “You know who Meg Whitman reminds me of? Lucy Van Pelt!”

Suddenly it all became clear. That's right. Whitman is exactly like the self-proclaimed fussbudget from the Peanuts comic strip. She promises faithfully to hold the ball steady while California—in the guise of Charlie Brown—runs up to give it a good kick.

We all know what's going to happen if we fall for it, don't we?

Speaking of boys named Brown, Meg is both eager to remind us that Jerry Brown is one of California's historical figures and hopeful that we remember none of the historical details. While she labels him a failure, his eight years in the governor's office seem like the good old days relative to the current political and budgetary environment. In particular, Whitman wants us to think that Jerry Brown was such a profligate big-government spender that he broke the bank:

His big spending turned a surplus into a billion-dollar deficit.

Actually, Meg, the voters broke the bank with Proposition 13. Brown was an exceedingly frugal governor. So frugal, in fact, that the tax increases enacted under Governor Reagan (that's right, Reagan) were creating a surplus.

Perhaps Meg is not aware of Brown's penny-pinching history. Back in those days she was far away from California, going to school at Princeton and Harvard. More likely, though, Meg and her people are consciously distorting Brown's record. That's what politicians tend to do during campaigns and Meg has certainly become a politician, complete with a well-funded propaganda campaign.

The truth about that era of California politics is difficult for right-wingers to swallow. I remember being called a liar in 1980 during Reagan's unfortunately successful campaign for president. A Reagan supporter blew up at me when I pointed out that California budgets had grown more rapidly under Reagan than they were growing under Jerry Brown. Knowing that Ronnie was the patron saint of tight-fisted budget-slashers, the Reaganite told me quite emphatically that I was either a fool or a liar.

It's easy, however, to check the numbers for yourself. The California state treasurer's office in the spring of 1986 put out the Annual Long-Term General Fund Forecast that I still have on my shelf. It's replete with historical data. In 1967, Reagan's first year in office, state expenditures totaled approximately 2.939 billion dollars. By 1974, the last year of his two terms, expenditures had reached 7.245 billion dollars. On a point-to-point comparison, that's a 46.5% increase. It amounts to an average increase of 13.8% each year.

In 1975, Jerry Brown's first budget came in at $8.264 billion. Three years later, his 1978 budget (before Proposition 13 passed) was $11.612 billion. His budget increases were averaging 12.0% per year, nearly two points less than those of supposedly fiscally conservative Reagan (who would soon be running up a deficit as U.S. president).

People couldn't help notice that Jerry was spending less money than the state was taking in. The state surplus ballooned to nearly four billion dollars, an awesome amount. It helped spur Californians into voting for Proposition 13 on the June 1978 primary election ballot, slashing property taxes to the bone and putting the Golden State into a fiscal straitjacket.

The state government had not exactly stood idly by while the surplus grew and the voters got antsy. The governor's office supported a reduction in property taxes. However, a concerted effort to enact property-tax relief for California's homeowners was consistently opposed by conservative legislators who wanted it to fail. They wanted things to get worse so that middle-class voters would support an initiative written to principally benefit corporations and owners of commercial property. It worked, and California took a quick tumble into the fiscal frailty from which it has never fully recovered.

The 1979 state budget incorporated major subventions to local governments and school districts to soften the blow of the gutted property tax. As a result, that budget totaled $16.174 billion, a dramatic one-year increase of 39.3%, largely at the expense of the rapidly shrinking surplus. As the surplus dwindled and Brown reasserted his fiscal frugality—now underscored by the draconian Proposition 13—the governor ended his final year in office, 1982, with a budget of $21.522 billion. Compared to 1975, that was a 60.4% increase. Averaged out, it represented a growth of 14.7% per year.

Thus the impact of Proposition 13 pushed Brown into a position where he exceeded Reagan's overall growth rate. Nevertheless, his average ended up less than one point higher even after absorbing the 39.3% kick in the teeth occasioned by Proposition 13. It strains credulity to portray Brown's record as governor as one of irresponsible spending. As a budgetary manager, he did a good job. In light of his successors, he did a damned good job. It is endlessly regrettable that Brown and the contending forces in the legislature were unable to forestall Proposition 13 by coming to terms on a reasonable and timely property-tax relief measure. The Golden State still suffers the scars of that battle and that proposition's enactment.

Now here comes Meg Whitman to save us! She presumably knows how to solve our state's problems because she's cut from the same cloth as the people who imposed them on us. How much irony is there in her free-spending quest for political office? She spent $76 for each vote she got in the state primary. And now her general election campaign trail is carpeted with the greenbacks spilling from her deep pockets, much of that money going to a statewide media campaign that smears Jerry Brown as a big spender.

Good grief!

The job satisfaction metric

Too much of a good thing?

California community colleges are a mixed lot, lacking the kind of central authority enjoyed(?) by the University of California or the California State University. Instead, the Golden State's 112 two-year colleges are broken up into 72 largely autonomous districts. The colleges have various reporting requirements to the state chancellor's office, but the chancellor has minimal direct authority over any of the individual colleges or districts.

That makes things more exciting. Community college districts don't march in lock-step. We wander in all directions. Sometimes the results aren't pretty, as when Compton College ceased to exist. (It lost its accreditation and was reduced to an educational center under the administration of neighboring El Camino College.) Or you can be like Sierra College and suffer from a fractious board of elected trustees who fire the president and spend as much time on political posturing as setting educational policy. Then there's Solano College, which played a game of brinksmanship with the accrediting authority for community colleges until a state-appointed trustee was imposed on it and an interim president was brought in to kick butt and stabilize the situation.

And I think we've all heard of San Francisco City College's shot-down trial balloon to allow corporate sponsorship of class sessions.

Normally, the less excitement you have, the better.

My friend Steve is mild-mannered and usually doesn't brag about how boring things are at his school, but it's difficult to remain modest when other school districts are cutting programs to the bone and yours is hanging in there. He has enough seniority now to fear no lay-offs, but Steve tells me they're not in the works at American River College and the other Los Rios institutions. (Apparently Los Rios did something weird and socked away a bunch of money in a contingency fund, into which they are now dipping. Unheard of!)

Steve admits that even the Los Rios colleges have to deal with reality in the Governator's dystopia, cutting back on class offerings and reducing (or eliminating!) teaching loads for part-time faculty and limiting overload teaching by full-time instructors. The lengthy budget crisis is taking its toll and now Los Rios faculty and staff are looking at creative remedies: pay cuts!

Faculty salaries are a big-ticket item at any college, of course, which is why cuts have already been imposed on UC and CSU campuses—generally by means of mandatory unpaid furlough days. Sierra College has similarly trimmed work schedules and salary costs. According to Steve, the idea for pay cuts in the Los Rios district actually came from a faculty member, not an administrator.

Hmm.

It appears the idea is that a voluntary pay cut would free up cash to support retention of class sections and adjunct faculty. (I hope the faculty gets a written guarantee that's where the money would go before they cough up part of their salaries.) Some members of the Los Rios community are willing to argue they are overpaid, so it would be easy to give up a little of the “excess.”

Fascinating.

Steve forwarded to me the most compelling argument in support of the claim that he and his colleagues are too richly remunerated. His cover note suggested that Steve was not entirely persuaded by the message writer's logic. Behold:

Subject: RE: Pay cuts are the answer!

I must agree with Professor C. I have been an adjunct instructor at ARC since roughly 1963 and I still love it. I have said that I would be willing to teach for nothing. Actually, I did teach one class for nothing and believe my students felt I was worth every penny of it. It is the only class I ever taught where I had more students at the end of the course than at the beginning.

I believe a 5%-10% pay cut is fully justified. When a colleague died at Sierra College a few years ago, I taught one of his classes for 20% less than ARC pays me and was happy to do it.

One way to tell that "the talent" may be overpaid is by considering the turnover rate. When an instructor quits at ARC, it is talked about for years. One professor at Sierra College told me that in the years from 1996 to 2004, exactly two professors had quit. One joined her husband who had been hired at Chico State and the other was hired by the Air Force Academy. How does this compare with the turnover rate at almost ANY other business?

You follow that line of reasoning? Excessive job satisfaction is evidence that monetary compensation is too high.

It makes a cruel kind of logic. Surely it would be more cost-effective to churn the faculty regularly by setting salaries as low as possible. Instructors would always be leaving and a big fraction of the faculty would always be on the first steps of the entry-level salary scale. Savings galore!

This concept could undoubtedly be extended to the banking industry, where we can tell that salaries are currently too low because the top executives in the financial sector don't stay in their jobs very long.

QED!

By the way, Steve pointed out to me that the above message was written by one of his colleagues in the econ department.

Maybe I'll sign up for a class when he teaches it for free.

Out of pocket

Cocoon man can

It's happening now and it's happened before. California has a budget again, one of those jury-rigged jobs created by tacking on just enough vote candy to squeeze out the constitutionally mandated two-thirds majority in both houses of the legislature. It's never pretty.

The cuts are percolating down to the local level as school districts make out pink slips to send to teachers who might be laid off. The state education code requires that public school teachers be informed by March 15 if they won't have a job in the fall. I remember a few years ago when one community college district pink-slipped virtually the entire faculty, just to be on the safe side. It was eventually able to rehire them (except for those who decamped for better funded districts) when state funds rebounded in the interval, but I'm sure it was traumatic.

The current financial crisis in California and the country reminds me once again how I live my life enfolded in a cozy security blanket. In a tenured faculty position with years of seniority, I'm in a comfortable cocoon. My school district would have to cut a majority of its permanent staff before I'm at risk.

Not going to happen.

I guess the only people in a better position are those top executives who get to reduce costs by firing their underlings. And even when their companies go bankrupt, those guys float away on golden parachutes or scarf up bonuses funded by bail-out money. (Dare we even question their entitlement to those wads of cash?) I suppose I'm really not in their league, even if my position among mortals is enviable. Every day I am grateful for it.

I dig, but not too deep

As I was saying, the current crisis seems familiar. Once again, the low people on the totem pole are the first to get it in the neck. Our student help is being laid off and our part-time staffers are losing some of their hours. It sucks.

It wasn't that long ago that one of my colleagues, just appointed to an administrative position, lamented that she had had to dismiss all of her student assistants. She was telling me about it because she felt bad, but she was also explaining why she had no one to spare for a joint project we were working on. I had a bunch of transcription work to shuffle through, and it would have gone much more swiftly with a student aide to read things off while I sat at the keyboard and banged in the data.

I told her not to worry about our project or to commiserate with me over the tedium of doing the transcription as a solo job. I'd check with the mathematics department about getting some student help. She brightened at that suggestion, but wondered aloud whether my department would have any student help hours to spare after her office had lost all of its. I shrugged and indicated it wouldn't hurt to check.

Actually, I had no intention of asking the math department chair for any assistance. I was simply going to ask my students if any of them wanted a short-term job. Soon I had a couple of students eager to earn a few bucks for some simple number reading. The job came off without a hitch, vastly simplified by the presence of the student aides, and I dug into my own pocket to pay their wages.

That's right. I was sufficiently exasperated with the situation to cough up the funds to pay the student help. That will certainly teach the school a lesson, won't it? When you tick off Dr. Z, he'll get even by spending his own money.

“Ha! I'll show you all! I'll pay the students myself.”

Seems silly, in a way, yet great was my satisfaction at getting the job done and my students paid. I could afford it and the results were excellent. The students seemed pleased, too.

There was, of course, one tiny complication. The administrator was pleased that I had completed my part of the project so quickly and just a little surprised to hear I had been successful in lining up student help. She asked me whether she should write a thank-you note to the math chair. Oops! The math chair knows nothing about it. I merely smiled and said it was all taken care of and not to worry.

And there it sits, fading into the past. It appears that the administrator and the math chair have never crossed paths or, if they did, never compared notes on that project. If they had, the math chair would have told her the department didn't have any student help and that Dr. Z never asked for any.

It's my little secret.

Demisemimillionaire

Milestone & millstone

The Site Meter widget told the story. My blog was approaching a quarter of a million hits. It had taken three and a half years and about 600 posts. I thought to myself, “Wow. If I only had a dollar for each hit, I'd be one-fourth of a millionaire.”

Then I thought, “Wait a minute. I do.”

Yes. I did. It was sitting there in my checking account. It was a stunning sight: a six-digit number (plus two decimal places) right there on my computer screen when I logged on to my bank account. Damn. Look at that. I have more money than the FDIC insures. It would be a bad idea for my bank to fold right now.

It was a fluke, sort of.

Years ago I managed to pay off the mortgage on my residence. My lack of expensive vices allowed my salary to outpace my expenses, creating a growing surplus. It finally reached the point where I purchased an investment property and allowed the rental income from it to cover most of the monthly mortgage payments. Good deal.

Thanks to the virtuoso management of the nation's economy by our beloved 43rd president (my hero!), mortgage rates have dropped significantly. I decided to try to refinance.

Oops. All the good deals are for one's primary residence. Investment properties don't qualify.

Darn.

Then: inspiration! I could get a really good loan deal on my paid-off residence. I could use the proceeds to pay off the mortgage on my rental property. In effect, I was shifting my mortgage from the investment property to my residence. The numbers worked nicely, too, since I'd be saving a few hundred bucks each month.

I did the paperwork, signed the application, and got approved. I gave the bank the information for the mortgage company that serviced the loan on my investment property. Then the money showed up.

In my checking account.

Oops.

It was an awkward situation. Almost dangerous. I visited the bank.

“I have too much money in my checking account.”

The bank rep called up my checking account on his computer screen.

“Whoa! Yes, you do. We deposited the loan in your checking account? Why didn't it go directly to your mortgage company?”

“Beats me. But let's get it out of there and on its way to where it needs to go.”

The bank rep worked his magic, filled out forms, got my signature. A wire transfer was effected. My checking account was restored to its real-world level, comfortably inside the FDIC ceiling (very comfortably inside the FDIC ceiling, I'm afraid). I was a mere mortal again, although one with a paid-off rental property and a brand-new mortgage on my home. That's acceptable.

And today I'm on the verge of attaining a quarter of a million hits on Halfway There. The excitement mounts. Who will be number 250,000?

An eager world awaits.

Messages from beyond

Cashing in on End Times

You've undoubtedly already seen the bumper stickers announcing that irresponsible Christians are ready to abandon their vehicles at a moment's notice, putting the rest of the population at risk. And, of course, there's the stacks of books from the Left Behind series that used to clutter bookstores and now litter the ten-cent table at library sales. (The movie version features Kirk Cameron!) Cashing in on the apocalypse is big business.

Somehow, however, I missed the news item earlier this year that we can now leave messages to our earthbound family and friends after soaring to meet Jesus up in the sky. Mark Heard is a supermarket shelf-stocker from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a region that undoubtedly abounds with the unsaved. According to the Bible in the News segment of today's Southwest Radio Church broadcast, Mark was fiddling with his on-line stock investment portfolio when it occurred to him that his wife would be unable to access his account after the rapture.

Apparently Mark is “unequally yoked” with a nonbeliever, but he still loves her enough to want her to have enough money to survive the tribulation period and the terrors of Satan's seven-year rule over the unraptured. That's when Mark had the idea (undoubtedly put in his head by God, probably by the Holy Spirit third of the Trinity) that he should stash important information where his wife could obtain it. While most people might then go out and buy a fireproof bedroom safe, stuff it with documents, and give the wife a key, Mark was not willing to settle for such a mundane solution. (Besides, his wife is unsaved. She'd open the safe the first time he turned his back and rob him blind. Right?)

Instead Mark cleverly created youvebeenleftbehind.com, a website that promises to sprinkle your loved ones with electronic manna after your rapture departure. It “gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends For Christ.” (Why the “for” is capitalized is one of God's little mysteries.) You can store up to 250 megabytes of crucial information your loved ones will need after you are snatched from the bosom of your family. Imagine writing long, detailed, I-told-you-so screeds from which they can take spiritual comfort as Satan's minions rampage all about them. You can convey messages to as many as 62 e-mail addresses, which will be delivered approximately six days after the rapture occurs. The triggering mechanism is a kind of dead man's switch. Five members of the youvebeenleftbehind.com team have been scattered about the globe as we await the second coming of Jesus. If three days pass without at least three team members logging in, the clock starts ticking. In the absence of intervention, the messages go out three days later.

I presume that Mark Heard must be one of the five team members and I'm guessing that all of the team members are confident they'll be raptured up. Even if they're wrong, would they be disgruntled enough upon being left behind to continue to log in and thus hold back their clients' archived messages? That would not be a Christian thing to do, would it?

This service is available for only $40 for the first year of enrollment. If the Lord tarries—as he has been wont to do for nearly two thousand years now—renewal fees “will be will be reduced as the number of subscribers increases. Tell your friends about You've Been [sic] left behind.”

But presumably not with a left-behind message.

All dollars are created equal

But they don't stay that way

When I see a penny on the ground, I usually pick it up. Force of habit? I'm not sure. As money, a penny is essentially worthless these days. A penny in your pocket probably creates more wear and tear on your clothes than it could possibly pay for. My young nephew, however, pounces on pennies with utter delight. Pennies in his pocket are a source of great pleasure, at least as playthings if not as legal tender. In that sense, at least, value is quite relative.

What about dollars? Hard-nosed realists would probably explain to us (quite patiently, no doubt, although perhaps with a touch of exasperation), that a dollar is a dollar. Subjective valuations are just a myth. Am I not a mathematician who should appreciate the tautology that a dollar is a dollar?

Actually, no. I agree that every dollar generated by the U.S. Mint is equal to a dollar, but a dollar released into the big, wide world is subject to dramatic variations in valuation—all based on context. A dollar bill in my pocket is worth quite a bit more than a dollar bill in the pocket of Bill Gates (although I doubt that Bill makes a practice of carrying dollar bills around).

To many, I'm sure, this will sound like blatantly relativistic nonsense. To them I would respond by humbly pointing to a book that most of them seem to take quite seriously as a source (or even the source) of wisdom:

As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. “I tell you the truth,” he said, “this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.” (Luke 21:1-4)

---

Go argue with Jesus, why don't you?

Or perhaps you would rather dispute with Lazarus.

I mean David Lazarus, of course, the San Francisco Chronicle business section columnist who recently turned his attention to the notion of a flat tax. In his April 11, 2007, installment, titled The flat tax: It's simple, alluring, Lazarus skeptically examines the notion that the flat tax is the epitome of fairness. If one taxes every dollar at exactly the same rate, how can that be anything but fair?

Well, tell that to the widow in the temple. As a little thought experiment, suppose that the poor widow's income is exactly at subsistence level. (We can quibble about how one makes this “exact,” but you get the idea.) If you tax her income, if you take anything away from her, she is now grimly doomed to be below subsistence level. Unless Elijah comes strolling along and blesses the widow's cruet of oil and barrel of meal (1 Kings 17), she's now condemned to starve.

Unfair! Not even the most adamant supporter of a flat tax would insist on taxing every dollar. Yes, I admit that this is true. Remember Steve Forbes, who was going to be swept into the White House on his flat-tax platform? His flat-tax proposal would have exempted the first $36,000 of income from his 17% income tax. Ah, yes, even Forbes was willing to treat dollars differently, depending on the taxpayer's level of income. Already a tiny element of progressivism is creeping in. Perhaps things aren't as simple as they seemed.

Lazarus reports that the Hoover Institution's Alvin Rabushka (a senior fellow at that Stanford redoubt of irreconcilable Republicanism) has published an updated edition of The Flat Tax (with co-author Robert Hall) that proposes a 19% tax rate coupled with a $25,500 exemption per family of four. Deep in his heart, however, Rabushka admits to Lazarus that he wants more:

But the figures are flexible, depending on how much money we want the government to raise. When I pressed Rabushka on his ideal formulation, he said he favors a 17 percent tax rate and a $40,000 exemption for a family of four.

“In my view, government is too big,” he said. “I want to cut it down.”

---

Yes, that's the customary motive of the right-wing exponents of the flat tax: Set the rate below the revenue-neutral level so that you starve the greedy federal monster. Sounds cool, like something out of a Grover Norquist wet dream (“I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”). Let's put a single knob on the income tax system so that we can dial it down, percentage point by percentage point, till Washington is sufficiently emaciated to qualify for a mercy killing. As C. Montgomery Burns might say, “Excellent!”

Proponents of the flat tax may market it to anti-government groups as a way of reining in the federal colossus, but to the citizenry at large they prefer to emphasize its simplicity. As Forbes was wont to say, “The flat tax would be simple. You could fill it out on a postcard.”

But this conflation of flat and simple is false. Sure, a flat tax is a simple tax, but a simple tax need not be flat. The implication does not go both ways. Lazarus notes that there's a lot of room to reform the federal income tax system:

“Simplification is a different issue from flat or progressive,” said Ed McCaffery, dean of the University of Southern California law school and author of “Fair Not Flat: How to Make the Tax System Better and Simpler.”

“We need a progressive but much simpler alternative,” he said.

In 2005, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, both Democrats, teamed up to sponsor what they called the “Fair, Flat Tax Act.” Among other things, it would condense the 1040 form to a single page and offer just three tax brackets—15 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent.

Something along these lines may be the most politically feasible solution to our tax woes.

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The Wyden-Emanuel proposal is flat the way the current system is flat: the rate does not change within each bracket. Yet it is certainly drastically simpler than what we're doing now, even as it retains progressivism.

Why do conservatives hate progressivism so much? Although it's easy to attack progressive tax systems as “unfair” because they treat dollars differently depending on context (which I've already argued is a bogus issue), the real animus against graduated rates lies in their impact on the plutocrats who run the Republican Party. The flat tax would shift the bulk of the tax burden toward lower income taxpayers (despite the fig leaf of the family of four exemption, whatever its level might be). From the Lazarus column:

Under current law, tax brackets range from 10 percent for lower-income households to 35 percent for those bringing in some serious coin.

“A 17 percent or 19 percent flat tax certainly would be a massive tax cut for high-income people,” said Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.

“Simpler? Yes,” he said. “But a flat tax would be inconsistent with the preferences of the American people. By and large, people—not all people, but many people—prefer a progressive system. We have increasing inequality in society. There's no reason to make it worse.”

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As Toder observes, “not all people” prefer a progressive system—the millionaires and billionaires certainly don't care for it—but the sense of fairness that goes right back to scripture makes it clear that there are circumstances where the dollar in one person's pocket is quite different from the dollar in someone else's.

As a former government bureaucrat, I am less inclined than most people to parrot the line that smaller government is automatically better government. (We've seen during the Bush administration that neglect of government responsibilities results in suffering and tragedy in the nation.) But I have no objection to judicious trimming and pruning. Would Alvin Rabushka like to chop away at the federal government? Oh, yes! Well, Alvin, think about the Wyden-Emanuel proposal. If real tax simplification were enacted, and the 1040 form reduced to a single page, think of how much smaller the Internal Revenue Service could be!

I do, however, worry a little about how the unemployment rolls would swell with former H&R Block tax preparers and civil service CPAs.