Banging It Out

People occasionally ask how I’ve been able come up with something to write about every week for twenty-five years. Actually there’s too much to choose from. Even if I were to write a column a day, there would still be too much. Listening to news while driving or working on the house, a column plays out in my head more than once a day. Sometimes it will stay in mind until I have my laptop open and I can bang out a few lines that will remind me of the rest. Then Saturday or Sunday I start to flesh it out. I edit it on Monday and send it to one venue, then edit some more Tuesday and send it to another. Wednesdays I post it online and send links to other websites, and to people who want them.

My office desk

About a hundred twenty have asked for links over the years, but the “contacts” application on my MacBook Pro lost that folder a few months ago. I had to reconstruct the list but couldn’t remember the names of about ninety people who were on it. We’d never met, and my only contact with them was online. They’d read the column somewhere and emailed me to say they liked it. I’d write back thanking them and ask if they’d like links each week. If they responded affirmatively I put them on the list. Going over the 1100+ people on my total contacts list didn’t jog my memory either. Not wanting to abandon my fan base, I included the emails of everyone whose name was unfamiliar and ended up with a new list of two hundred twenty — a hundred more than there were on the original.

Some people started getting the link for the first time and thanked me for sending it along. Since they were obviously happy about it, I left them on. Three people emailed back and asked me to drop them, which I did immediately. One woman made the request with CAPITAL LETTERS and lots of exclamation points!!! I figured she was a leftist whose email address somehow made it into my contacts. For others, I got those kickback messages indicating email addresses were not longer operational. After a couple of weeks everything was back to normal.

Stream of Consciousness

Sometimes I’ll start writing about something, but as paragraphs multiply and I approach the 800-word limit, I see that I’ve gone off in an entirely different direction and ask myself, “Where did that come from?” Other times, I’ll write an opening, then be unable to string together coherent sentences in anything like a logical sequence that will result in a paragraph. Frustrated at first, I’m forced to conclude the original thought was only a muse, more suited for poetry than an opinion column.

Twenty-five years of weekly columns adds up to over 1200. Nearly half are archived on my blog which I started in January, 2006. The rest — about 650 — were clipped from newspapers and put in a briefcase along with some letters to the editor they generated. When I read over some of the old ones, it seems as if someone else wrote them. It was someone else in a sense, because I’m not the forty-year-old Tom anymore and sometimes I ask myself, “Who was that guy?”

I’m not the twenty-year-old Tom either and I certainly don’t look like him. I should probably update whatever picture you see where you’re reading this because the newest one out there is eight years old. I have less hair now. I have few pictures of myself, however, since I'm the family photographer. I'm always looking out the lens and seldom into it.

Speaking of the effects of aging, my social security checks start in May. However, I won’t get as much as the Social Security Administration said I would in those letters they’ve been sending me every year. It will be forty percent less than that because the school district where I taught didn’t take FICA (social security) out of my paychecks. They deducted Maine State Retirement only.

I always worked other jobs while teaching, however, and paid into social security for all of them. I still pay into it every year in the form of self-employment tax. Will that be cut by forty percent now too? Heck, I’d be satisfied if they just gave me back what I’ve paid in since 1967 because those monthly checks won’t add up to what they took unless I live a lot longer than I expect to.

Come to think of it, I’d be better off without most of the “help” government gives me. So would the rest of the working people in this country, but we’re all beholden to those who vote for a living rather than work for it. Think about that on tax day. It’s coming right up again you know. Are you going to write a check or get one?

Not A Party Pooper

Happy Birthday Lila

“I like birthdays,” said my granddaughter last year. “You get presents. You turn another number.” She had just turned five. “Next year, I’ll be six,” she added matter-of-factly and that day comes Saturday. She’s a New-Year’s-Eve baby who arrived just in time to give her parents a tax deduction for 2010. I’ll be in attendance, bringing her a present — the Calico Critters Hazelnut Chipmunk Family Playset. It’s a box of four tiny anthropomorphic chipmunk figurines for $25. If I were shopping blindly for a present to give her and saw this on a shelf somewhere, I would never have purchased it. It looks overpriced, but that’s what she wants according to her mother. It’s not the $25 because that’s not a big number for us; it’s the objective value — but then I’m not objective when it comes to my grandchildren. She loves those little critters.

It so happens that I turn another number soon myself: 66. I’ll be entering my late sixties, one could say, and I’m going to start collecting Social Security. I’ll only be getting 30% of what I would have otherwise been entitled to because of a law signed by President Reagan thirty years ago to prevent double dipping by teachers in states like Maine. As a career public school teacher in this state, neither I nor my school district paid into Social Security for my teacher salary over 34 years. We both paid instead into the Maine State Retirement System. Because I worked other jobs all during that time, I paid into Social Security for those salaries, and I still do in the form of self-employment tax because I still work part time. If I’m only going to get 30% of my SS benefit, I should only pay in 30%, right? But no, I have to kick in the entire amount. Will I get back what I paid in? Well, that depends on how long I live, and who knows how long that will be? I don’t want to know.

Will the checks continue if I make it past 80? Probably not unless serious changes are made. There are simply too many people collecting and not enough paying in. Any dummy knows that can’t go on forever but neither President Obama nor President-elect Trump have any announced plans to address that. There’s nothing but IOUs in the Social Security Trust Fund. More than 90 million Americans are out of the workforce and obviously not contributing.

Meanwhile, there’s more than $12 billion in the Maine Public Employees Retirement Fund. It’s over 80% funded and Governor LePage has made provisions to steadily increase that percentage. Compared to retired teachers in other states like California and Illinois, my pension is meager and I can’t survive on it alone. Teachers and other public employees there get defined benefits that are two, three, and in some cases ten times what mine are, but those states are close to bankruptcy because of it. According to Forbes Magazine, Illinois has a $111 billion pension shortfall in 2016. Chicago’s alone is $9.5 billion. California had an unfunded pension liability of over $500 billion in 2014. It’s worse now despite Governor Moonbeam’s rosy reports on California fiscal situation.

Democrats have been running those states for generations. They’ve made commitments to public employee unions they knew couldn’t be kept. They also knew they’d be gone when the bills came due and they didn’t care. It’s called “kicking the can down the road.” They’re still kicking, but the end of the road is approaching fast. Should the federal government bail them out? Over my dead body.

I’m at that stage of life during which many of my contemporaries are dying or becoming debilitated with various aliments. I’m not what I used to be, but I’m doing well compared to most, and so is my wife. We both hate to exercise, but we do it anyway and it’s paying off. She also nags me about eating vegetables. Life is good, for now. I’ve been on Medicare since my last birthday and she goes on it in 2017when she turns 65. But Medicare is another kind of Ponzi scheme like Social Security. More and more are collecting it but the number paying in isn’t nearly keeping pace. Are our “leaders” in Washington addressing that? You know the answer.

President Obama has been patting himself on the back as his administration is about to end. When it does, he will have more than doubled our national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. All I can do about that issue and the others outlined above above is write about them. I’ll keep on pointing it all out to people, most of whom don’t want to hear it. When I attend my granddaughter’s birthday next Saturday where all my other grandchildren will be, I’ll think about it but I won’t say anything. Why ruin a good party?