Remember not too long ago, I was ranting about a proposal to tax grocery bags 17 cents each to fund waste management in SF? Well, someone went that one better in Florida:
Florida’s Legislature is flush with good ideas. Sen. Al Lawson’s involves a 2 cent-per-roll tax on toilet paper to pay for wastewater treatment and help small towns upgrade their sewer systems.
It’s actually a fairly clever idea. But not very likely to (ahem) pass.
Daniel Muntz takes a long time to get there, but he makes a really good point over at Ezra Klein’s blog today.
In short:
It’s not about whether we should be choosing big versus small government. It’s about good government versus bad government.
And by that, I mean we should not be fixated on things like how many governemnt agencies there are, or whether Cato thinks we’re doing a good job. Rather, we should consider whether the government is helping American citizens. If so, then it should keep on doing what it’s doing. If not, then it’s time for change.
Good stuff. I hope the meme spreads.
Gimli is almost a year old now. We rarely use his “full” name — more often than not we call him either Gimi or Gimlet. Something similar happened with Tina (she was originally named Christine) so I’m not too surprised it has happened again.
Here he is, camped out on top of my stuff while I’m trying to do homework at my “second desk”, aka the dining room table. I have way too many books and papers to try to get school stuff done on my ‘real’ desk.
I was going to blog about this yesterday but I didn’t want to follow that upbeat post with something gloomy quite so quickly. Nathan Newman’s Labor Blog raises a host of disturbing points about the one-step-forward-two-steps-back Santorum minimum wage bill currently in Congress.
Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum is leading the charge for a GOP bill that would ostensibly raise the minimum wage by $1.10 per hour, but in reality would cut wages for millions of American workers and expand unregulated sweatshops across the country.
As a minimum wage employee myself, I have some strong opinions about how fucked-up the minimum wage laws are. I see up-close and personal exactly how difficult it is for people to make ends meet even on San Francisco’s generous $8.62/hr minimum wage.
In short, it’s hard as hell to make ends meet when you work for the minimum wage. One of my co-workers has 6 roommates. Another lives in a neighborhood so bad that she’s arranged to have her roommate meet her at the store to walk her home after dark. Another shares a one-room efficiency with his wife. That doesn’t sound so bad, but in about 2 months’ time they’ll add a baby into that one room. He has been apartment hunting, but says they simply can’t find something bigger that they can afford. Still another co-worker, a father with two young daughters, works 2 jobs and tells me that on a good night he gets 5 hours of sleep. Some of my colleagues are trying to go to school while they work but that presents its own set of challenges: the more classes you take, the less hours you can work, but the fewer classes you take, the longer it takes before you’ll finish your degree.
I could go on but I’m getting too depressed. I know I’m lucky because I have a husband with a decent job and thus am not relying on my minimum-wage plus tips income to the same extent that the rest of my co-workers do. That could change at any time, of course. If the last several years have taught me nothing, they’ve taught me to not make any assumptions about the permamance of any job. Every day Scott and I still have our jobs, it feels like a small victory.
And in related depressing news, the LA Times has put their entire series of articles about why American families are so screwed into a non-registration required special section. It’s also worth a read.
Another weekend day, another early morning shift. I came home around noon to a beautiful surprise — Spring has snuck into San Francisco when I wasn’t looking. It’s sunny, there’s a hint of warmth in the air, the tang of the sea is noticable, and the fog hasn’t set in — a perfect day. I got off MUNI a few blocks before my stop, it was such nice walking weather, and enjoyed it all. Living all the way out by the beach is often inconvenient, but today is the kind of day that makes it worthwhile.
I showered off the smell of coffee when I got home and sat down to realize that I either need to trim my blogroll or be more consistant about reading it, because the pileup of posts waiting for me on Bloglines is way too much to work through. It makes me feel frustrated; there’s so many good bloggers out there, with so much to say, and I’m too tired to keep up with it all, much less try to find something interesting, original, and throughtful to say here on my own blog.
There’s a lot of terrible things going on in the world. I know I ought to be saying and/or doing more about some of them. But today, I just want to enjoy the spring air and spend some quality time with Scott and the kitties.
Got a jury duty summons today. And oh how convenient — it’s scheduled to start the Monday of my Spring Break. So much for either resting up and/or working some extra shifts that week.