Where Did All the Money Go?

Friday, January 30, 2009

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

Where Did All the Money Go?

By J’AMY PACHECO

I’m no financial whiz.

Back in the days when people actually wrote checks, I didn’t keep a checkbook. That was my husband’s job. Tax time? I just sign on the line and hope our tax preparer isn’t a daredevil.

It’s not that I can’t add and subtract – I just don’t want to. It goes against my principles, like paying full retail, or not negotiating over sticker price.

Nope, money matters have no place in a mind filled with deadlines, dinner menus, laundry goals, school schedules and music lessons. It is, therefore, difficult for me to understand what’s behind the economic situation currently dogging our country.

The housing thing, I get. As I watched the price tags on houses in my city rocket from $150,000 up to the half-million mark in very few years, I knew it couldn’t last. I also knew many of the people who bought homes in my then-inflated neighborhood couldn’t afford them, because most of them were verbal about the crazy terms they’d accepted to get into those homes.

All but one are gone now, and our neighborhood is checkered with the dead lawns that often are the sign of a foreclosure.

I can’t open a newspaper without learning of some store closing, or some company laying off thousands of workers. As I understand it, companies are letting workers go because companies aren’t making enough money to keep them. Others employees are being furloughed – required to take unpaid days a couple times a month to cut costs.

But Jimmy Choo is still selling criss cross platform sandals for $785. (I know this not from personal experience, but from looking at Bergdorf Goodman’s Web site.)

A leather bag from Coach still fetches $498, and Neiman Marcus still gets $1,280 for a simple brown Vera Wang dress – and it only comes with one shoulder! Wiis are still selling like crazy, theme parks still have long lines, and the $100 collector’s edition of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” still sold out at Amazon.

Obviously, somebody’s got some extra pocket change floating around. So…what gives?

I read recently that the Postal Service wants to eliminate mail delivery on Saturday to make up for falling revenues. That, I don’t get.

Every time I go to the Post Office, the line is all the way back to the door. I already print my postage at home, and drop mail off in the bins in the lobby. People used to have mail delivered to their homes. Now, I have to walk to the end of the street and around the corner to get my mail from a cluster box serving two streets.

I’m doing more of the work, but the Post Office is still losing money – and a lot of my mail.

Before Christmas, I discovered that a house with my number, but on a nearby street, was receiving pieces of my mail. I discovered this while returning some of their mail and hearing them complain about getting mine.

Neither of us ever got the necklace I ordered as a gift for my daughter, however, and it was never returned to the sender. I can’t help wondering if someone at the post office is selling jewelry – you know, to help with all those expenses.

So, where’s all that stamp money going?

Obviously, it’s not going to our prisons. I just read an article about the state’s prison receiver demanding a $250 million down payment for an $8 billion prison renovation project that at one time included plans for yoga rooms, meditation gardens, and electronic bingo boards.

The net result is supposed to cost something like $230,000 per year, per inmate. And there’s no mention of any furloughs there to save money.

I’m all for quality health care for inmates – but I’m also all for quality health care for everyone. And I’m thinking there aren’t very many Californians today who can afford to add to their tax burdens to pay for all this – daredevil preparers or not.

I’m also thinking maybe a lot of people who’ve lost their homes and jobs would like to have someone spending $230,000 a year providing THEM with mediation gardens, yoga rooms and bingo.

Maybe instead of meditating and playing bingo, prisoners could handle the mail, or make shoes for Jimmy Choo. Then they, too could pay taxes, and maybe that will help with this whole budget thing.

The whole thing gives me a headache. But today, who can afford the aspirin?