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The Price

Dusty 1 Comment

I saw an opinion piece which stated that schools today don’t teach enough economics.

Fair enough. I don’t think that’s the biggest problem – I will argue, probably in future posts, that the lack of humanities education is at least partly responsible for the loss of empathy which is at least partly responsible for the rise of Trump – but it’s certainly true that schools don’t teach a whole lot of economics.

But you know what? Even though I didn’t learn economics in school – not one jot, not one tittle; I knew nothing whatsoever about macro or microeconomics by the time I finished my compulsory education – I did learn how to learn: and I have learned some of the basics of economics on my own.

I have learned enough now to correct the mistaken argument I accepted from my students in Oregon over a decade ago, which was part of the impetus for me to learn some economics, because I hate losing arguments, and I hate feeling stupid, and I thought, back then, that my students had won an argument and made me look stupid in the process. They were saying that immigration caused inflation, which I thought (without any strong factual basis, just vibes) was false; they said, “But immigration means more people buying things, which raises demand.”

“Right,” I said, waiting for them to get to the point.

“Raising demand raises prices,” they said.

“Right,” I said, still waiting for them to get to the point.

“…That’s inflation!” they said, and then chortled when I turned red and flapped my open mouth uselessly, unable to reply. I felt dumb. They won that argument.

Well, kids, it’s not that simple, and I know it now. Now I would say, “Increases in demand only raise prices when there is a restriction in supply; once the supply increases to match demand, that should level out prices unless there is some other upward pressure on the prices. So if immigration is slow over time, and spread out over an area as large as the US, it probably wouldn’t change prices at all: it might lead to a temporary spike in any given location, but once the supply chain adjusted, then all that would happen is a greater volume of sales, spurred by more customers, who also enter the supply side of the chain by getting jobs and adding to the aggregate productivity – and we call that growth. Not inflation.”

What’s that? You say the actual information, the specific content, which I gained during my primary education wasn’t nearly as useful as the skills I gained??

BUT ANYWAY.

(I don’t doubt, by the way, that I have made some errors in the above long-awaited rebuttal to students who couldn’t possibly remember the original argument; none of them will even see this post, I’m sure. My economics understanding is far from complete. But it still feels good to say that, so I’m going to leave it there.)

Here’s something I do understand, and would like to discuss now that we have some better idea of what the numbers are: the costs, and the benefits. We’re looking for a balance: and preferably greater benefits than costs. Right?

So what has Trump cost us? Compared to how we have benefitted from his election?

When Trump got into office, and I learned from at least one friend on Facebook that their vote had gone to Trump in hopes that he would bring down grocery prices and restore the (apparently) wonderful economy that we had in his first term, I decided I would keep track of the prices people wanted to elect this man for. Because I understand: I have spent most of my adult life not making quite enough to be comfortable, not enough to have it easy; things like price hikes and tax increases and wage freezes, furlough days and interest rates and insurance – I have been pinched by all of them, and slammed by some – have all caused pain and worry. Not to mention what I’ve had to go through with student debt, house debt, deferred maintenance costs, and medical bills – including medical bills for my pets. I get it, I really do, I understand why kitchen table concerns override most ideals, no matter how important those ideals may be. I understand that people are hurting: believe me, my family is too. We have debt. We have a mortgage. We have family medical costs, now. My mother, who will turn 81 this summer, is working, full time, to pay off her mortgage and her back tax bills. (I will mitigate that last one slightly by saying that my mom is a nurse, absolutely loves being a nurse, and the work she is doing now is in-home hospice care, mostly things like keeping an eye on someone overnight or while family caretakers are away. It is not heavy work, and she likes doing it. But she’s fucking 81, and she is still working. Full time.)

But now that we are two months in, almost two-thirds of the way through that “First 100 Days” marker that we like to make so much of, I think it is time to look at different prices. To be specific, I think it’s time we looked at the price we are paying for Trump: what it is costing us to have Donald J. Trump as our president, this second time around.

Ready?

First, gas and eggs:

As you can see, they have not gone down. Egg prices shot up because there has been an outbreak of avian flu, and millions of chickens have died or been put down to prevent further infection; eggs are in comparatively short supply right now. They will remain in relatively short supply until the chickens can be replaced: which means that even more of the eggs that might go to market will instead have to be used to hatch new egg layers (Not directly, of course, because the eggs we eat aren’t fertilized: but some clutches, some hens, some broods, however the egg farmers arrange and measure this, will need to lay fertilized eggs instead of unfertilized eggs, and that means fewer eggs produced for sale. And we are talking a LOT of chickens, and thus a LOT of eggs.), and then we’ll have to wait until those new chicks get big enough to lay eggs themselves. So it will be a while. And all of that assumes the bird flu which caused the problem gets resolved, the chances of which don’t look great right now. But while we are waiting on our egg prices to drop, it is also true that grocery prices in general have not dropped. Grocery price tracker: Inflation trends for eggs, bread and more during the Trump administration

It is to be expected that, assuming that some (or all) of the tariffs remain in place, prices will go up, which will include grocery prices. Trump Tariffs: The Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War

It is to be noted that Trump’s constant promises to lower grocery prices starting on day one appear to have been lies: this has not been his focus since taking office.

Gas prices have also not gone down, because again Trump has done nothing to lower them. “Drill baby drill” means nothing if you are looking to drill within the continental US; our oil is the wrong kind to make gas. And Trump has proposed a 10% tariff on Canadian energy – which is where we get most of the crude oil we turn into gasoline.

Why Trump’s fix for gas prices won’t work | CNN

“Why don’t we just start using American crude oil? Champagne oil sounds so nice!” Because oil refineries are set up to handle certain products, and changing them to other products is either too expensive, too slow, or just impossible. I mean, in theory the federal government could step in and use tax dollars to make the changes or subsidize private refineries so they could make the changes…

But that would require actual reliance on, and responsible management from, the federal government.

So: gas prices are not going down, probably will go up. Egg prices are not coming down for a long time, months if not years before all of the supply chains are back to where they were before the avian flu (and that also assumes there won’t be any other price shocks in the egg industry, or the grocery industry, or anything else – like changes in interstate commerce, or retaliatory tariffs, or hell I don’t know, a nuclear war with Russia).

How else are we paying for Mr. Trump’s return to power?

Well there’s the stock market.

United States Stock Market Index – Quote – Chart – Historical Data – News

You can go look at the graph. The stock market jumped up right when Trump was inaugurated, and climbed slowly upward to a new high a month in, on February 19th – and then, tariffs. And the Dow Jones took a dive. It’s coming back up, the last couple of days, because the Fed announced they still plan to lower interest rates this year, because the overall economy is still strong and improving; but the temporary stays and exemptions Trump put on his own tariffs expire in two weeks.

So we’ll see.

The stock market is not the economy, and the market is volatile, so I don’t intend to use this as the only or even the main measurement of the cost of Trump; but it’s surely been a jolt to people with retirement savings in mutual funds.

I wonder how many of them voted for Trump?

So what else is there?

Well, there are all the people who have lost their jobs. And while I’m sure that hardcore Trump supporters will argue that these are actually benefits to the American people, because we are saving money by cutting these people off the government payroll, I’m going to look at the other side: we are losing their services.

DOGE Cuts Update Today: Social Security Changes, Pentagon Slashes Jobs – Newsweek

Let’s see: the Pentagon is cutting 60,000 jobs, which is actually fine with me in terms of our military budget and activities; I would like both to be curtailed. But that sure is a lot of people to put out of work. I’d really rather see those people still working, and maybe a couple fewer aircraft carriers and whatnot.

The EPA is cutting 1,000 scientists. The Department of Education is laying off 1,300 employees – and now Trump has issued an illegal order to shut down the department entirely. 24,000 probationary employees were fired; several of them will go back to work because the administration lied about having fired them for cause – but also, by the time the cases work through the courts and these people are allowed to go back to their jobs, many of them will have found other jobs, because who wants to wait several weeks or months to go back to work for somebody who fired you with a goddamn email from Elon fucking Musk?

The IRS is cutting 20% of its workforce, 18,000 jobs – which is great if we don’t want to find waste, fraud, and abuse among billionaire tax cheats and corporations contorting through loopholes and government contracts – and the USPS is cutting 10,000 people, which is great if we don’t want to, you know, communicate and stuff. But that’s fine: nobody even wants to know what’s happening now. We don’t want to watch this shit show.

The Veterans’ Administration is cutting 80,000 workers. I have no jokes at all to make about that. I have spent the last year and a half, with my wife, trying to work a claim for her mother, who is the widow of a veteran, through the VA’s system. I tried to do it myself. I couldn’t do it: after thirteen months of trying to make it work on my own, I finally got help from a VA counselor whose expertise is in helping people finish their claims. He got it done for us in two months. Now my mother-in-law is receiving the widow’s benefit she deserves, and needs.

Was that guy cut?

He is a veteran himself, and now he helps fellow veterans and their family members get into and through the system. He is kind, and professional, and very easy to work with and to talk to. He helped us.

So you tell me: if he was cut (and I honestly don’t know if he was, but 80,000 is a big fucking number, and I have no idea how many of these counselors and account managers are going to be cut in the future even if they weren’t thrown out in this first round), was that a benefit to our country? Or a cost?

How about the Social Security Administration? There are cuts coming: they are closing regional offices, and they are reducing workforce – firing people, that is. Oh, and also they are making it impossible to verify your identity over the phone, which means people who need to talk to the SSA will have to actually go into an office and talk to someone to get help with their account.

Right when they close offices and cut the number of workers available to help people.

How about that one? Cost, or benefit?

How are those eggs looking now?

My problem with all of this, of course, is that I don’t see any benefits: I only see costs. I see our economy getting battered, and people being callously thrown out of work, and services that I know directly are incredibly important to the point of life an death being cut. I guess people who hate the government are happy, but as I understand it, people hate the government mainly because it doesn’t help people: and while I’m sure that is the experience some people have, it is not the experience that others have; and surely, we can see that ripping the whole system into tatters is not going to help people more. Trump claims that there will be benefits in the future, but Trump is a known liar; and to my knowledge, he has never explained clearly what benefits will come from all of this, or exactly how they are supposed to arrive. Are we really supposed to believe the same old trickle down economics lies? That if we cut taxes for the richest 1% then the rest of us will be better off? It didn’t work the first time Trump did it, or when George W. Bush did it, or – EVER. So I’m not going to accept it now.

So if anyone actually knows what benefits there are to all of this to offset these costs, please, write me and let me know. I would really like to know what the upside is.

I would love to learn.

So Much Crap.

Dusty Leave a comment

Ron Barnett's portrait.

Me and my crew in front of the Box Office/Concession Stand
Look at all that hair!
Break time outside.

I haven’t had a lot of different jobs in my life: only two, really. Sure, I worked for two months in a library, and another two months in a discount bookstore. I was a residential care provider in a group home for developmentally disabled adults for a while, a job I absolutely loathed; and I took photos for college IDs, a job I am forever grateful for, because that’s how I met my wife.

But none of those mattered; you might as well count the money I made mowing my parents’ lawn, or the change I’ve found on the street over the years. I never cared about what I was doing, never thought of it as a part of my identity. But work is, at least in this society, an indispensable part of a person’s identity: it is the first question one asks after “What’s your name?” and the source, after family, of our greatest pride, and of our greatest distress. Nobody asks, “What are your hobbies?” or “What is your favorite meal?” No, we want to know what people do. Our job is how we make a living: what a telling phrase.

The two jobs I’ve had in my life are polar opposites in many ways: the first was blue collar, the second white collar; the first had irregular hours, the second a schedule set for me down to the minute; the first was done almost entirely alone, the second could not be performed without other people involved – or, well, it could, but it would be pretty pointless. It would be nice, though: I often joke about how much better the job would be if it was just me alone in a room.

My first job was often just me, alone in a room.

But there are also aspects that are nearly identical: in both cases, I have worked for the government. In both cases I have usually worked early in the morning and been done by midafternoon, and I have always worked on weekends. Both jobs have tried my patience. Both jobs have given me good coworkers and bad, clients I liked and those I couldn’t stand, bosses who made my job(s) easier and ones who made it much, much harder. And both jobs have, on occasion, revolved around crap.

From 1995-2000, I was a custodian and maintenance worker. Since then, I have been a high school English teacher. I have often found it hard to know, for sure, which job I would rather have.

Being a custodian was great. The daily work was never too bad: the facility where I worked, the Civic Auditorium in Santa Cruz, was a public building; so every day the bathrooms needed cleaning and the various offices needed to be vacuumed, dusted, and have their trash and recycling emptied. That was my most frequent task for the first half of my standard five-hour shift. The second half was more general maintenance: I would sweep and mop the hallways, vacuum the mats in front of the doors, touch up paint, restock the concession stand, organize supplies and storage, and clean windows. If we had an event, I would set up for it; if we had just finished an event, I would break down equipment and clean up the main hall and the seating area – 1100 fixed theater-style seats. I dumped a lot of garbage cans and I swept a lot of floors.

Image result for santa cruz civic auditorium

I had that custodial job all the way through college. But I finished college in December of 1999, and so in June of the next year – in time for the summer hiring season for new teachers – I quit, and my wife and I moved to San Diego County, where I started applying for full-time teaching positions. And found one, at San Pasqual High School.

I did not like being a teacher right away. The daily work that first year was brutal: I got hired in late July for a school year that started in mid-August; this was not a lot of time to prepare. I had three different classes, none of which I had ever taught before, and so I had to make up, every day, what I was going to teach. I had to write all of my tests, all of my assignments. I had to make up vocab lists, after I made up a system for teaching vocab. I had to lecture, and lead discussions; I had to create group projects; I had to grade. The grading never stopped, never ended. It still hasn’t, 17 years later. In addition, I didn’t have my own room, and so I traveled that year, going from room to room and building to building during every five-minute passing period, pushing a cart full of books and papers and my coffee cup. I worked 60-hour weeks, spending hours every day after school grading papers and creating curriculum, sleeping only a few hours a night because I spent most of my time worrying about whether or not what I was doing was having any positive effect on my students, and pretty sure that it wasn’t.

I never worried about being a custodian. There were certainly days I didn’t want to go to work: we used to have certain events that were particularly long or difficult, such as whenever the Pickle Family Circus came to town, since they would do two shows a day, which meant we had to clean the hall in between the two shows. The summer Wine and Music Festival meant twelve- and sixteen-hour days, mostly outside in the California summer heat hauling equipment and supplies and garbage up and down the street. The hemp show people were a nightmare, as were the Gem and Mineral show vendors. And then there were the raves. They used to have raves at the Civic, once our manager realized he could sell 2000 tickets at $20 apiece, and then trap all 2000 people inside for twelve hours with no food except what they bought from our concession stand. The Civic made huge amounts of money on those things. And then we maintenance staff had to clean the place up. Imagine 2000 sweaty people, dancing for twelve hours, throwing around food and drinks the whole time, and – to judge from what they left behind – taking lots of drugs, taking off their clothes, and having way more sex than seems appropriate in a crowded concert hall. We had to mop the whole building, including the walls, and that was after we had swept out an entire dumpster worth of waste.

I’m not even going to talk about the bathrooms.

After my first year at the Civic, I got – well, sort of a promotion. They realized, first, that I was responsible and reliable; second, that I was particularly good at fine details and spending hours and hours on one tedious task; and third, that as a college student, I was totally willing to be exploited. So they made me a shift supervisor – but, you know, not really. I didn’t get any more pay, or any promotion or anything. They just gave me more responsibility. They had me lead crews for setup or cleanup, and they had me supervise alone for some of the smaller, quieter weekend events. And they gave me The Binder. The Binder was pages and pages of maintenance tasks that only needed to be done three or four times a year, like clean out the furnace room, or sweep the attic catwalks, or polish the brass door handles. I was now responsible for everything in the binder. In addition to everything else I did.

That didn’t happen after my first year teaching. No, it would take six or seven years before I got extra responsibilities – but then they came all at once, just as the actual teaching part was getting easier. I still got exploited, though. I was made the Chair of the English department – only a year before the school cut the stipend that came with the position. I was asked to be the “guru” for our new grading and attendance program, which was fine the first year when they paid me for it – but then after that, everybody just came to me for help, though the school didn’t pay me any more. I ran a Gaming Club, and then an Argument Club, and then a Philosophy Club, and then a Gaming Club again – along with a lunchtime talent show I co-hosted, when I wasn’t singing in the staff band.

But that was okay; I liked the musical tasks, and the clubs, for the most part. Serving as the head of negotiations for the teacher’s union was less pleasant, since we had a contract dispute that almost led to a strike that year. So along with teaching all of my classes, grading and planning and preparing, and all of the conferences and meetings and trainings that come with the job, I also had to have meetings with my union team, and contract negotiations sessions; I had to give updates to the other teachers, and lead union activities like marches and such. I slept even less that year, as any minute not spent thinking about my classes was spent thinking about how every teacher in the district was counting on me to do a good job.

Amusingly enough, that was also the year when I was waiting to see if the state would strip my license to teach, after I got busted for writing mean things about my students and my job on a public blog, which was a violation of the computer use policy as well as – well, let’s call it the honor code. That was a little stressful, too, since I knew I might be looking at the end of my teaching career. But here’s how that all ended up: we got a contract; I was named Teacher of the Year for the district; and then I got suspended for thirty days without pay. That was when I quit and moved to Arizona. Where I had to appear before an ethics committee to explain my suspension. They called me “morally reprehensible.”

It’s funny: I used to steal stuff from the Civic all the time. I mean ALL the time. Toilet paper, paper towels, these thick cleaning cloths that my wife used for cleaning her paintbrushes; Windex, bleach, hand soap, light bulbs; we used to borrow tools, painting supplies, even the carpet cleaner when we needed it. And that’s not even getting into the food I used to take from the concession stand. I can’t tell you how much coffee I got for free over the five years I worked there. And the candy: every time I brought candy to the stand from the storeroom, some of it disappeared into me. So did all the leftover popcorn. If ever I have been morally reprehensible at work, it was while I was a custodian. And yet I never got in trouble for it there.

The best part of working as a custodian was that I got to work alone. I almost never had to speak to people; when I did, it was always very brief and businesslike. Then I would put on my headphones and listen to music while I vacuumed and mopped and dusted. Even when I led shifts, I would assign the tasks, and usually take the worst for myself – which was generally the bathrooms. But I didn’t really mind: turns out bathrooms have great acoustics if you’re the type who likes to sing along with music. My pay eventually caught up with my promotion, and I made decent money, had benefits and a guaranteed twenty hours a week, on a schedule I could pretty much pick and choose. I also got into any concert I wanted, free.

The best part of working as a teacher is the fact that I’m a teacher. I do love literature, even more than singing; I like my students more than my mop and broom – well, mostly. I certainly like them more than the brass polish: that stuff was nasty. I believe in what I do, as much as I’m actually allowed to do what I believe in, which is not all the time. I have much better pay and benefits, and summers off, which I love. And I never have to scrape gum off of the bottom of 1100 fixed theater-style seats.

That was a lot of gum. People who put gum on the bottom of their seats are morally reprehensible.

I still cannot say, though, which job I would rather have.

The nastiest thing I ever had to do at the Civic was clean up the lobby after an elderly man had a bathroom accident, not in the bathroom, during the Symphony. Or maybe it was the several times I had to clean up what the homeless people left in the bushes outside. No – no, it was the bathrooms after the raves. Definitely that. Let me just say this: people stopped using the actual toilets, figuring that anywhere in the room was good enough. The nastiest thing I ever had to do as a teacher was when I had to report a sex crime. I would rather clean the bathrooms than do that again.

The worst I was ever treated at the Civic was when the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu people kept me there for four hours longer than they were supposed to, just because they were hanging out instead of cleaning up, and every time I said something, they Bro’d me out of the room. (Bro, chill out, bro! We’re working on it, bro! We’ll be done real soon, bro. Hey, do you lift?) The worst I ever got treated as a teacher was when seventeen of my Honors students cheated on the same essay because they didn’t read the book. Or maybe when I caught three girls cheating, and they yelled in my ear for ten minutes while I had to walk across the campus (That was when I was traveling, remember?) to find the proof – which did finally shut them up: because even though they kept shouting at me that I was wrong and they were offended that I would ever insult them with that accusation, I wasn’t wrong.

But being right doesn’t stop people from arguing with me, questioning me, telling me how to do my job, which seems to be everyone’s favorite pastime: students, parents, administrators, random people I meet on the street, they all want to give me ideas for how to teach. That might be the worst treatment I get. Or maybe it is every single day when my students, who talk about how much they (generally) like me and like my class, spend most of that same class ignoring me while they are talking, sleeping, doing math homework, or staring at their phones.

No – no, it was that morally reprehensible thing. That was truly the worst thing that has ever happened to me at work. Ever. I would rather clean those bathrooms with my bare hands than deal with all of that again: the meetings with superintendents, the consultations with my lawyer, the threats from the state’s lawyer, the fact that I will always have that black mark on my record, for something that isn’t half as bad as the things that have been said online about me – and sometimes, to my face.

Working at the Civic meant cleaning up a lot of crap. Working as a teacher means taking it.

So I suppose that’s really the answer: I would rather clean bathrooms. I wonder if anyone is hiring.