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Monthly Archives: March 2014

Golden Years?

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Are you ready for retirement?  While the idea might have its appeal, especially with the winter weather making for long commutes this year, an awful lot of workers are not on a track to be able to retire.  That’s according to a survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), conducted annually.  They found that only 18% are “very confident” that they’ll have enough for retirement and a further 37% are “somewhat confident”.  That’s up from the 2013 survey, in which only 13% was “very confident”.

The implications go beyond any one family’s ability to retire, however.  The decline in workforce participation has been largely due to retirement since the start of 2011, and retirement opens jobs for young people.  The wave of retirement that should accelerate after 2017 is one of the main reasons Barataria has hope for the 2020s.  But is retirement nothing more than a dream for many workers today?
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MN Minimum: Half a Cent per Buck

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Raising the minimum wage has become a progressive rallying cry.  While President Obama’s call to raise it to $10.10 per hour throughout the US is a longshot, given the Republican House, many states have either raised their wage or are considering it.  Minnesota is contemplating raising our minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2016, possibly indexed to inflation afterwards, and it is likely to pass.

What is the net effect on the economy?  An analysis of the net effects was prepared in December and with a little more math it boils down to something no worse than 0.5% of the total economy of the state.  It’s a way of looking at the proposal that makes the case against raising the wage much more difficult, although the effects are not felt uniformly throughout Minnesota.

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St. Patrick’s Day

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Good people go to Heaven, but the Celts went everywhere. There isn’t a corner of the globe where you can’t find us if you look hard enough. Nations as far flung as Canada and Australia are largely Celtic in origin, and the majority of those Celts came from Ireland.

Our people have wandered the earth like almost no other, and for one day we all return home with the help of a hyphen. Many of us become Irish-Americans or Irish-Canadians on Saint Patrick’s day when any other day American or Canadian would be enough. We drink up well in pubs, cheer on the bagpipers, and think back to what our ancestors must have gone through to get us where we are.

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US, Get Over Yourselves!

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Imagine you are a young woman walking down a street in the US when a group of young men starts hooting and whistling at you.  It’s probably annoying, even infuriating, but you keep walking and ignore them.  Now imagine the same thing happening on a street in Kiev or Odessa.  You should probably run for your life because you may have just become a target to be kidnapped and sold as a sex slave in a distant land.

That is the reality faced every day in Ukraine, where a repudiation of the descent into a mafia state is likely the main issue at the heart of the recent rebellion and interference by neighboring Russia.  But you’d never know that reading the mainstream media here in the US.  This important story has been largely ignored because everything, everywhere in the world is reported as if it is about the US somehow – no matter how ridiculous this perspective is.

Our inability to simply get over ourselves is the main reason our press is so terrible, not some liberal/conservative bias.  It is well demonstrated by the complete miss on this important story shaping the world today.

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Time Flies

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If you’re like most people, the upcoming week will start a little bleary from losing an hour of sleep to Daylight Savings Time. It’s an uneven process, too, with Europe not changing until 30 March this year – meaning that there’s now only 6 hours difference between St Paul and Frankfurt instead of the usual 7.  Schedule your skype conferences appropriately!

All this messing with the clocks only proves how artificial the whole idea of time is.  Perhaps we’re better off with one time across the globe.

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