The $15 An Hour Wage Discussion

 There is this great article I picked up today....entitled: "Why a One Size-Fits-All Federal Wage Makes No Sense."  I'll lay out the site over here.  It's written by Martha Njolomole.  Great piece and I recommend a read.

It lays out two basic issues.  

First, State by state, and city by city.....it's crap.  A guy making $15 as minimum wage in NY City....is marginally living, while the guy in some place like Dothan, Alabama is living in fairly decent status.  I didn't use the word luxurious....but you could go a long way in Dothan with $2,400 a month.  The situation in NY City, Boston, or Burbank....wouldn't match up with Dothan lifestyle.

This is something that I've remarked about a great deal as I've traveled across Europe, the US and the globe itself over the past twenty-odd years.

A guy working at McDonalds in west Texas....given the minimum wage of $15, with no state tax....could live in a very happy status.  

But then we come to second issue that is written about in the article....all work isn't even.  An entry-level kid....sixteen years old....isn't at the same status of of a twenty-two year old guy with four years of Piggly Wiggly clerk status.  You start talking about background, maturity, willing nature, inability to learn beyond a certain level.....it's hard to say that America really deserves this one-size-fits-all pay status.

I've had a total of two part-time professions in my life, after I left the farm.  Neither were jobs that held for a life-time of work.

I worked for roughly four months in 1978 as a Tiger Air loader....at the Frankfurt Airport.  I'd show up around 6 PM with a couple of Air Force guys who wanted part-time work.  

Huns would show us the two-dozen steel pallets laid out and we'd move cargo onto them....then strap them down.  Sometimes it was Italian-made shoes....sometimes it was French-made bras.  Occasionally, there would the twenty-odd animal crates that you'd stack up for pets being shipped.  On rare occasions, there would be an expensive car.  

Around 11 PM, the plane would land.  We had three hours to get everything off, and reload it.  By 2 AM, it was supposed to be reviving up and getting out to the runway.  Our job officially ended at that point....eight hours.  We were led to the central office....paid in cash (no paperwork, no taxes)....around the sum of what would be today 80 Euro (figure $100 roughly).  I did this once a week....for about two months, then skipped a few weeks, returned to another two months.  

It was no-brainer work....it was extremely critical on timing.  Everything had to be done and ready by the 11 PM arrival.  They needed dependable folks to show up....avoid sloughing off, or delaying that 2 AM take-off.  

The second part-time occurred in Tacoma, Washington....for about three weeks.  It was strictly a Saturday night event...at some warehouse....to stack gear for Monday morning pick-ups.  Ten bays were laid out.....I worked with a second guy and did a full ten hour bit for $6 an hour (that was 1980).  

There is no way of balancing things and saying x-number of people are deserving of $15 an hour, and that x-number are too immature, too unreliable, or too stupid.  

I sat and watched an interview around five years ago....a guy had a decent business of making ceramic beer mugs.  His little factory probably generated around a-million dollars in sales each year.  He needed around fifteen people to show up on time.  He had ten older employees who could handle the demands and the low stress environment.  The other five positions were constantly being filled with new folks who were never dependable or capable of passing the drug-test (yes, he'd gone to mandating that as part of the job-requirement).  Around every month or two, he'd miss a contract demand....because these two guys never showed up for work, or this guy slept through the afternoon. 

It's a total waste of time to size up this $15-an-hour gimmick and think that it'll resolve issues.  It'll just take a number of messy problems now, and flip them into even weirder problems in five years.  

If you lived in some town like Houston and started to notice more than 30,000 folks who were continually hired-up and fired in sixty-to-ninety day cycles, and the state unemployment office was now forced into paying fairly incompetent and crapped-out people....somewhere in the range of $15 an hour to be unemployed....how do you think that will work?  

All fifty states are going to have some problem to occur in five to seven years, with unemployment 'pits' and a fairly high cost of paying off people who just can't work at the level required.  For the guys and gals who will support this mechanism?  More state taxes coming down the road.  

The National Guardsmen Landscape in DC

 I would suggest that five landscapes now exist for what you see in DC, with the Guardsmen:

1.  It just looks an awful lot like the Baghdad 'Green-Zone'....oddly enough was a 4 square mile area, which is what the current secure area of DC amounts to.

Guardsmen over the age of thirty-five probably remember the Green Zone and did some time there in their youth.

They too....left duty and slept in warehouses/older hotels at the end of their duty-day.

2.  The landscape gives this image of President Biden/Congress/Senate existing.....only, if the Guardsmen are there and protecting them.

3.  A lot of this script resembles the safety concerns of locals in Kent, Ohio in April/May of 1970.  Local cops were not of a sufficient number to protect the business zone of Kent, and disturbances reached a point where the governor of the state was called upon to deploy Guardsmen to protect the city and the campus.

4.  Another segment of this script resembles May, June and July of 1932, where the Bonus-Army riot occurred.  Note, it was the US military that was called in to settle that mess, and caused Hoover to be voted out of office in November.

5.  If you looked at things on 4th/5th of January....what idiot in charge of security of the Capital building would not have increased security, putting up barriers, and ensuring all days were locked and secured?  This looks more like a mall-guard assembly of people instead of actual law enforcement.  Then you bring the Guardsmen in to be what the Capital Police could never be? 

I will suggest this...if we come to May and 7,000 Guardsmen are still in DC, with the suggestion that a 3,500 number of Guardsmen will not go away in 2022 until 3,000 new/extra Capital Police are hired and in place....there's something seriously wrong with trust in Congress or the leadership authority of the nation.

If the new Capital Police of 2023....resemble a group of jackboot Green-Zone thugs, with 50-cal weapons and armored vehicles parked around a dozen areas of the DC Green-Zone?  Something will be seriously wrong with the new democracy that we have.  

What is this Putin Mansion?

 Around two weeks ago, pictures finally emerged of this fantastic mansion that had been built over on the Black Sea area, and is rumored to be Putin's personal mansion.

So to the facts:

1.  At some point between 1999 and 2009, work started on this piece of property.  Some comments did get out in 2010, but they were mostly dismissed.

2.  The rumored owner of the building?  Alexander Anatolyevich Ponomarenko.  You probably never heard of the guy, but he's fairly well off and done business in the building/operation of sea ports, runs some banks, and built a couple of profitable airports.  

3.  Money spent on the house?  Some people openly suggest a minimum of one billion dollars.  Some even suggest up to around $1.3-billion.

4.  How long have people actually known about the mansion?  Well....at least a decade, but it just never got into the mainstream news.  

So the question is....is it really Putin-property, or someone else's property?  Zero proof other than various folks bickering about this whole discussion. 

If you asked me if this fits Putin's style?  I'd say no....he likes the big open landscape and probably would prefer a luxurious cabin situation in the middle of some national park area.

So this might all be some fake scandal accusation?  Maybe.  But this is how wild and crazy speculation goes in Russia today.