Monday Mumblings

Just getting out some mumbles stuck in my head--kind of like Monday morning quarterback except mine are from reading the Sunday paper.

1. Did you see the story of Brittany Lockhart in the paper? She and her brother "graduated" for their mom a couple of weeks ago at the hospital where the mom died a week later. I've followed the story and my heart breaks for them because I've been where they are. My dad died 2 weeks before I graduated from high school and I was left to care for my younger siblings. On the night my dad died, I promised my sister and brother I would take care of them and I did the best I could with the limited resources we had. My head swirls with the desire to help this girl who now has to pay for her mother's funeral and figure out how to educate herself while taking care of her 3 brothers. It is not an easy road, but the life lessons I learned doing it myself are the essence of who I am today.

2. School lunch. I agree it is bad. I ate lunch with my kindergartner at the beginning of the school year. I pack her lunch every day, but on this day we were "lunch tray". The lunch was $6.50 for the 2 of us and it was yuck! I was so disappointed that I spent 6 1/2 % of our monthly dining budget for that awful stuff. School lunch was bad when I was in school. My best friend from childhood told me back then that the hierarchy of food from the government goes like this: military first, prisons second, and schools third. I haven't researched to see if she is right, but I know from when I worked at our county jail the food I served the inmates was definitely better than our school lunches. There is a law in NC that you can't bring in any outside restaurant food to the cafeteria. Of course not! If the cafeteria had to compete even with McDonald's, they would "go out of business". No restaurant could continually serve such horrible fare and stay in business. But as middle class Americans, I don't think the answer is to have the government spend millions of dollars figuring out the problem. I believe that we should just take control of lunch ourselves. Pack our kids' lunches. It's not like lunch is free at school for us and with a little effort, we can easily pack a nutritious lunch for our kids that costs less than the school cafeteria. I have packed Hannah's lunch every day except for the one mentioned above. We have to stop asking the government to do everything for us. There are many things we can do for ourselves. Because for everything they "do" for us, they also "take away" another right. We are slowly giving up all our rights for more "protection". For middle class Americans to take back our country, we have to start depending on ourselves more and on government less.

3. Being frugal. There was an article that said Americans are saving more of their income. During great economic times, the savings rate was negative meaning that as a nation, we were spending more than we made. The rate went up to about 6.5% and is now holding steady at about 3%. It is sad to think of a family only saving 3% of their earnings. To be able to retire and maintain your current lifestyle, you should save at least 10% or have 25 times your annual income saved by the time you retire. Sounds daunting, doesn't it? Worse would be eating canned cat-food! Most Americans are being more frugal, spending less and looking for ways to reduce their outgo. Even as their income is returning from a layoff or job change, most people won't go back to their old ways. I hope that is true. For the middle class, we have to change how we spend or we'll always be the "struggling middle class".