The Radical Centrist™

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Unpopular Opinion: “Hero Wages”

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First off let me just say that I hate dumb and unnecessary euphemisms.  Especially over-usage of the word “hero”.  You’re not a hero just because you did your job.

Be that as it may, when the stay-at-home orders and guidelines over the coronavirus and covid-19 came to be, some people were really stuck in their jobs.  They truly needed to go in to work day after day and did not have the luxury of working from home.  Medical personnel, grocery workers, and so on.  Just two examples, there’s more.  All of these services were indeed “necessary”.  People were getting sick and dying and needed to be treated.  People need to eat.  I get that, and there’s no way around either.  Most definitely these people are/were “essential”… but they’re essential in normal times, too.

Many employers started temporarily paying them an extra $2/hr more, Starbucks even paid $3/hr more.  It was clearly stated it would be limited and was intended to help in a time of crises, because the key word here was “temporary”.  Everyone was fine when the expanded wages were rolled out, no one complained they’d be temporary, and to be honest I’m not sure anyone even heard that word, or understand what it means.

When the expanded wages were started I cringed.  Not because they didn’t deserve it… they do… but because if you know anything abut human nature you know people, when given something extra, never want to go back.  And here we are.  Employers are starting to either end the expanded wages or announce a soon-to-come ending of said expanded wages, and guess what’s happening… protests.

You could say the pandemic isn’t over yet, and I wouldn’t disagree with you at all, but let’s say we went to the end of August and everything were stable again… it’d just be the same thing, protests and not wanting to go back to normal.  (Normal wages are a different issue and not included here.)

This is why I hold this unpopular opinion: The expanded “hazard pay” should never have been done.  People simply do not comprehend they were given an extra, a temporary boost, to help them through difficult times and that said difficult times would eventually come to an end.  For all the good it did and should have done, it’s also only going to cause hard feelings and increase the divide between employees and employers.

Final thoughts:  It’s not that I think these people don’t deserve it, I’ll say again I actually do think they deserve it, but increasing wages temporarily was not a good move, so maybe a bonus… a nice meaningful bonus… at the end would have been better.

Who has the bigger educational “right”?

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What, exactly, is a “right to an education”? (No one, technically, education is not literally a ‘right’, but I digress.)  Who deserves a good education? Everyone, correct? Of course. How far do we take that? To the end? To the extreme? Sounds good. We want everyone to be well educated and to have a fair shot, right? But is it realistic? Are we subconsciously and willfully sacrificing some kids in favor of others?

We don’t want disruptive kids to lose out, and that’s a noble sounding sentiment, but should it be the first priority? Why doesn’t the good kid who studies and stays out of trouble have a right to a good education, also? Without distraction and disruption, the presence of which only serves to lessen their educational experience. We say the good kids have equal access and opportunity, but our actions speak otherwise. Seems we have our priorities upside down.

And why is that? Are we too soft? Are we forced to follow the money? A little of both?

In many school districts they get paid for student attendance. In the beginning that probably made some sense, get kids into the schools. Educate the populace. Schools get $1.95/day* for each student attending class, which has devolved into an unnatural and corrupt incentive to keep kids in school as much as possible, damn the consequences… which I suspect is why “in-school suspensions” have become so popular, keep ’em here and we get the daily money. Maybe we should rethink that and trash the entire concept.

Maybe a better way to fund schools would be to say, “You will have an average of XX number of students for the year, and it will cost $XX to run the school, so you will get $XX, period.” Attendance would be irrelevant. Really, it should be irrelevant, as the overhead costs would not vary in either scenario. Funding should not be so high on a school administrator’s, i.e. principal, etc., mind that it trumps the core mission (education of the students). In the present system, in reality if not on paper, funding has become the core mission due to the perverse incentive.

Bottom line: Your a-hole kid’s “right” to an education should not trump my good kid’s right to an education, and to allow a relative handful of bad kids to ruin it for everyone else is shortsighted and simply wrong.

Yes, we would lose some kids. That’s unfortunate, but we need to shed our society of this “bucket crab mentality” where we allow underachievers to constantly drag people who want to work hard and excel back to the bottom. We only get average as a result. Sometimes I feel that ‘average’ is what we really value, but that’s probably another topic for another post. Regardless, we all lose out, and that’s not right.

*-Number made up for example purposes.

Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons

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This is a big deal.  Finally, we seem to be making some headway back into rational thinking.  Or… are we?

I’m not so sure.  Granted, I’m naturally very skeptical, but I feel that I have reason to be.  How many times has our government said it was going to do something, then just put some window dressing on it to make it appear different, when in reality nothing substantial changed at all?  More times than I can count.

It’s outlined in this article from the Washington Post.  Consider these quotes from the linked article:

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

…and this…

Pablo Paez, a spokesman for GEO Group, said in a statement: “While our company was disappointed by today’s DOJ announcement, the impact of this decision on GEO is not imminent. As acknowledged in the announcement, the BOP will continue, on a case-by-case basis, to determine whether to extend contracts at the end of their contract period.”

Then there’s this quote which was in a previous version of this article, but seems to have been removed when they updated it (the article seems to change constantly, I’ve seen at least three updates so far, for whatever that’s worth)…

“The privately run facilities will not close overnight. Yates said the Justice Department would not terminate existing contracts but instead review those that come up for renewal. She said all the contracts would come up for renewal over the next five years.”

These loopholes are HUGE. Granted, there is something in there about one contract already having been declined to be renewed, but I need to see a more definitive commitment.  It’s precisely the contracts that worry me. We may not enter into brand new contracts, but this leaves the door open to still renewing existing contracts, which is exactly what I believe will happen in the vast majority of the cases. The corporations are not going to give up their revenue without a fight, and Congress will have something to say about it, and these corporations lobby Congress heavily.

I would love to see this actually happen, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

OMG, they’re cutting spending!!!

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Or, are they?  Maybe what they’re really doing is telling you they’re cutting spending while all they’re really doing is decreasing the amount of the pre-determined increase in spending.  Then, to compound the insult, they lie to you (read: us) about it.  How many times have we heard a politician or bureaucrat seek sympathy from us over “budget cuts”?  Reality is, nothing is being cut… in any sense that you or I would understand the concept in our daily lives would understand it.

Yet, who can really blame them for taking advantage?  After all, how many people really know how government works?  Not many, percentage-wise.  I certainly don’t claim to be a guru, but I have done a bit of reading on the subject and have become very skeptical when it comes to government budgeting… especially baseline budgeting, which has been our federal standard for roughly four decades now.

As this article points out, baseline budgeting is essentially a scheme that serves to perpetuate and increase the government bureaucracy.

“Baseline budgeting” is one of those Washington terms that sounds very dry and boring. In reality, baseline budgeting is one of the most sinister ways that politicians claim to cut spending when they are actually increasing spending.

Granted, not everything in government should be run like a private business or a private household, but when it comes to budgeting it is not unreasonable at all to expect government departments and agencies to justify their projected needs rather than expand their spending to meet the money given.

Are “sin taxes” legit?

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Tobacco, alcohol, whatever. Are “sin taxes” a legitimate way to generate revenue?

I say ‘no’. First off, I see no reason to pay an extra tax to do something that is otherwise legal and is already being taxed through the various consumption and income taxes. Second, the idea that the government feels that it is justified in this additional financial fleecing just because the targeted group is politically impotent is morally repugnant.

And no, the “…if you don’t want to pay the tax then don’t do it…” mantra doesn’t justify it.

So, why have them?  Revenue generation is almost never stated as the reason.  It’s usually some form of behavior modification that is touted.  But if you watch and listen it seems pretty obvious that they (politicians) get all giddy when they talk about how much revenue came in. The stuff about reducing unwanted behavior is just a red herring. Any decently articulate person can make it sound good.  California’s Prop 10 was almost exclusively about revenue generation.

Here what I believe (and maybe I’m being too cynical)…

What they say their priorities are…
#1 Curb unhealthy behavior
#2 Generate revenue

What I believe their priorities REALLY are…
#1 Generate revenue
#2 Perpetuate the bureaucracy
#3
#4
#5
#6 Curb unhealthy behavior