Now Do You Get It?
Thu., October 23, 11:50 AM
There are a lot of people out there — not just Mr. Magoo — who just don’t get it. So, while I am not unique, nor even close to it, I am going to try to explain once more.
I am sixty-eight years old. I started working — for a salary, that is — when I was seventeen years old. I happen to enjoy working at almost anything I do; nevertheless, it doesn’t mean I would not rather be doing something else. I was proud of being an honest, hard-working employee.
When I went to college, there were few scholarships available and, as far as I know, no one got student loans. (The best student I ever knew received free tuition but had to scrounge and beg to find a foundation that would help her pay the living expenses that went with attending the university.) I had no scholarship. I worked. I would go to school for two semesters and then work full time all summer, so that I would have enough money to pay for the next two. Night classes were seldom an option, since I often worked the evening shift. I worked during the school year too, so that my parents wouldn’t have to give me an allowance. Oh, sure, tuition was only $15 a credit, and room and board were fairly cheap. It was a state university, and the Yalies and their ilk looked down on us, but we had as good an education as we were willing to work for. Yes, it took a little longer than four years, but I got that diploma, ’cause it would have been darned hard to get a better job without one.
Incidentally, next time you pooh-pooh a state university education, just remember that Ivy League isn’t exactly lily white. Remember that a most prestigious university conferred an MBA on at least one student because his father had a lot of money. It certainly wasn’t for his brain power. For all we know, someone else actually took the exams. We do know that you can get away with a lot of less-than-legal behavior if you can offer a grant.
I worked until the week before I got married. I stayed home with my babies, but I was back in the workforce in less than ten years. We applied for a mortgage and bought a house, and we paid it off in half the time. No one bailed us out. We did without a few luxuries in order to pay for what we needed.
You may remember a post about my good credit record that became meaningless when I got married, because the law then was that the husband’s was all that mattered. I built up his credit and eventually, when the law changed, I built up my own again as well. I always paid my bills on time. That’s the right thing to do.
Sometimes people have emergencies, and they have to borrow. I’m not putting them down. I am just giving you my experience.
So I worked, even when jobs became scarce, until I retired at sixty-six. And I probably wouldn’t have stopped even then, if my eyes hadn’t given out. I certainly thought I had saved enough that we would retire comfortably.
As you might imagine, my Cheesebox isn’t worth what it was a couple of years ago. Even my “conservative” investments are suffering. My eighty-year old husband, who worked even longer than I did, now needs custodial care. (Don’t suggest in-home services; we don’t have room to swing a cat, and I end up doing all the work, whether I can or not.) He gets medical benefits from the Veterans Administration (seven years in the Air Corps/Air Force), but we have to go to Title XIX for aid in nursing homes. That will take away approximately half of what I struggled to save.
Does a congressman who has been in Washington for twenty years or more, with a guaranteed salary, health insurance, and a pension, understand anything of what I am talking about? Anything at all?
Finally, there are fraudulent, corrupt individuals who cheated clients, investors, and employees, who nevertheless are retiring with millions of dollars worth of funds. They may be able to prove they were ten times more valuable to their business than I was, but they will never convince me they were worth a hundred times more. You may think I’m jealous or bitter (heck, I am bitter); you might even decide that I’m a communist. I have heard that before. But you know just as well as I do that it isn’t fair and it isn’t right. The only benefit I get out of this is that I will be below the tax radar, regardless of who wins the election.
Taxes, indeed. I think there should be fines, HUGE FINES, for those people who manipulated this into a two-class society. Any jackass can figure out that, when there is a large gap between the haves and the have-nots, the economy is unstable. Well, almost any jackass.
