Youlovesalad.com

Dear Wall Street,

I would like to request a few things back. My money would be a great place to start. I don’t even mean my investments that I lost, but the taxes I paid you after you lost my investments. I would also like to regain a sense of security that scum bags don’t succeed in the world because good-hearted people always win. I would like that back with interest of course. I would like my subway system running “normally” again and I would like the golden surcharge for stepping into a cab to be taken away. I would like my faith in humanity and my general belief in karma to be restored but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

I think that the fact such big bonuses are being distributed, or are even in question, is a pretty obvious sign that there is no remorse for any of the irresponsible actions taken in the past decade and that Wall Street has not only lost touch with “Main Street,” but with an entire sense of reality. Humbleness and a sense of humility has long been gone in the big banks. Integrity has been replaced with selfishness and sense of arrogance and entitlement that is shameful and flat out disgusting. Whether we are technically in a recession anymore or not does not change the fact that thousands of people are still without jobs, or have lost their homes and millions of Americans are in a debt where they can not foresee a way out. All of this is due to the greed and the actions of the same people who are now reaping the benefits of a recovering financial market while the “little” people are left to suffer. No one asked us if we wanted our tax money to go to rescue banks that were “too big to fail” (I laugh because they DID fail and we bailed them out). The government did not step in and give me or my parents the thousands of dollars we had lost with our investments. Investing is a risk with no guarantee. It is legalized gambling. Wall street opposes a new tax that would cost them a few million dollars a year out of the billions of dollars they bring in. Well here is what I say to that: If you want the government to stay out of your business, stay out of theirs. People criticize Obama for trying to regulate Wall Street. They claim that is inherently against capitalism and free markets. Maybe it is. But if we were purely capitalists, we would have let those banks fail. Some operations succeed and some fail. I understand why banks that have repaid their government bail out loans with interest are bitter that they are making up for the funds lost by companies that did not repay their TARP loans. However, the government took a gamble on all of those companies that it has to save. There was no guarantee that Goldman Sachs would rebound so quickly or so lucratively- they could have just as easily failed. And it is for that reason that those banks are responsible for helping the companies like AIG that haven’t rebounded. The government gambled with the people’s money and they deserve it back- no matter who has already repaid their fair share.

I am willing to give Wall Street their bonuses- when they actually deserve them. I ask you Wall Street- where is my bonus? Where is my bailout? Where is the money I lent you (with interest of course), because I sure as hell don’t have it. I am ashamed that people in this country, although few in number, could be so ruthless and selfish. The level of ignorance that they have displayed in thinking that they deserve a bonus more than the national salary average, especially considering they led the country, and the world, into a global recession, is beyond pitiful. Politicians keep claiming we have entered an “age of accountability”, but somehow, I feel that the regular people are the only ones being held accountable.

I know I mentioned this before, but I absolutely hate people who move to New York and their parents pay for their apartment. Please stop. It makes life so much harder for the rest of us.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/147767

I’ve said it before and I”ll say it again, I believe people who are obese should have to pay more for health insurance and now I have found people to back me up:

ttp://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/whos-ready-for-a-fat-tax/?scp=6&sq=obesity&st=cse

When it comes down to it, obesity is a self-inflicted problem. There is only a small portion of the population that actually has a genetic pre-disposition towards becoming obese. Sociologists and politicians make all sorts of excuses for the obese- food deserts, low-incomes, poor education. While all of these factors are in fact real contributors to obesity, they are not the cause. The cause of obesity is one thing and one thing only- consuming too many calories without exercising. Does anyone ask themselves why in the early 20th century, with all of the poor, uneducated immigrants, obesity wasn’t rampant? How come there are educated and wealthy people that are obese (although fewer in number they do exist)?

Lack of education definitely does impact rates of obesity. But with articles in the newspaper and ads on TV everyday, you would really need to make a conscious effort to ignore health warnings and not know that eating a big Mac everyday is bad for you. I know all about food deserts- the lack of grocery stores within a certain radius, and here is what I have to say. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but I will speak for NYC. Supermarkets are everywhere! And when there is no supermarket nearby, there is certainly a bus or train to take you to one. Where I grew up in Queens, they recently took away the last Key Food and replaced it with a Rite Aid. Do people in my neighborhood complain that we are in a food desert? No. Are we an obese community? No. And it is not because everyone is rich and has a car and drives far away. It is because there is access to public transportation and even people without cars can get to the nearest supermarket. However, food deserts cause big problems when in a poor neighborhood. There is still public transportation- but the will of the people is different. It is easier to blame the community for not providing the resources needed, then to seek out the resources yourself. The blame is put on someone else and individual’s shirk all responsibility for what goes into their body.

I can’t always afford the supermarket right across from my apartment, but I don’t sit and blame the city for not providing food subsidies so that I can afford the things i want.  I also don’t go to McDonald’s everyday for a meal (which is not even that cheap anymore!) I walk an extra mile just to go to Trader Joes to buy food that I can afford.  Sometimes I even lug bags of food 25 miles from White Plains all the way back to my apartment. I understand that not everyone is physically capable of doing this, but if you can’t take a bus a few blocks down to go to a grocery store, then you probably should not be living alone in the first place.

People need to take responsibility for their own health and actions and that is why there should be a tax on obesity. Findings released by the CDC found that “the prevalence of obesity rose 37 percent between 1998 and 2006, and medical costs climbed to about 9.1 percent of all U.S. medical costs.” How are we ever going to cut medical costs if we continue to allow preventable diseases to take over our health care system? We need to have a sense of shared responsibility here in order to ever move forward and work towards getting everyone health care. Everyone needs to do their part here.

Well thank god they found Mark Sanford. I was so worried about him. The real mystery remains though- why do I care that this guy had an affair with a woman in Argentina? I am not his wife. I am not his mistress. He is not even my governor. I don’t know why he felt the need to apologize to the entire country about his behavior- he should probably just apologize to his wife. And if you’re going to smash your political career, take some advice from Eliot Spitzer and go down dirty.

Don’t we have more important things to worry about like Iran? North Korea? ……..Bueller? Bueller?

There has been so much in the news lately related to health care.  Since it is the field that I most likely want to build my career around, I think a lot about the situation we are faced with. Private insurance is great for doctors- they actually get paid and can perform the best diagnostic tests and can use the best medical equipment to treat their patients. Unfortunately, someone has to take care of the poor people, and they are often the ones with the worst medical conditions. Due to their poor diets or lifestyle choices, or their lack of general care on a regular basis, these people usually seek medical treatment when they are on the brink of a medical disaster.  With the cost of malpractice rising by the day, and the amount that doctors are paid by government run health care programs staying stagnant, or decreasing, it is no wonder that no one wants to treat people without insurance. It is not all people at the bottom of society’s ladder that find themselves without health insurance.  Middle class families with good jobs find themselves without health benefits if their employer doesn’t help subsidize plans or if they can’t afford to pay out of pocket for a private plan which can cost more than $10,000 for a family of four. I believe we should find a way to get everyone decent healthcare. It would avert a lot of the money that we pump into the system that basically keeps the severely ill alive when if they had better care all along, they wouldn’t end up near death every six months. The ER  has replaced the role of primary care physicians and it is draining our system and our doctors. It has been the case for a while now, that America does not produce enough doctors to sustain its population. The reason we haven’t suffered to this point, is that we have allowed a large influx of foreign doctors to fill the gaps.  However, it is often the case that doctors trained abroad are treated as if their training is not as good as American bred doctors and they are often placed in lower ranked hospitals- often public hospitals. So here is the catch, we do not want to produce more American doctors because it is a) expensive but more importantly, it allows us to use foreign doctors to fill the positions that American doctors don’t want to take. Doctors at public hospitals are often paid less and work more. More of their patients are uninsured and more of their patients are severely ill because they can not afford primary care. A lot of foreign doctors from the Philippines or India for example, still make more money as a doctor in the United States than they could abroad, and that is why, we haven’t heard them complain that much. Obama’s plan for health care calls for more primary care physicians, which is a great idea, except that he also came to the realization that there are not enough doctors to fulfill his plan. No one wants to go into primary care- it’s not rewarding.

There have been several proposals of different ways to raise the billions of dollars needed just to keep Medicaid and Medicare alive through the decade.  Proposals include the soda tax, the alcoholic beverage tax, taxing people who get health insurance from their employers, etc. These are not real plans. First off, the soda tax is ridiculous. While I am all about combating obesity and diabetes, taxing soda is ridiculous. I drink soda sometimes and I weigh 100 pounds. If you charged my 25 cents more to buy the soda, I still would, and so would the lady who weighs 400 pounds. I think health insurance should be like car insurance. Everyone has to take responsibility for themselves. It is not soda that is bad for you. It is the AMOUNT of soda that you drink which is something only you can control. The same goes for alcohol. Both of these things in moderation are not bad. SO lets say you have health insurance- just like care insurance you would start with a rate that fits your age category and personal history/experience. It is your decision how you are going to treat your body, and like a vehicle, the more you break it, the higher your insurance goes. I am not talking about breaking bones and being careless, or getting a disease you can’t control like cancer(unless it’s lung cancer). But I am talking about making the conscious decision to smoke, or do drugs, or be an alcoholic, or eat McDonald’s everyday with a large soda and never exercise. Those are things in your control and they hurt your body.You can’t hide the damage you are doing to your body for long and people who don’t take care of themselves should have to contribute more to the health care system than people who do. On the other hand, if someone with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes decides to change his or her life style and eat better and exercise, they should be rewarded for that. If people don’t have to take individual responsibility for their own actions, they tend not to care, even if it’s about their own health.

We spend BILLIONS of dollars each year treating people from smoking related illnesses, heart disease, and complications from diabetes type II. Smoking is the number one cause of death from a preventable disease in the United States and yet no one has suggested to tax smokers more. Yes, cigarettes cost almost $10 in NY, but they cost about $3 everywhere else.  Why? Because our government doesn’t really care. They rather appease tobacco lobbyists than do what is best for their citizens AND for their health care system. And if our government doesn’t really care about the health of it’s citizens, it will continue to avoid training more doctors and providing people of lower economic status with inferior care.

Taxing people who receive health benefits from their jobs doesn’t really make anything better either. I receive almost $10,000 in health benefits from my job, but if I had to pay taxes on that money, I would just take it as income instead of health benefits. A lot of healthy people in their 20’s and 30’s would do the same. So then you would have even more people who are uninsured, and those are the people you want to be insured since young people don’t go to the doctor often and they balance out the illnesses of the elderly. In order for everyone to have health insurance, everyone needs to be involved- the young, the old, the sick, the healthy. The young will pay for the elderly and the extremely sick now, but one day, when they have children, or later one when they are old, they will receive the care they deserve. And for those republicans who think that government should just stay out of it- I urge you to go to the doctor or pick up a prescription and not use your insurance card, just to get a glimpse of how much things actually cost.

I work with a guy who I really like. He is a kind hearted, funny and decently smart guy who I have known for almost two years. Aside from his relative immaturity, since he is 30 years old and only talks about how wasted he got in college and never mentions what he will do with his life, I truly find to be a good guy. But we had a conversation last week that completely changed my view on him. We basically argued about what it meant to live in a free country. His version of free country entailed fat people continuing to eat whatever and however much they want, crack being legal for all crackheads to enjoy, few laws of any kind including basic safety laws like wearing a seat belt and more that I don’t want to even get into. His basic  idea was that if he wants to eat unhealthily, and not where a seat belt when he drives then that is his problem, and hurts him and no one else. I tried to explain to him the concept that we live in a society and humans can actually not function alone without the help of others, but the idea of social responsibility went right over his head.

But what really changed the way I look at him are his opinions on guns. I have always known that he is a hunter and owns shooting rifles. He lives in upstate New York and his family owns a hunting camp, and for that I do not, nor have I ever judged him. But I recently found out that he also owns a pistol and carries it almost everywhere, aside from when he is coming to work. I asked him if he felt threatened and why he felt the need to carry a pistol everywhere? He said the same thing everyone else says- for protection. Yet he doesn’t want laws that would make it harder for mentally unstable people ot get guns. If you had to go through an extensive series of background checks and mental status history, maybe fewer crazy people would have guns and we wouldn’t need a gun for protection. The fact is, you have to be mentally unstable to shoot another human who is not harming you. No one normal can do that.  However, my co-worker just seemed to say that bad people were going to get guns no matter what so there was no point in not being prepared. People completely misinterpret the meaning of the second ammendment and what it means to be a free country. If we were free in the sense that most people think, then crack would be legal, and crazy people could have guns and I could kill whoever I wanted during my road rage episodes and I would not go to jail. But there are laws, and most of the time there is a good reason.

In the last month alone, I can think of three major serial killings that have killed more than twenty people. There was Michael McLendon in Alabama who killed his mom, aunt and uncle, neighbors and then random strangers in Alabama. There was Robert Stewart who decided to take out his anger on people 78 to 98 years old in a nursing home in North Carolina. And then most recently there was Jiverly Wong, who fired at least 98 shots and killed 13 people in Binghamton last week. Now maybe you could say that if you were in one of these situations and you had a gun then you could protect yourself better. Expect, I am pretty sure that if you whipped out a gun in front of one of these three men, you would have been the first to die. Wouldn’t it just be easier if these killers didn’t have guns in the first place? Or if someone had done a background check on any of them? Hunters don’t understand that gun control laws are not meant to prevent them from hunting. Sarah Palin, eat your heart out. But guns are not meant for anything less than a dense forest. They are not meant for big cities and they are not meant for small cities like Wilmington, NC or Coffee County Alabama (I am not making that name up). We do live in a free country but that doesn’t mean we are free to do whatever we want, and it is really time for people to start understanding that. It is almost the 10th anniversary of Columbine and the second anniversary of Virginia Tech. No one should have to fear going to school and no one should feel the need to carry a gun to the supermarket to protect themselves.  But until people understand that the second amendment does not give everyone the right to  walk around with a pistol in their pocket, we will not be free- because we will always be worried that the next psycho is just around the corner.

I have to hand it to the MTA, I didn’t think they could get any worse but somehow their new proposal to close their $1.2 billion budget proves to outshine all of their other brilliant ideas. The MTA used to threaten that they were going to add tolls to the East Side Bridges and add a payroll tax to avoid having to raise fares by 23%. The new revised plan, adds tolls to the East Side Bridges, raises the tolls on the bridges and tunnels that already exist, raises the fare by 23%, cuts service and 1,100 jobs.  That’s a raw deal if I have ever seen one. It’s almost worse than investment bankers taking home million dollar bonuses after tanking the economy.  The MTA claims that all of these measures together will help close their budget gap within the year but what I want to know is if that happens(which we all know that it won’t), is the MTA going to lower the fares back down and take away the tolls on the bridges? Are they going to rehire all of the people they are about to fire? They may never get the same kind of revenue from taxes that they used to, and even if they do, it’s going to be a while.  So I ask you MTA, what is  your long term plan for funding- just keep sticking tolls everywhere? Maybe you should charge a toll to walk across avenues, or different neighborhoods. That seems about as fair as anything else.

So I received a pretty generic email last night from Senator Liz Krueger in response to my complaint about the MTA proposals. What strikes me, is that this situation appears to have only one of two choices to MS. Liz. Either we increase the fare by 23% and cut service, or we implement a payroll tax and charge people to cross the East River. Well I don’t like either of those solutions Liz. We all know that if you start charging people $2 on bridges this year, by next year it will be $3, and by 2011 it will be $5 like all of the other bridges. It wasn’t that long ago that the toll on other NYC bridges were $3(I am not that old and my long term memory is not that good to remember something far away). If you don’t increase the subway fare now, you’ll do it next year. Face it, the MTA is the worst run institution in America. It is the 6th largest debtor in the US and all of the other debtors are entire states or cities.  We need to use our head Liz and brainstorm some new ideas.Isn’t the Fed releasing like a trillion more dollars in economic stimulus money? Why don’t we get our hands on some of that.  I agree that we need to rebuild our crumbling transit system and prevent service cuts, but if you are looking for a long term fix, which you claim you are, charging people $2 to cross a river is not your answer. And I can’t believe I am goign to defend big businesses, but I don’t see why it is there job either to pay taxes for this.

Maybe it is because I missed my  yoga class this week, which typically restores my faith in other people and gives me a more “enlightened” and positive view on the world. Or maybe this week has just been disappointing. Governor Patterson continues to disappoint me  with his ideas for the MTA overhaul and all I can think about is where is Mayor Bloomberg in all of this? He knows way more about the MTA than Patterson does and I don’t hear him say much about it.

Then there is Pope Benedict, who makes a trip to Africa to tell people that condoms are not the answer to AIDS. Is he serious? More than 22 million people in Sub Saharan Africa have HIV, and a major leader in the world is trying to convince them that abstinence, not condoms, is the answer. Well unfortunately, Pope Benedict, AIDS or no AIDS, people are going to have sex. Even if people wait until they are married to have sex, they will still pass along the HIV virus if they have it. Millions of children are orphans at young ages because both of their parents die. If your whole family  is dead wouldn’t you want to reproduce and have a family again?  Should we tattoo HIV + on people with the disease so people know who they can and can’t marry? Instead of teaching people safe ways to have sex and protect themselves from HIV transmission, you are basically undoing all of the progress that other people have made in teaching Africans how to protect themselves.  If you want to help the people of Africa, you should find money to provide them with the HIV drugs they need in order to survive or help promote sexual education.

And my biggest qualm this week- AIG. I’m too disgusted to really say much. But I am close to quitting my job so that I don’t have to pay taxes anymore and I can just collect money from the government. They should probably pay me a retention bonus just so that I keep working. Because, you know no one out there is as qualified as me to do my job. I will end with a quote from Jackie Calmes and Louise Story from the NYTimes:

The company paid the bonuses, including more than $1 each to 73 people, to almost all of the employees in the financial products unit responsible for creating the exotic derivatives that caused AIG’s near collapse and started the government rescue to avoid a global financial crisis.

No one could have explained it better than these two.

This is fabulous.

http://gothamist.com/2009/03/10/keep_it_going.php