when it rains it pours

this is rain in LA. (Look closely.)

In Los Angeles rain is rare, but when it does it comes like a waterfall.  Within minutes the streets become rushing rivers, parking lots become great lakes, and television channels are interrupted with warnings of flash floods.

Not long after our Vegas trip Jaime and I received a series of parking tickets from the ruthless iron fisted LA municipal parking police.  They can start out at $50 a pop and double when they go unpaid after the deadline.  Which makes sense because if you don’t have $50 today then it is much more likely that you’ll have $100 tomorrow, right?

Following the parking tickets Jaime discovered that LAMILL would be changing how employees collected tips.  Instead of individuals collecting tips on an individual basis, they would be pooling them and splitting them evenly.  For those of you who have not worked in the restaurant industry, for waiters who are less then stellar the pooling system is great.  For good waiters like Jaime who work hard and make their customers happy the pooling system can cause you to take a big hit in what you take home at night.

I was also having difficulties, struggling to scrape together at least thirty hours a week at Borders.  The writers strike had just ended in mid February and the hope was that there would be an exodus of guild writers going back to their jobs.  Unfortunately the four month strike turned out to be the death of many productions.  Shows that had been getting by on just the skin of their teeth got axed and there wasn’t an immediate need for tons of writers.

All of this was hardly enough to handle, but one morning while on break at work I got a call from Jaime.  I could tell from the worried tone of her voice that I was not going to like what she had to say.  She started with,

“You know how they say, ‘when it rains it pours?’”  To my knowledge no one has ever followed that sentence with, “well, I found $5 on the sidewalk then twenty minutes later I found a brief case with $5 million.”  Instead Jaime told me that she got a traffic ticket on her way home.

What happened was this:

After dropping me off at work Jaime was on her way back to the apartment when she stopped at a three way intersection outside a school.  If you’ve seen the Hangover you know what school I’m talking about.  It’s the one in the beginning, where we’re to believe that Bradley Cooper is a teacher.  What the movie doesn’t show you is that there is no parking lot for parents to wait and before and after school the place is an absolute mad house.

The intersection in question can easily be eight cars deep in all directions.  There are no crossing guards and kids stream into the crosswalk in a constant flow.  When it was Jaime’s turn to go, a pair of kids play fighting on the opposite side stumbled into the crosswalk.  They weren’t crossing and they weren’t near Jaime so she went.  About a block later a cop flipped on his lights and siren and pulled her over.

It was a bullshit ticket, for bullshit reasons, but the whole event was made worse by three factors.  The first was that we still had Washington plates, which as a resident you have two weeks to change.  The second was that she still had a Washington drivers license which also needs to be changed.  The third was that, while we had car insurance, our card was expired and we had no proof of current legitimate insurance.

He wrote Jaime up for not stopping for pedestrians in a crosswalk and expired car insurance.  He must have felt bad for her or could see the little back rain cloud following our car because he gave her a break on the license and the plates.  The ticket total was still nearly $1000, but he explained that it would be reduced significantly if she took her proof of insurance down to the court house.

By the time the ticket was due we had even more bad luck as our car broke down and had to be taken to the service shop to fix what ended up being five major problems that would occur immediately after moving to LA.  It felt like the cloud would never lift and we would wash away.

After it the rain LA’s dirt and dust covered wasteland begins to sprout green, the smog temporarily lifts and for a least a little while Angelinos appear to be happy and less self centered.

The ticket ended up costing us about $300, the parking tickets were paid and my parents generously paid for the car repairs.  While my situation a Borders would never get better, the tips situation at LAMILL did get better and soon Jaime was bringing home something resembling a livable wage.  It was a lesson to us, as long as you can sit back and wait out the rain the other side is always a bit greener.

slash and burn

this is what it looks like when i cut spending

There have been many occasions in which my wife and I found ourselves in a desperate financial situation.  Money was tight and our debt began to mount.  Before we found ourselves struggling to say afloat amid the rising tide of debt (that’s a whole lot of metaphor) we had to cut our spending.

We listed out everything we spent money on monthly and placed things in three columns.  The first are things we have to spend on; rent, electricity, gas, water.  The second are things that can be cut but at great inconvenience and risk of greater financial burden; car insurance, health insurance, cell phones, internet.  The third are those which are completely expendable; cable ($100 per month), Netflix ($8 per month), and gym memberships ($30 per month).  None of these are easy to cut but somethings go to go or we would find ourselves living on the street.  And unlike the US government I don’t have China to grant me a loan.

Our government is faced with the same problem as Jaime and I.  They spent too much money on too many things and have racked up a $14 Trillion deficit.  Let me begin by giving credit where credit it due

          George W. and his “fiscally conservative” Republicans took the national debt from 6 trillion to 8 trillion in just five years.  It took ten years to raise the debt the same amount from 1990 to 2000.  So all these Conservatives who stand around now complaining about the spend happy Democrats, have their blood in the national debt as well.  I’ll be partisan and admit that it was the fear rattled Democrats who blew the whole things out of the water nearly doubling the national debt in just five years.  Thus concludes my brief and incomplete history lesson.

Now the Congressional House of Representatives just like Jaime and I, have to sit down at their kitchen table with a stack of bills, a calculator, and a yellow lined notepad and begin to make cuts.  With a $14 trillion deficit there are sure to be many cuts and most if not all will end up hurting at least one group.  I will be focusing on three specific spending cuts.  Planned Parenthood, the NEA/NEH (National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities), and NPR (National Public Radio.)

The cutting of spending for these three organizations has consumed months of debate in the House.  Naturally I assumed that because they were debated so heatedly and for so long that they must be big expenditures for the government.  You can imagine how surprised I was to discover just how much was being spent on these three organizations annually.

NEA/NEH: share about $167 Million

Planned Parenthood: about $350 Million

NPR: about $430 Million

Total: about $947 Million 

Let’s be liberal and round the whole thing up to $1 Billion annually for all three combined.

According to different estimates the government is spending between 4 and 6 Billion every single day.  If Congress was to cut all spending to each of the afore mentioned organizations then no sooner would they have saved $1 billion would they turn around and spend $4 billion.

Sure, over time saving a billion will add up, but picture this.  If we didn’t spend a dime on Planned Parenthood, NEA/NEH, and NPR for the next twenty years, then we would have saved $20 billion.  Which sounds like and is a lot of money, but when you consider that we spend $20 billion every five days... over twenty years that’s... I’m horrible at math (Let’s cut more funding for public schools) it turns out my calculator doesn’t go high enough to represent that number.

These are tough times and with such an enormous deficit many are saying that you have to start cutting somewhere.  I completely agree, a billion saved is a billion earned.  What concerns me is that amid fears of a government shutdown and weekly votes to approve stopgaps to keep from said shutdown, what has taken priority over all other expenses are these three organizations.  In order to argue this point at all I have to censor myself and not go in detail about how I really believe that the Republicans looking to cut these Liberal organizations are hiding behind government overspending in desperate times.  But I digress, if they’re going to spend this much time and energy debating $1 Billion (less than a drop in the hat).  How long will it take them to cut spending on expenditures that cost real dollars.

Whether you do or do not support these three organizations, you can’t argue that Congress has been wasting our time in this matter.  Time for which we spend $176,000 per year per Legislator.  For 435 voting members we pay approximately $77 Million per year, not to mention all the other expenses that get added on to that.  Such as healthcare, we pay for their government run healthcare, not that they feel we deserve the same in kind.  Amazingly (or perhaps not so) I’ve not heard anyone stand up and say that Congress should take a pay cut or even slash their health care all together.  After all every little bit helps, you have to start somewhere.

Jaime and I looked long and hard at our expenses.  I didn’t want to cut anything, I wanted to simply find the money elsewhere.  But just as the Republicans don’t believe in raising taxes, I had no one to raise taxes on.

The gym membership could not be cut because I was under contract.  Everything else had direct negative impact or legal ramifications.  Had the government been in charge of my budget they would have cut Netflix, it was the easiest to cancel.  We chose not to because of the importance of entertainment in our lives, and at only $8 per month the savings would be too minimal to make a significant difference.

In the end we chose to cut health insurance and cable.  They were painful cuts but they were the biggest expenses that we could actually get rid of.  They had real impact on our budget and without them we were able to keep out apartment, internet, and Netflix.  I knew that if we could be responsible and stay out of unnecessary trouble (wars) things would turn around and we would be able to get those back again.

When things did finally make that turn around we chose not to purchase cable.  As it turns out we didn’t really need it all that much.  Maybe if the government looked at themselves and made cuts that impacted their interests, they would discover that they were unnecessary as well.