Covid-19 Update

We're going up the hill today to fetch the kid home from school. There are at least 12 confirmed cases in Arkansas as of this morning, and who knows how many actual cases.

The kid is coming home because his roommate is employed at a low-wage job, and can't self-quarantine. Both of them are young, so probably not at risk; but they're both worried that the kid will get it from the roommate and then bring the virus home to us (Dr. Skull and I aren't exactly old, but).

Yesterday I went out to the grocery. Not as chaotic as a few days ago, but on the other hand, the shelves were almost stripped: no paper towels, no toilet paper, no paper napkins, no cleaning supplies. Almost no canned fruit. Almost no frozen vegetables. No baby food. No canned milk.

All of this is obviously panic buying -- what else, in a capitalist society? We can't do anything effective, so we buy crap.

I was after tomato sauce and cheese, so I could make enchiladas. Those were both still available. (Why aren't people buying cheese? I mean, at a time like this, don't people want cheesy goodness?)

Our public schools are staying open, at least so far; but all the universities have closed.

Crystal Bridges, the sole decent art museum in Arkansas, has shut down.

I'm not worried myself, not even a little bit, about the virus. I am a little concerned about what's going to happen over the next months. According to most sources I'm seeing, the pandemic doesn't peak here in the USA until July 2020. Can the economy survive five months of even moderate quarantining?

Meanwhile the weather in Arkansas continues cold and rainy. I miss my walks.

Dystopian USA

If we read about this happening in some other country, we'd be appalled. But hey, we can buy seventy different types of sugared breakfast cereal, so yay capitalism!

Windowless underground sleeping pods could rent from $1K/month https://t.co/SGYGN8StIB pic.twitter.com/Cyg5SxP3nO

— New York Post (@nypost) January 16, 2020

Someone at Amazon is High

Y'all remember when Amazon recommended this $1400 dollar wine cooler to me (get one for home AND the lake house!).

Today it recommended this to me.

Seriously, I don't care how rich I ever become (fat chance); I won't be spending nearly $150 on a butter dish.

Sheesh.

Some of the reviews are kind of funny, though.

Ignorance at the Top

Over on Twitter a conservative guy I sort of like (he's at least willing to try to base his conclusions on reliable evidence) claimed that sky-high rent and cost of living is not a problem, or at least not one that causes poverty and homelessness.

Because moving away from unaffordable cities is not an exotic expertise question. It’s a thing people do under ordinary circumstances, every day.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) June 12, 2019

Thread starts here

He says people can just move. Go to some place where the rent and cost of living are more affordable. Get a job there.

This take illustrates my main complaint about Conservatives in the top 5% of income levels. They have no idea what life is like for people who are making the average income in this country -- usually they have no idea what the average income even is.

They think their income -- $150,000, $250,000 -- is "average." They think they're middle-class.

In reality, almost half of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense. (This is what's happening this week in the delagar household -- Dr. Skull needs dental work, and it's $500. It might as well be five million. We don't have it, and we don't have any way to get it.)

But sure. "Just move!"

First off, you'd have to quit your job and get a new job. This assumes that well-paying jobs are readily available in places with cheap rent, and that a person in poverty can easily get one. Neither of those things are true. (Dr. Skull, who has a PhD, has been trying to find a job literally anywhere in America for the past three years. He is finally getting interviews, but they're for jobs that pay between $40,000 and $50,000 a year. And while the rents in these places are cheaper than the rents in say, San Francisco, they aren't that damn cheap.)

Also, quitting your job and "just moving" will mean at least a month without a salary, unless you're very lucky. Given most households in America live paycheck to paycheck, this is a non-starter.

Second, you'd need money for moving expenses, and the deposit and first month's rent on your new place. See "Not able to cover a $400 expense," above.

Third, "just moving" will take many Americans away from their social safety network -- the grandparents who will babysit their kids in an emergency, the dentist who will let them pay $50 a month instead of requiring the money upfront, the neighbor who knows how to fix cars cheap.

Finally, even assuming you can get past all of the above, moving to where the rents are cheaper is not so easy. Almost everywhere in the USA, rent has been increasing steadily, unlike people's incomes.

So yeah. A really bad take.

We're not even that poor -- we're solidly middle-class, according to the income quintile tables -- but I have been trying to move us to a cheaper place, literally in my own town, for the past year and a half.

I can find cheaper places (cheaper by $100 to $150/month); and there are several I would very much like to live in.

But first I need to save up at least $1000 in moving expenses.

See: Americans don't have $400 for an emergency, above.

Right now I'm just hoping the car (which has over 100,000 miles on it) doesn't break down, because if it does, we're fucked.

Crabs in a Bucket

This is an idiom that I've had to explain to people more than once. It's like we have a collective insistence on forgetting what it means.

Or maybe you just have to have done some fishing and crabbing at some point in your life, in order to understand it to your bones.

See, you put crabs in a bucket as you trap them. The crabs try to climb out, but you don't  have to worry about that -- the other crabs, the ones still in the bucket, will pull those trying to escape back down into the bucket.

This is America.

You would think those of us who are less well off would try to help each other. We'd celebrate workers who held a successful strike and increased their pay. We'd be pleased at people getting their healthcare and their education paid for by the state -- which is how it ought to be done, obviously.

Nope. Instead, here in America, we want to yank our fellow workers back down in the bucket. How dare you make $15/hour? When I'm only making $20/hour myself?

How dare you get healthcare? How dare you demand to be free from drug testing? How dare you expect to be educated without going into crippling debt?

Here in America, we won't even allow retail workers to sit down during their shifts, even when it makes perfect sense for them to be sitting (those running registers, for instance). How dare they ask to be treated humanely?

I'd say this stems from ignorance, but in fact it stems from the American worship of capitalism. Here in the USA, poverty is not just a crime, it's a sin.

The Rich and the Poor Alike Are Allowed to Post $12,000 Bail

I've been thinking about this story.

It's the Guardian, so no paywall, and you can click through, but the basics are this: It's Austin, Texas. A woman is waiting for her food at a food truck, as you do in Austin. Another woman, Gina Guidry, approaches, asking for money.

This is fairly common in my city, so I imagine it's fairly common in Austin as well. People usually have a riff -- their kid has diabetes and they need money for insulin, or their car is out of gas, or they don't have money for groceries. Maybe it's true, maybe they want to buy meth. I don't know, and I don't care. I always give them a couple of bucks.

But if you don't, that's fine. We all do our own moral calculus.

This person at the food truck didn't. And Guidry started yelling in her face, and then grabbed a dollar out of her hand. So the woman called the police.

The police show up. Guidry has gone nowhere. She still hanging out by the food truck, which tells you, I think, a lot about Guidry's mental and emotional capacity. The woman points her out: "That's her. She took my dollar."

The police arrested Guidry, and charged her with a felony. Sure, it was only a dollar, but "theft from the person" is a felony in Texas.

Also the bail for that is $12,000. Which obviously Guidry doesn't have.

So Guidry is being held in jail, awaiting trial -- which as we know means she can be held for years -- at the expense of the state, at the expense of what we can guess is her already fragile mental health, and toward what end?

I'm not saying whoever this woman who called the police on Guidry was wrong. It sounds like Guidry is probably not firing on all cylinders, and I'm sure the experience was terrifying for the woman who was attacked.

But putting people in jail because they are poor and damaged is surely not the best we can do as a society. And keeping them in jail for years because they are poor and damaged, so that we can then give them a trial and sentence them to -- what? What is the appropriate sentence for grabbing a dollar out of another woman's hand?

I'll add, also, that this story only happens because our economy is so broken. If we had resources for the poor, the addicted, and the damaged, Guidry wouldn't be wandering the streets begging for dollars, or screaming in women's faces at taco trucks. And if she was, there would be places we could take her that aren't Texas jails.

Links for your Thursday

I'm writing and writing right now, so light posting ahead.

Have some links!

I'm considering a new page for my bibliography -- what do all y'all think about this one?

In case you missed this: A Poem for academics

And in case you missed this, an amazing short story from Naomi Kritzer

Where your taxes go

I'd love this even if I didn't love bagels

Science says this

From Daniel Ortberg, who is a national treasure

A follow up to the previous, due to all the online harassment Ortberg got for his essay

Women in science

The quintiles, in case anyone is confused about the state of American wealth and poverty

What the above translates into

On the other hand...

This one is just funny

Also funny

Life in the Lower-Middle class

Nicole and Maggie's post today, which led me to this post, has inspired this post.

I've blogged, briefly and glancingly, about our money woes before. But I've never talked about the details. Partly that's because I can clearly see that whining about living on just over sixty thousand dollars a year (my pay since I got the salary bump on making full professor) is not a good look, not when I'm surrounded by people who would love to make half that. And partly because it's just depressing.

When I was a graduate student, living on six thousand dollars a year, I used to get very scornful and judgy about people who complained that their twenty or thirty thousand a year wasn't nearly enough to live on. Try living on six a year, I would fume to myself. See how that works out for you!

How it worked out for me was that I didn't buy health insurance, which meant when I got cancer I had destroyed my entire future. But that's another post!

Here's life on $60,000/year.

First of all, we pay a ton of taxes. I worked it out once, and between Federal, state, and city taxes -- plus the 11% sales tax which we have in Fort Smith -- we're paying nearly forty percent of our income in taxes. Don't forget to deduct the cost of health insurance!

So even before we get to what we can live on, we're down to something like $38,000/year.

That's something like $3300 a pay check. From this, we deduct rent, utilities, and medical costs (co-pays on prescription drugs, paying off the standing debt to various hospitals and dentists, which right now is running me something like $400/month), and we're left with somewhere around $1800/month for other expenses.

That sounds like a lot! It would have sounded like a lot to me in graduate school as well.

But from that, we have to deduct food costs and household expenses. We have to put gas in the car. If there's an emergency that month (there is always an emergency) we have to pay for that. Does someone need new shoes? A new pair of jeans? (Someone always needs something.)

What about having fun? Subtract the cost of a Netflix subscription, also subscriptions to an online newspaper (right now, NYTimes, because they give me an academic discount), also the cost of subscribing to a couple of SF magazines, because it's my field, also monthly donations to the ACLU and a couple other charities (the local food bank is my big donation this year), and very quickly we are left with only four or five hundred dollars.

Again, this sounds like a lot! I should be able to save that money, against the next medical emergency, yes?

Except inevitably some OTHER emergency always appears. We only have one car, for instance, so if something goes wrong with it, we have to rent another car while that one is in the shop. Then we have to pay for repairs.

Back last summer, for instance, in the space of three months, the radiator in the car sprang a leak, and then the catalytic converter went. That last one cost us, in repairs and car rental, almost four thousand dollars. You know I don't have that much saved -- so it went on the credit card. Since then I've been fighting to pay that off. (Good luck, at nearly 30% interest.)

Or Dr. Skull's computer has some problem. (I don't own a computer -- the school provides me with a laptop, thank God.) Or the printer breaks. Or someone (me, this time) breaks a tooth. Or, or, or.

Theoretically, is what I'm saying, making what I make in this area, we should be middle-class. And we are!

But this is what life is like for the middle-class these days. Every single month, I struggle to save even just a little money. Every single month, I spend the last week of the month trying to find some way to make it through the week without spending our very last dollar.

Notice, also, what is not in this "budget."

We don't have money for vacations. (Sometimes we make a day-trip to Crystal Bridges. That's our big holiday.)

We don't have money to sock away for retirement (apart from what the school requires from me, which right now is about 3% of my paycheck -- they add another 5%).

No money is being saved for the inevitable day when we'll need to buy a new car. No money is being saved for any other emergency.

No money was ever saved for the kid's college -- I had to rely on my parents to come up with that. If they hadn't, the kid would have attended my school, lived at home, and probably taken out loans.

And remember! I'm doing well. This is a good salary for this area.

Try to imagine how people making $35,000 a year are living. That's the paycheck for Oklahoma teachers. Or how the guy who rents us our car is doing -- Enterprise Rentals pays him $30,000 a year. Or the woman who cuts my hair, or the waiter at a local restaurant, or the clerk who rings up my groceries.

I suspect all of them -- like me -- are carrying a load of debt, created by the fact that our paychecks do not stretch to cover such fripperies as dental work, medical bills, and car repair. Something like one-third of everyone in the US is being dogged by collection agencies. And in many places this is leading their arrest and jailing.

This is an untenable situation. An untenable economy.

What's Middle-Class?

On another blog, I saw a naive blogger making the claim that $160,000/year was "middle-class," and that she didn't understand this claim that "people like her" weren't middle class. After all, her family only took a few "very modest" vacations* a year, and only ate out a few times a week. The claim, she said, that people making $40,000/year were middle class had to be nonsense. That was abject poverty! (For the record, up until a few years ago, I made just over $50,000/year. Since I became a full professor I make somewhat more than that.)

A perfect illustration of the American South. This was posted on my FB feed. A local store has this display up for the Easter Season, and many, many people were thanking Jesus for the store and its "bravery" in witnessing for Christ.

The fact that this is a marketing plot -- and a fairly heretical one -- has not entered their minds. This is because no one in the South, and very few people in America, are willing to admit that the real religion of America is not Christianity, but Capitalism.

Once you realize that, of course, this display makes perfect sense.

Buy more soda, affirm your witness to the one true God.