To change the subject (and to get away from the tax trauma), spring cleaning has started here at The Gulch. We’re starting small, cleaning out the coat closet by taking winter coats, boots, gloves, scarves and hats out and moving them to a storage closet. Then it was a matter of rearranging some of the other contents and getting rid of the winter detritus.
After that we went through the pantry/laundry room, removing some items that were better stored away in one of the attics. (Yes, we have two attics at The Gulch, one accessible from the house and the other from the garage.) These are things like Tupperware containers, pots, pans, and other kitchen related items that are used, but only once or twice a year during one of the holidays. This freed up space and the pantry is now less crowded and it’s easier to find things and keep things clean.
I will soon be starting on the house attic as there are lot of things there the WP Mom no longer needs and that she wants to give to Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul. There are also things I have there I should have disposed of prior to departing from The Manse but ran out of time to take care of prior to the move to The Gulch. Then it will be time to take care of the attic garage, but most of that work will be rearranging things that are already there, mostly Sterilite containers full of seasonal stuff. Winter stuff will go in as summer stuff comes out. (Some of that ‘summer stuff’ is gear for the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout which, if everything goes as scheduled, will be going back in the water sometime during the send full week of May.)
And so it goes.
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One has to ask how well California’s Fast Food Worker’s Minimum Wage law is working out for those who were supposed to receive the higher pay? So far, I’d have to say it isn’t working out at all, at least not for the fast food workers.
This week, your humble correspondent has witnessed another tranche of elitist Democrats ruin the lives of thousands of people and pretend everything's fine.First, AB5 killed the so-called “gig economy”, something that didn’t need to be done. Carve outs had to be made for independent truckers because if it hadn’t been done California’s trucking industry would have collapsed and its economy with it. But still, a lot of jobs went away. Many of the ‘gig’ workers moved out of state and continued to do their work from their new homes in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
In California, Democrats forced a 25% pay increase for fast food workers and workers learned the hard way about being priced out of a job.
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Welcome to California, where between Bidenomics inflation and Gavin Newsom's new $20/hour fast food worker minimum wage has caused cheap fast food to become unaffordable, especially to the people who either got their hours cut or lost their fast food jobs completely.
Take a bow, fellas.
Hence, on March 25, Gavin Newsom plunged headlong into a 25% increase in the cost of labor for fast food employees.
This effort to kill small businesses and jobs harkens back to AB5, California Democrats' attempt to kill off private contracting for the sake of their union paymasters.
It seems all of the measures the California Assembly and Governor put forth keep punishing those who make the economy work, create job losses, falloffs in state revenues, generate huge budget deficits, and when that doesn’t work, they double down and make things even worse. However, for the California Democrats it’s working just fine because it allows them to virtue signal about how they’re helping the “little people”.
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Mike over at Cold Fury points us to a piece about The Elite War on the American Middle Class, or as Mike calls it, “another war in which there are no rules.”
Being middle class in America used to mean something—something socially transformative, something even revolutionary. The American middle class represented a form of national social order never before seen on this earth—cultural domination not by the very rich and very educated, or the political domination either by tyrants or the mob, but by a mass of people, relatively well-to-do, who felt themselves fortunate in their circumstances. That was what made the American middle class different from the French or English bourgeoisie. Its members believed, and the country believed, that they were the nation’s backbone, its true governing class, and its moral compass.We’ve been hearing that Biden (or rather WRBA) is working hard to grind down the middle class, and while I originally thought is was rhetoric, I can no longer think that as action after action taken by the the Biden Administration continuously whittles away at the middle class.
Throughout most of the 20th century, the term “middle class” signaled membership in an optimistic and growing group, most of whom had risen within memory from physically laborious jobs in farming or on factory floors to offices and small businesses they ran themselves. The middle class had enjoyed long periods of prosperity and stability, and each generation of politicians, on the left and the right, had enthusiastically pandered to it because they were the American majority, and it was from the American majority you could build a political consensus and a political coalition.
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Rather than be catered to by the elites who seek to make their living off their tastes and wants, the middle class is more likely to hear the elite talk about it as a problem: Middle-class Americans are racist, they complain too much about how expensive everything has become, and they won’t get on board either with the left’s social-engineering schemes or the populist right’s rage-driven apocalypticism.
They are told that “no human is illegal” and that their concerns about an open border are evidence of their own bigotry. They see the poor and other designated “oppressed” receive sympathetic elite attention and government subsidies and programs, and services aimed at helping them. The elite champion the rights of criminals, illegal immigrants, and destructive Black Lives Matter activists who want to dismantle the police. They tell the rest of the country that they must call the homeless the “unhoused” and ignore any quality-of-life effects from that population’s drug use or instability. When the middle class complains, the elite often chide it for having fallen prey to “misinformation” or excessive “right-wing” media consumption.
As Mike writes:
As are we all—everyone, that is, foolish and/or naive enough to still believe, as patriotic dupes, in the essential righteousness of a nation which in actuality bears little if any resemblance at all to the nation its Founding Fathers—whom its middle-class posterity still nonetheless justly admire and take great pride in—brought forth originally.If the middle class is eradicated, that will leave only the new nobility – our self-anointed Progessive elite – and the neo-serfs – the rest of us. It is the neo-feudalism of Marxist ideology and the Progressives are using every step in the Marxist handbook to erase the middle class.
None of this has happened by accident, mind. The assault on and dismantling of the American middle-class and the nuclear family which is its backbone and practical foundation is Item One in the Marxist playbook, the crucial first step without which all else is pointless and futile.
Of course that might not work out quite the way they want and it is they who might find themselves on the wrong side of history...or better yet, on the ash heap of history.
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Speaking of war, one has to look at the escalating war in the Middle East with Iran getting directly involved in the war between Israel and Hamas.
Iran fired 300+ cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones at Israel. 99%+ of those missiles and drones were shot down by Israeli and US Navy anti-aircraft systems. At least Iran targeted military targets unlike their Hamas, Hezbollah, and Russian allies who have no problem targeting civilian infrastructure, facilities, and residences.
Of course SloJoe is trying to talk Israel into not striking back, something that Biden should stay away from. If nothing else it makes him sound more like he is Iran’s ally rather than Israel’s. Why is it that Israel, the country against which Hamas started a war, is the one everyone says must restrain themselves while their enemies continue their attacks on Israel.
This is a stupid war, one made possible by the Biden Administration, one that would not have happened if Trump were still in office.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice and snow from the last storm has all but disappeared, the rivers and streams are running high, and where boating season starts in a little over three weeks...for me.