Day Care Bites the Dust

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I know I have made myself quite a controversial subject by my insistence that children be loved, cared for and raised by their mommies and daddies instead of hired help and institutionalized child care. As I have said many times, children evolve each and every day…and those minutes need to be influenced by and experienced with the people who matter the most. This is why I am thrilled about the one-sided effect of the current economic problems in America.

According to a recent report in USA Today, parents nationwide are telling day care providers that “they must scale back or abandon their services. Instead, they keep kids at home with grandparents or up-end their work-life balance because gas and food prices have become prohibitive and average child care costs outpace rent and mortgage payments - even for those drawing salaries.”

Of course, the day care industry is scurrying around trying to come up with a plan to save itself. Many are offering all kinds of hours and financial deals. The USA Today article, after noting that the 2005 U.S. Census Bureau data (the most recent available) indicated that 2.65 million preschoolers attended day care, and that current statistics of un-enrollment were not available, called the situation “distressing.”

Sure it’s distressing for an industry that has been so effective in its marketing, that parents who actually raise their own children are made to feel guilty for doing so. But it is not distressing for the children, who will now be in the arms of people who love them and are there to teach, nurture, support, and experience life with them.

Sure it’s distressing for parents who have to reconsider and reconfigure their lives to accommodate raising their children. But, they will find surprising rewards in the true experience of family.

The hysteria from the child care industry has included dire warnings that parents will leave their kids home alone, in cars, or with strangers who might hurt them. That sort of child neglect and endangerment goes on in spite of filled-up day care establishments and should be dealt with through social services (to help families make better adjustments in their priorities) or through the legal system (where children are removed to live with safer relatives or foster care).

If it is true that every cloud has a silver lining, then the “shine” is there for many children of parents who can no longer pay the $3,000 to over $10,000 a year for day care, because mommy or daddy is coming home to you.

Is Personal Responsibility Passe?

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When marriages get difficult, people “bail out” by divorcing, and flippantly propose that the kids will be fine.  When school children are failing classes, the tendency in American education is to drop standards on performance examinations, drop the tests altogether, or punish the hard-working children by eliminating valedictorian status.  When folks decide that their business or financial situation isn’t paying off, they declare bankruptcy and ultimately give the bird to those who trusted them enough to do business with them.  When the auto industry makes cars that aren’t popular, Congress votes to bail them out financially.  When mortgage companies and banks loan trillions of dollars to people who can’t possibly pay their monthly bills, we have a world-wide financial crisis requiring the average, hard-working citizen to give up his or her compensation to save the day.  When people do stupid things, like put hot coffee between their legs while driving a car, a company has to pay out from its profits to compensate for a customer’s irresponsibility.

This is not really about finances.  As many have pointed out, during the Great Depression, unemployment was higher than 20%, and people found themselves unable to pay their bills through no fault of their own.  This is 2008, and unemployment is about 5%, and people find themselves unable to pay their bills totally by their own fault!  Why?  Because they want to live a lifestyle they have not yet earned.

This is about character and honor as well as the philosophy of earning your blessings.  I have told many a parent not to buy a home for their newlywed children, because they would be robbing them of something to work towards together, in addition to the thrill of the accomplishment.

Dozens of CEOs are walking away from disasters they helped create with hundreds of millions of dollars of “reward.”  Millions of Americans are walking away from the disasters they greedily and irresponsibly signed up for by putting their names to a promise they could not keep.

This is not the American spirit of old, and it’s certainly not the way to bring up our young people.  I hope they have learned from this.   Instead, I worry they’re just blaming the Wall Street fat cats or the Federal government.  To quote Shakespeare:  “the fault lies not in our stars…but in ourselves.”

Do Financial Crises Cause Marital Crises?

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The world’s finances are being shaken to their core because of - well - cheating and greed.  Nonetheless, people are being laid off, large companies are going out of business, small businesses can hardly pay for even minor fees to keep themselves afloat, and the price of gas keeps yo-yoing.  The good news is that you can buy a car for under sticker price…as long as you don’t need a loan; you can also buy a house for a pittance…as long as you don’t need a loan.

A number of financial advisors have reported that their biggest problem is not the most obvious one, which is explaining what folks should and shouldn’t do with their cash, savings, and investments.  As it turns out, their biggest problem is how husbands and wives are turning on each other with blame and rage or turning away from each other with blame and fear.

Feelings of concern, anxiety, sadness, confusion and fear are, frankly, reasonable emotions when tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes hit your community…it is reasonable to slap your own - and maybe each other’s - foreheads, regretful that you both didn’t plan better.  But ultimately, it happened to each of you and all of your neighbors and you have to respond in a constructive way despite your personal pain.

Feelings of concern, anxiety, sadness, confusion and fear are, frankly, reasonable responses when the financial bottom falls out from under you.  It’s not unusual to want to look for the cause of the disaster whether it is a bank CEO, the President, the Treasurer, modest-income people who borrowed to live beyond their means….or….your spouse.

“Kicking the dog” because you are upset with your day is animal cruelty.  Kicking your husband or wife when you are both in the same lifeboat is also cruel, and it is destructive to the marriage and the family.

Perhaps it is true that one or both of you made some financially unwise moves with investments or by spending too much and living beyond your means with credit cards and loans.  I think that in these situations it is always best for the person in charge of the “errors” to simply own up to screwing up, apologize, and then offer to help make things right.  Once your spouse has thrown himself or herself on your mercy, do not ever make them feel stupid or bad in an attempt to regain a sense of superiority or control. 

When things go wrong, turn TO each other with compassion, solace, and a pledge to be a team and work it through together, survive it together, brainstorm together, and work together.  No matter how sad you feel, this is the time for lots of attention and great sex.  Endorphins and orgasms go a long way to keeping you both cheerful about life and life with each other.

The financial situation in America and the world, as well as the Dow, will come back up.  Make sure your marriage weathers the storm so that you can both be there to enjoy it.

Do Women Fare Better With the GOP?

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Barack Obama and Joseph Biden are both fishing for the women’s vote - especially disenchanted Hillary Clinton feminists.  Biden has insisted that Republicans, including Sarah Palin, represent a step backwards for women. 

But when you look at the labor market data from the Census Bureau (as Professor Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago has in a new study), to figure out “the amount and reasons for women’s progress in the labor market since the 1960s” something very interesting is revealed. (Wall Street Journal 9/12/08).

In 1988, the last full year of Republican Ronald Reagan’s administration, wage growth for women working full-time throughout the year improved by 8.3% from the end of the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter.  “Johnson, Carter, and Clinton were all Democrats, yet none of them witnessed much labor-market progress for women during their administrations:  eight years of Reagan, four years of George H.W. Bush, and six years of George W. Bush.”  The Nixon-Ford administrations were the only Republican administrations that didn’t make it to this list of forward momentum for women. 

In the Quarterly Journal of Economics, August, 2008, Professor Mulligan and Yona Rubenstein (from Brown University) calculated the statistics that showed women’s annual wage growth relative to men’s: 

Under Republican administrations, women’s annual wage growth relative to men was .0.87% under George W. Bush, 1.4% under George H.W. Bush, and 1.6% under Ronald Reagon.  Under Democratic administrations, women fared less well.  Their annual wage growth relative to men was 0.21% under Bill Clinton, 0.04% under Jimmy Carter, and minus 1% under Lyndon Johnson. 

I like that color lipstick, especially if the kids are grown or Daddy is home with the kidlets.

Are Newspapers Biting the Dust?

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“It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter.  The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller….Financial pressures sap its strength and threaten its very survival.”

Nope, that isn’t a statement about your local newspaper.  It’s a statement about the American daily newspaper of 2008, as reported by the Pew Research Center.  “This description is a composite.  It is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at newspapers across the country, and the results of a detailed survey of senior newsroom executives.  In total, more than 250 newspapers participated.”   In total, more than one in every five of the nation’s 1,217 daily newspapers participated, making it one of the broadest surveys of its kind in recent years.

The majority of newspapers are now suffering cutbacks in staffing, and even more in the amount of news they offer the public.  The forces buffeting the industry continue to impact larger metro newspapers to a far greater extent than smaller ones.

Perhaps you’ve heard the recent announcements of a further round of huge newsroom staff reductions at large papers, including the Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post, all known to be quite liberal in their perspectives. Let’s also not forget The New York Times, that bastion of bias, with a second quarter drop of 82% in revenue, with print advertising continuing to shrink.

The Pew Report was meant to document how newspapers are faring in the race between today’s financial pressures and the innovative attempts to insure the industry’s future.  Many papers are expanding their web presence and getting into web TV to mobilize the rapid growth of web readership.

One major area of concern, however, which has already cropped up in television news, is the pressure to have a constant flow of new material on the web, which means “a loss of time to organize a thoughtful attack on a story, to think through precisely why a story is being done, or how to make that story more meaningful.”  Newspapers have long had that luxury and that responsibility.  Television and radio news, with their competitive immediacy, have veered toward the unexamined and notorious for the sake of ratings. 

We should be worried.

Food Prices Hurting Your Appetite?

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Every weekend, newspaper inserts around the country provide coupons, giving you opportunities to get a wide selection of products for even less than what your local paper offers in its supermarket ads.  To tap into this vast source of discounted food and cleaning products, there are Web-based services that give you easy access to the discount coupons.  Some of the sites allow users to print coupons directly, while other services, for a fee, clip the coupons from newspaper inserts and mail them to you.

One of the best of these is thecouponclippers.com.  Fees are 50 cents per order plus 10% of the face value of each coupon, and shipping is 58 cents.  They have an extensive selection, including a health-food section.  You can shop by department or via search tool.  If you are buying huge volumes, you might want to check centsoff.com.

There are others, like grocerycoupons.com, onlinecoupons.com, and grocerycard.com, but they require a fee for the year that ranges from $10 to $100, and then 10% of the face value of each coupon and 75 cents for postage.

Scooters Rule!

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Gas prices are going up over $4 per gallon in some areas of the country. The solution?  Get a scooter! 

One “scooter-ite” bought a Vespa GTS that uses about $7 of fuel every two weeks.  Wow!

Consider the cost of a 50 mile round-trip commute based on a fuel price of $3,79 a gallon:  the scooter (Vespa S) would cost $2.65 per day; a Honda Accord, $6.10 per day, and a large SUV (Ford Expedition), $10.50 per day.  A Vespa can travel 80 miles on a gallon of fuel.

There is a downside to scooters, however:  dealing with potholes, having to get a motorcycle license in most states, no protection in bad weather, and vulnerability around other vehicles, which are usually a lot bigger.  Nonetheless, scooter sales have gone up 25% in the past year.  Scooter prices range from $3,000 to $9,000, depending on size and “fanciness.”

In 2005, the latest year with complete data, the death rate for scooter riders was 129 per million scooters registered, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.  In comparison, the death rate was 78 for cars and light trucks, and 645 per million motorcycles registered. 

I believe this is a growing trend.  It’s not an accident that you’ve been seeing so many more motorcycles and scooters on the road.  In addition to being more cost-effective, it’s fun and “cool” to be on a scooter.  I have a Harley-Davidson Road King that’s been converted to a trike for safety.  I had it “muralized,” and it’s a show-stopper.  I’ve had a Vespa scooter, too, and that’s also a fun ride.