September 5, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES their personal merits or toil, just cannot justify $12 a hour. Royal also said that 70 percent of the federal taxes come from the top 10 percent of the population, while half of the people in the United States essentially pay no taxes at all. I assume he meant no federal income taxes, because if the people now on Social Security and pensions were excused from paying local property taxes, the oldsters would be skipping and scampering around with glee like Munchkins welcoming Dorothy and Toto to Oz, and the schools would have to be turned into factories or flophouses. Scratch one delusion right there: No one who is not homeless or incarcerated is outside the tax noose one way or another. It just does not happen that way. We have two theoretical offers from two well-meaning people of faith and kindness: We can soak the rich until they sink out of view, or we can give up Food Stamps for the poor and cut back on Medicare and perhaps even Social Security. Neither offer is acceptable. Here is a concept: Let us call it the middle of the bus. If we mandate a $12 an hour minimum wage for people who actually work, we can trim the impact by then phasing out many forms of public assistance for people who have jobs but are also subsidized in their low wages by the federal government’s dole. This turns up an ancillary problem: So many bureaucrats now work for the government in overpaid jobs that actually do some good -- but are really not worth the wages, which are a whole lot more than $7.50 an hour -- that we crash into a lobby that is the equivalent of 40 yards of barbed wire with tin cans and limpets. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that people who do hard physical labor or operate potentially dangerous equipment are worth $12 a hour or more. The obstacle to paying them what they are worth could be not so much the American public, as the public-sector employees who take a skim off the top before the folks who need them get their Food Stamps. Here is another middle of the bus concept. If we phase out federal programs aimed at providing a college education to everybody who can stick his hand up, we save the taxpayers a bundle, and we also restore the value of a bachelor’s degree because not everyone has one. Most industrial nations send 10 to 20 percent of their young people to higher learning, and are able to maintain a productive economy without a surplus of government lawyers, accountants, publicists, and educational administrators who need to be kept employed at college-degree wages and taxpayer expense. Try taking on those bureaucracies! Only one party can even attempt it, and that is the party that is afraid to disturb the richest rich people who sometimes pay almost no taxes because they are so heavily invested in IV • Page 15 Sometimes things just happen. Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic nun who is also a licensed attorney, took a strong dislike to Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget balancing act and organized a bus tour with four other nuns who have spent their noble lives working on anti-hunger programs. Bill Moyers recently screened a show in which these five women toured the Midwest, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Upper South, and were greeted with cheers and approving placards wherever they appeared. The fact that the nuns’ budget critique anticipated the vice presidential candidacy of Congressman Paul Ryan -- a fellow Catholic, but one whose budget the nuns see as hurtful to the poor -- appears to have been a coincidence, but the publicity for the bus trip can only have expanded geometrically by Ryan’s new prominence. Moyers questioned Sister Simone and a conservative Catholic, Robert Royal, on their divergent views about the budget and the economy. Reduced to a level that hopefully is not simplistic, Royal -- like Ryan -- agrees that Catholics are mandated to help the poor (as are all practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims), but that the blessings accrue best when they help voluntarily and not under government compulsion. Royal pointed out that, if you taxed the notorious one percent -- the very rich -- you could probably balance the federal budget for one year, and then you would be back where you started with no more cash cows left to milk dry. Sister Simone provided some examples of why something has to be done: Viewers saw a video of a working mother with two young children she could not feed without Food Stamps because her paycheck did not cover rent and food. The clients at the food pantry she visited mostly appear to have driven there, and the prices of gasoline and insurance could not have helped much. “The minimum wage doesn’t even get people out of poverty now,” Sister Simone said. She is right. People who quit working 20 years ago, or were lucky enough to never have tried it, seem to think that $7.50 an hour is a lot of money. Dream on. My first “real” job paid $105 a week, and I had a college degree, foreign language skills, and veteran status. My wife and I paid off our mortgage in seven and a half years. Today, five times that much salary would barely cover my property taxes. The first house I bought cost $32,000. The same house with minor improvements is now assessed at over $500,000, which means it would probably cost me $250,000 to buy a new one like it in today’s economy. My first new car cost $2,600. My last new car would have cost $40,000, but it was a display model, so I could afford it. Food costs have just about quintupled. Gasoline costs have risen even more so. Once upon a time, people could live on $20 a week. That is no longer possible. Sister Simone, Moyers, and Royal talked about what a fair minimum wage would be. Sister Simone plunked down on $12 an hour as an ideal minimum wage for 2012. Moyers seemed interested, but Royal, CEO of the Faith & Reason Institute, said wages at that level could put a lot of people out of work. Bluntly -- and Royal was right in this case -there are people out there whose work, without reference to Sit in the middle of this bus tax shelters. So we have a conundrum: One party is shackled to a burgeoning and wasteful bureaucracy that comes between the poor and what the poor need to live, and the other is bound to a comparative handful of people who can buy and sell federal politicians like pop-up puppets and obstruct any reform they find threatening. Perhaps a cleanup of rhetoric would improve our political vision. I have qualms about calling somebody a “public servant” when the “servant” cannot be bothered to take any telephone call that might be bothersome. How long does the butler keep his job when you ring the bell repeatedly and he does not show up? Does the cook keep a job when the guests repeatedly get ptomaine poisoning? People who are not notorious cranks should keep lists of such people and compare notes. If the same names crop up on multiple lists, it is time for recall by petition. Another gripe is substitute words uses for “soldier.” I was a soldier once. I was not a “hero,” and I would have been embarrassed if anybody called me a “hero.” My discharge was honorable. I failed to kill Ho Chi Minh. I never killed any civilians either, probably because I got injured in Airborne training and never went overseas. Still worse is the term “warrior.” When a real “warrior” loses, he does not return alive. Remember the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers or the last Apache holdouts. This sort of rhetoric applied to Americans who joined up for an honest paycheck and then encountered military reality can only encourage the tragic incidence of suicides among returning combat veterans, a terrible waste of lives among decent people who had no idea what they were getting into. Conversely, real “warriors” often assess other peoples’ lives as even more worthless than their own, and that is another mentality we cannot afford to endorse or encourage. Call a soldier a soldier: a person who serves his or her country out of loyalty and honor, and is paid. A soldier should not serve out of a lust for racialist homicide or a belief that he or she can compensate for bungling, self-serving politicians with massive firepower. We can save lives on both sides that way, and maybe get out of the mess we have been in ever since the role of World’s Policeman was foisted on us by people who did not love America or worry about the shortened lives of its citizen soldiers. The right place to sit, I think, is in the middle of the bus. We cannot drag people who do not want to work into the educated middle class by destroying the rich. We cannot let people who are willing to work go hungry or homeless because they are underpaid. We cannot ignore the problem forever. We cannot cure it by tag team slogans more appropriate to sports than common decency combined with economic horse sense. Club welcomes newest members The Junior Woman’s Club of Ramsey welcomed its newest members, Aimee Latorre, Alyssa Solow, Marissa DeSimone, and Tricia Cherubini, at a bi-annual installation dinner held at a restaurant in Ramsey. Any Ramsey resident who is interested in becoming a member of the club is welcome to attend the first fall meeting at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 13 at the Ramsey Ambulance Corps building. Pictured: Vice President of Membership Laura Gruber and Denise Pinbell install JWCR’s newest members.