Redistribution to whom? [Updated]

5/1/2018: I've appended some additional material at the bottom of the post.

As Katherine calls our attention to Trump Administration proposals to crank up the percentage of their paltry incomes that the rent-subsidized (or, as they are more commonly known, "poor people") will have to pay for their crummy government subsidized apartments, let's glance over to see how the quintile, or decile, or maybe it's .1% (millile?), at the other end of the hope-and-prospects spectrum lives.

Remaining

This is my homily for this weekend, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Cycle B.  The readings for the day are here.

The 50th Anniversary of Robert Kennedy's Whistle Stop Tour Across Nebraska

Friday was the 50th Anniversary of Robert Kennedy's seven-stop train tour across Nebraska on April 27, 1968. From the Omaha World Herald article today:

"LINCOLN — Fifty years ago in a Lincoln living room, Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency got on track.

It was late March 1968 and Kennedy, a U.S. senator from New York, had just entered the race for the Democratic nomination for president. The incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, and a staunch anti-Vietnam War candidate, Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, were already on the ballot in Nebraska and other early primary states....Kennedy’s Nebraska campaign organizers — including former Lt. Gov. Phil Sorensen, who returned to his home state from Indiana as a liaison between the national and state organizations — huddled at the Country Club neighborhood home of Edie Van Neste. They had little time to cobble together a statewide campaign. Nebraska’s mid-May primary loomed in about seven weeks."

How to Increase the Number of Homeless People

I was dismayed to read yesterday that HUD may push rent increases for millions of people who receive housing aid.  The Trump administration and the head of HUD, Ben Carson, have said for months that this is a step they are advocating because the present system is "unsustainable".  They have also proposed increasing already existing work requirements for those receiving housing subsidies.  Let's unpack that for a minute. They just passed a tax cut which benefits the top 2% disproportionately, and which grows an already ballooning deficit.  So I suppose in that sense helping keep a roof over poor peoples' heads is unsustainable.

Isn't this illegal? Even immoral!

According to the NYTimes: Mick Mulvaney, former Congressman (R.-SC), current head of the WH budget office, and interim head of the Consumer (unraveling) Financial Protection Bureau "... told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet with lobbyists only if they had contributed to his campaign.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Did that "I might talk to you," have a minimum price?

John Cassidy at The New Yorker: Among other favors Mulvaney is planning on doing for capitalism is:  "restricting public access the bureau’s database of consumer complaints."

Another baby car seat scandal on the horizon? Or maybe lead in toddlers' toys. What will it be, I wonder.

AND....Mulvaney's  "grandparents were originally from County Mayo, Ireland. He attended Charlotte Catholic High School and then Georgetown University, where he majored in international economics, commerce and finance. At Georgetown, he was an Honors Scholar."  Would love to see the class notes from "international economics, commerce, and finance."   How to squeeze the piggy banks? Lobbyists you can love?

 

Time to cut the cord?

While I don't wear a suit and tie every day, nor a men's hat, nor habitually carry a handkerchief with me, we do still possess one relic of a bygone era: we still have a landline telephone.  We've had the same phone number for decades.  My parents still call me on it, and it's listed as the primary number with all of our doctors and our children's schools.  Presumably, our friends have it stored somewhere, too, but I can't think offhand of the last time a friend called me on my landline phone.

RIP: Empty tables, great memories

 We celebrated our 65th April 24 together with lunch at a neighborhood Italian restaurant. We have had flashier anniversaries of the night we met, but flash fades over time. We were talking about great restaurants we will never visit again.
 Not because of us.
 Because of time.
 Deacon Jim misses department stores. I miss restaurants.