How to Fix the Economy

Heard on the news today that officially speaking, the recession ended a year ago. That is, things aren't technically getting worse anymore, there's just a lot of leftover bad. Economists call this period after a recession ends a "recess" because so many people are underemployed and therefore theoretically have more time to play outside (if you're an economist, playing outside is always only theoretical). Americans who are not economists don't know the technical term "recess" and so they call the period we're in lots of other words which are not printable on this blog and spend their extra time applying for theoretical jobs.


Our recess: looks a bit lonely, but otherwise nice.

The good news about the current recess is that I have a part-time job. I teach three classes at a university, which happens to be what full-time professors do, except that they have to go to faculty meetings. Also they get paid nearly twice as much as I do and get medical benefits and usually travel allowances.

I know numerous people in the same position I am in, because they are my co-workers. Like me, they graduated at a time when most institutions have full-time hiring freezes, and therefore hire lots of the people who can't find full-time jobs to teach part-time for less money and no benefits instead.

Don't get me wrong--I don't blame my employer. When the economy is slow and your funding is down, there aren't many options other than to do what they're doing. My guess is that numerous companies in numerous sectors are doing the exact same sorts of things right now. If my company let all of us extra part-timers go and replaced us with full-time employees, we'd be stuck with nowhere to go, and the company would be stuck with too much payroll for a continuing economic recess.

No--in order for things to get better, all the underemployed people in the country would have to quit at once and not take another job unless it paid nearly twice as much, included benefits, and involved mandatory attendance at boring meetings. If this mass quitting were to happen, employers would all have to take a crazy risk at once and start hiring full-time, which would give most of the people who just quit real jobs, which would stimulate the economy, which would save all the companies that just risked their necks to hire.

Yes--every struggling company would be foolish to hire full-time people now and every single part-time employee doing more than part-time work would be incredibly foolish to quit now, but if all the part-timers were to quit and all the companies were to hire, things would work out just fine.


...all quit our jobs at once! That's change America can believe in
if it closes its eyes and tries really, really hard.

So: if you see President Obama this week, tell him to read this blog post. And this blog post will tell him to cancel his traditional yearly message to sixth graders and address the nation's part-timers instead. If he tells us all to quit, and we all listen, the recess will end and he'll get re-elected. If the President doesn't read this blog, or doesn't come up with the same brilliant plan on his own, his approval ratings will continue to fall and we'll end up with four years of President Glenn Beck.

The choice is yours. Well, no, actually it's his. I think.

Please leave a comment if I'm right, Mr. President. (I'd also accept an electronic hoofprint from your unicorn if you're in a hurry.)

The Good Life

Apologies must go up front to my more sensitive readers: I am about to offer my second scatalogical story this week alone, but rest assured that I weighed your feelings before deciding that this tale must be told.

My infant son and I had been spending a pleasant Yom Kippur afternoon together, he resting peacefully on my side (where he could hear my heartbeat), me thinking about change, as you're supposed to do on Yom Kippur. At some point a sound made clear that one thing in my life which would need particular changing was my boy's diaper, but I waited good and long to do so, because he's developed quite a reputation for peeing whenever the diaper comes off: on the nurses who weighed him at birth and after one week, on the doctor just prior to his circumcision, and as often as possible at home.

At length, I repaired (I'm not sure I'm using that word right--but it sounds quaint and dated, which is nice and helps compensate for the subject matter) to the changing table, and commenced to effect the change. No sooner did I reach for the new diaper, however, than an explosion of yellow matter with a deli-mustard-like consistency propelled itself out of my son's body, off the end of the changing pad, then the changing table, then over a foot of carpet (raining down bits and pieces along the way) and onto the back of the open door. Thinking of nothing else, I moved post-haste to contain the damage at the end of the changing table, not thinking to cover him in the meantime, so that soon I was distracted by the sound of a stream of liquid hitting the nearby wall and thereafter turning upwards and soiling the table off the other end of the changing pad.

All told, my son's mess stretched perhaps four feet and required some seven separate wipies to deal with. I had to clean him, the pad, the table, the carpet, the door, then move the table to clean the wall. How is a father, in such circumstances, supposed to react?

I could angrily lecture my infant son on hygiene, but elected not to waste any energy doing so.

I could choose to believe that if there were a God, he would not create baby boys with such powerful digestive organs, but thought it better to leave the Almighty and his creation alone.

I could cry and cry and cry about the hard world and the soiled clothes and the realization that by the time he's toilet trained the room may never be the same.

But it was so much more fun to laugh while I cleaned him up and put him down for a rest (after his great exertions), then call my sister on the phone to share the absurdity of the story all the while thinking that yes, this is proof if there ever was such a thing: I am living the good life.

New Business Plan

So...I was all excited about opening a local vegetarian bakery, but then I found out that most cakes and cookies sold locally are meat-free already. The same is true in this area, believe it or not, of ice cream parlors (one serves a beef jerky ice cream, and another features a turkey gravy as a topping option, but everything else is meat free), so there went my back-up plan.

Nicole and I discussed moving to another city where a vegetarian bakery or ice cream parlor would still be a novelty, but we don't know that many people in Montana. So I've come up with a C plan instead: I'll make millions of dollars selling heartbeat bassinets.



Believe me: babies will buy them. There are few things babies hate like not lying on their parents. A baby who is used to being inside of its mother and hearing the comforting rhythms of her heart doesn't need three dangling stars above its head: two dangling stars are plenty, and the other space can be used for an artificial heart (see diagram above). With an artificial heart beating a familiar rhythm overhead, the baby can sleep peacefully in the bassinet.

A warning to parents: if you don't let your baby buy my heartbeat bassinet, whatever bassinet you do buy will probably end up as virtually useless decor and you'll be doomed to stay up all night blogging because you're afraid to actually fall asleep with a baby on your chest. Just a friendly warning.

Tax Cuts and Bubbles

Nine years ago, I made one of those paper count-down chains they taught us to make in elementary school in the weeks leading up to winter break. Every week, I've been cutting off another link and am almost done, because this is the season when the Bush tax cuts are set to expire. For me, that will be a symbolic moment of exorcism: in a significant way we will be a little more free from that dark ghost of economics past.



Or will we? I heard on the radio today that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over the issue in a way I didn't expect. The Republicans want all the tax cuts, including the ones on the richest 2% of Americans, extended (after all, if you're making $8 million a year, your time is too valuable to look for all the tax loopholes designed for the rich. It's much easier to get your taxes off up front without having to come up with a charity donation or local investment to write off). The Democrats don't want those tax cuts extended--but they do want to keep the rest of the Bush tax cuts, the ones that protect "middle class Americans" who earn $200,000 per year.

Did you hear that? $200,000 a year is middle class! Good thing we've got a party to fight for the vulnerable people in that income bracket!

Politically, I guess it makes sense to call very-but-not-quite-obscenely-rich people "middle class," but I'm beginning to wonder if that sort of thinking, on both sides of the aisle, is what got us into this economic mess in the first place. As I recall, the current economic crisis began when people took out massive sub-prime mortgages and second mortgages on houses they couldn't afford in the first place and then (surprise!) couldn't make their payments. Why, I wondered, would so many people do that?

Simple. Let's say you want a normal, middle-class American standard of living, and Congress tells you that means you should spend up to $200,000 a year. You'd better take a loan out fast, because where I come from, ain't many people who actually earn that.

Maybe we got in this crisis in the first place because Bush tax cuts drove up our collective idea of what appropriate spending was. The rich got richer and the "middle class" spent more to try to keep up, whether they had it or not.


Q: If you can pay cash for 16 of these every year, still have
$40,000 for living expenses, and be considered middle class,
what's the minimum number you have to buy to prove that
you're not dirt poor? A: I don't know, but loans never hurt.

I'm about ready to start my own Tea Party, except that in mine, we'll sink luxury goods to the bottom of Boston Harbor until people decide they're not worth going into debt and wrecking the economy for and maybe we should spend our money on things like schools, hospitals, research, and cleaner factories instead.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time there was a little moon-baby who came to earth. The earth was beautiful, but in the thick gravity everything felt heavy. It was hard for the moon-baby to move his arms and legs and he couldn't float around anymore. The gravity made the moon-baby tired and he'd sleep and sleep.

I'd watch his moon-face and I'd watch the slow way he'd stretch his moon-fingers. Here is a secret: I am also from the moon. My mind still makes moon-jumps, in fact, but my fingers are slow in all this gravity and my eyelids won't stay open while I try to write.

This world is heavy. Heavy, heavy, heavy. That's why you have to learn to close your eyes and think of the moon. Closed eyes are your moon-eyes, and your moon-eyes remember that in the real world, which is the moon, things are light.

When you will remember that, you will smile your moon-smile. Here is another secret I will someday tell the moon-baby. The moon-smile is what will make the other moon-people recognize you. It's the way you open your moon-eyes and smile the moon-smile that will make a silver-souled moon-girl fall in love with you some day.

...and we're back (sort of)

As you may recall, I had hoped to blog for twenty minutes each day (note: Sundays are holidays, and don't count) during the month of September. Well, Friday I didn't, and Saturday my twenty minutes consisted of staring at the screen and thinking about the craziness of this year's 9/11 anniversary but not coming up with anything witty to say about it.

I'm still feeling a little short on the witties. Or wits. Or whatever you call them.

Look! A postcard from my sister:

Look, Daddy! I can pee eight inches past the top of my head!

The diaper was actually "poopy"--that's the technical term the hospital nurses use for the result of an infant's bowel movements--but just before I finished changing it, my son decided it was a good time to pee: on his belly, on his fourth pair of clothes for the day, on my arm, on his changing pad, and off the edge of his changing pad for a total distance I estimate at eight inches past the top of his head.

Eight inches.

If you calculate that according to body size, it's something like if I peed straight up in the air nine up to nine feet above the ground.

Kids--even when they're a mess, they're strangely fascinating. (Or maybe you just turn crazy when you become a parent as a defense mechanism.)