Burgers and Budgets

July 16, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

McDonald’s, which always has its workers’ interest and welfare at heart, has distributed this pamphlet showing employees how to make a budget and stick to it.

(As you can see, the pamphlet is a joint effort by McDonald’s, VISA, and (apparently said with a straight face), Wealth Watchers International.

The  “key to your financial freedom” is keeping a budget journal.

Here’s the sample budget McDonald’s uses. 

The budget is encouraging, to say the least.  With an income of $2060 a month, a 2-earner family can save $100 each month.

But do you notice anything missing?  Food, for example. Presumably, that comes out of the $27 a day in spending money.  Transportation costs? Car payments are included, but not gasoline or upkeep. On an income of $24,000 a year, will this family have a car that needs no maintenance?  And if the two earners have only one car, it’s likely someone will have to take public transportation to work.  Oh, wait  – maybe they both work at the same McDonald’s. And they never buy clothes.

I’m not sure how McDonald’s employees get health insurance for $20.  Or home heating for free. 

I compared this budged with those found at the The Economic Policy Institute, which has a “Family Budget Calculator.”  You enter the location and the number of adults and children, and it shows the budget for “a secure yet modest living standard.”  Since McDonald’s used a 2-earner family, I imagined a family with two adults and one child.  Here’s what they would need in San Antonio.*

Here’s a northern city, Akron.

Both cities require a monthly income of $4400 for a modest living, more than double what McDonald’s envisions for its employees.  The big difference is health care – $1200 a month is a lot more than $20.  Then comes transportation ($600 vs. $0).  Then there’s the $580 for childcare, an item that is also absent from the McDonald’s budget.  (Apparently, workers at Golden Arches are part of that low-fertility problem that some observers in the Wall Street Journal worry about – here for example).

As for daily spending, food alone, at $600, more than wipes out what the McDonald’s budget suggests. Perhaps McDonald’s assumes that the family eats most of their meals on site, taking advantage of the 50% employee discount.  

So much for the spending part of the McDonald’s budget.  What about the income part?  The Glass Door  posted these pay ranges for various positions.  

Workers might get as little as $6 or even $5 per hour.  The average seems closer to $7.  That means that at least some fast food is not covered by federal minimum wage, but let’s use that minimum, $7.25, as a default estimate.  A forty-hour week, four weeks a month, comes in at $1160 – very close to the $1105 in the McDonald’s sample budget. So that side of the balance sheet is fairly realistic.

That annual income of just under $24,720 is above the official poverty line – $19,530 – but not by all that much.  Given the omissions in the expense column, I would think that a family would find it very hard to live on that little.  And I doubt they could sock away $100 in savings, no matter how much “journaling”** they did.

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* My choice of cities was arbitrary except that I wanted to avoid high-cost areas like San Francisco.

** My linguistically conservative ear still reacts with pain when I hear journal as a verb.  The McDonald’s-VISA pamphlet has sections on “Journaling” and “How to Journal.”  I guess that’s to compensate for the omission of Fooding, Public Transportationing, and Health Insurancing.

A Loss of Innocence

July 14, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a tremendous asset to the public discourse, and I love the way he comes across in his writing. You might disagree with him, but I don’t see how anyone could dislike him.  And usually, he gets it right.

But he gets one small thing wrong in his “thoughts on the verdict of innocent for George Zimmerman.” 

Back when I taught criminal justice, I brought a Legal Aid lawyer to campus to give a talk about his work. During the Q-and-A, a student started to ask, “If a you’re on trial and a jury finds you innocent . . .”  The lawyer immediately stopped her right there and said, “Since the founding of this republic two hundred odd years ago, no jury as ever found any defendant  innocent.”  The girl was more tha baffled, she was stunned.  Then he explained that in our system of criminal justice, there is no such thing as innocence.  Innocence is a factual matter. Guilt is a legal matter.

The question a jury must answer is not “did the defendant do it?”  And it’s certainly not, “what verdict would do justice?”  The question is much narrower: is there reasonable doubt?  More specifically, is there reasonable doubt that the defendant’s actions make him guilty of the crime as defined in the criminal code – the crime that the state has charged him with?  

The distinction is not particularly important in Coates's column, which I recommend that you read right now (here) – after all, the guy took valuable time away from his Paris sojourn (on Bastille Day yet) and his French lessons to write it. And while you’re at it, read Andrew Cohen (here), who explains why in highly publicized cases, the issues for the jury are very different from the issues that most engage the public.

Covers

July 13, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the arts, when one work resembles another, it’s not always clear whether the similarity is coincidence, influence, homage, or just a plain ripoff.

This book cover for Lolita appears in a BuzzFeed piece on books that are “harmless. Until a friend or loved one tells you that one of them is their favorite.”  A FB friend of mine thought the cover was brilliant.  And it is.

But I couldn’t help thinking of that other meaning of “cover” – the one in music, as in  “Madonna’s cover of Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way.’” The Lolita cover reminded me of a black-and-white photo by Ralph Gibson, a photographer known for his minimalist style as well has his nude and erotic photography.

I’m fairly sure that the Gibson photo predates the Lolita cover by decades.  I have no idea whether the book designer had ever seen the Gibson photo.  But even if he or she actually had seen it, and even if the Lolita cover was deliberate imitation, there’s no way for the designer to credit Gibson.  Works of art do not include footnoted references.

(The problem of imitation/influence/plagiarism in the arts was the topic of one of the first posts on this blog.  That one (here) was about magicians.  This one and this one were about fiction.)

Spoiling the Party

July 10, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

The World Meteorological Association included this graph in its report on Global Warming.  Using decades shows the general trend more clearly than would a graph showing year-to-year variation.*

Needless to say, those who scoff at the idea of climate change added their discordant notes at sites like WaPo’s Wonkblog, which is where I found this graph.

Dan Savage – not a climate scientist – in a recent podcast talks of listening to a “This American Life” episode where state climatologists in conservative states say they are afraid to even use words like warming or climate change because the local ranchers and farmers, who just do not want to hear that idea, might force them out of their jobs. It’s happened. This reaction reminds Savage of the AIDS denial by some gays thirty years ago. 

Standing around gay bars in Chicago, in New York, in 1983, 1984 and listening to gay men who were in complete denial about the fact that AIDS was a sexually transmited infection.  They refused to believe it.

The people whose lives are the most likely to be ravaged are the loudest voices in the chorus of denial. 

Of course, the farmers and ranchers are not alone. Big Energy has also worked hard to push the idea that nothing’s happening.  AIDS denial and climate-change denial are examples of “motivated reasoning,” and the motivation in both cases is the same: if the science is correct, we’ll have to stop partying. 

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* The lack of a 0-point on the Y-axis suggests that this is a sort of “gee whiz” graph, rigged to make small differences appear large.  But with global temperatures a change of one degree Celsius is a big deal.