The Opposite of True

Some ideas are repeated so often that large numbers of Americans believe them without question. This makes a handy tool for politicians, advertisers and fundraisers. They get our support to fix problems that either don’t exist or have been exaggerated out of proportion. I covered some of these, stories about child abductions and clean air problems, about two years ago. Here are a few more examples.

Police killed in the line of duty:

Watch the news and you would believe that this issue is at an all-time high. There is a war on; blue lives matter! But the data tell a different story.

This website lists all deaths in the line of duty by cause and by year. The overall figures match fairly well with this other site, so I believe the information is accurate. 

Ignoring causes like accidents, heart attacks, etc., I looked only at gunfire, assault and vehicular assault, that is, purposeful acts. The total for 2019 was 58, somewhat below average. Of the last ten years, the highest were 2010, 2011 and 2016. The lowest were 2013, 2015 and 2017. There seems to be no pattern or trend.

Naturally, no one should feel good about any number above zero. Every case is a tragedy. The problem is a lack of progress, not an escalation.

Vietnam Veterans:

After so many years the stereotype of the mentally scarred Vietnam veteran still rings true in the public imagination. Reality is surprisingly different.

Research done early this century and summarized by Peter Rowe in the San Diego Union-Tribune found that those who served in Vietnam were “more likely to be married, college educated and gainfully employed than other members of their generation.”

Furthermore, a Harris poll of returned veterans “revealed that 90 percent said that, ‘looking back,’ they were either ‘very glad’ or ‘somewhat glad’ to have ‘served their country.’ Eighty percent said that returning home was ‘about the same or better’ than they had ‘anticipated.’” A large majority rejected the popular notion of the former soldier struggling to readjust, haunted by flashbacks and nightmares. 

Scam Victims:

We hear it over and over on the news and public service announcements: Make sure grandma and grandpa don’t become victims of scams. As a senior citizen who doesn’t answer the phone unless I recognize the number and who dumps in the spam bucket those weekly messages that my email is about to expire unless I follow the link, I resent the implication! The truth is that younger people are more susceptible to scams. 

This is true in the US, but I have seen similar reports from the UK and Australia. Here is an Experian article about a Better Business Bureau report. “Americans ages 18 to 34 were more susceptible to scams (43.7% were victims) than Americans 55 and older (27.6% were victims). However, while occurrences are less for older Americans, seniors still lose more money in scams than younger victims.” (They probably lose more only because they have more.) 

The Inc. website reports the same tendencies.

Going back to the Experian numbers, there is something fishy about their numbers. In the article they show a graph of those scammed by age group, which they took from the original report.

To get 43.7% they merely added 25 + 18.7. That’s like saying if 10% of first graders have red hair and 10% of second graders have red hair, then 20% of the whole group have red hair. WRONG! The right answer is 10% provided the classes are of equal size.

So their report of 43.7% for the younger people is really closer to 22%, and their number 27.6% for the seniors is less than 14%. The conclusion is still the same but the math is pathetic! (Remember, Experian is one of the three companies that calculate your credit score and they have trouble with this simple calculation!)

The overall point here is that we are often fed stories that are no more than stories that someone wants us to believe to raise donations, increase their ratings or get support for passing a new (unnecessary) law. 

Thoughts On Tipping

Interesting legal maneuvering has been going on in Michigan over something called the tip credit. It began with a ballot initiative that was challenged but upheld in court, but later was taken off the ballot after it was passed by the legislature instead.

Formerly, restaurants that employ servers, bartenders or delivery drivers were “obliged to pay those staff members only $3.52 an hour if the employees take in the rest of the minimum wage they’re due in tips.” Since the minimum wage was $9.25 per hour, if they received at least $5.73 an hour in tips, the restaurants did not owe them any further pay.

Under the new law, minimum wage would increase in annual increments to $12 an hour over the next three years, and the tip credit would be phased out. This is a big victory for labor advocacy groups, but the Michigan Restaurant Association (MRA) fears that it will drive up a full-service restaurant’s labor costs by 241% for their tipped employees. A survey of members by the MRA found that many restaurant owners plan to deal with this with a combination of cutting jobs and raising menu prices.

Despite the 30% increase from $9.25 to $12.00 per hour, it seems that the restaurant association could cope by adopting the European model where tipping is less common. Rick Steves, the travel guy, points out that “tipping in Europe isn't as automatic nor as generous as it is in the United States, and in many countries, they're not expected at all.” Often service is included in the bill, as it is in the US when serving large groups. According to this website, the default tip in the US should be 20%. Following this service-included philosophy, the restaurants could remain whole by gradually raising menu prices by only 10% and eliminating tips.

Note: A no-tipping policy would also eliminate a lot of intricate paperwork for the owners as the tip credit is phased out. It would also move the responsibility of training, rewarding and disciplining wait-staff from the customers to management where it belongs.

Surprisingly, the fear of this very thing, undermining the “existing tipping culture,” motivated many tipped workers in Michigan to organize a protest at the state capital earlier this year. They were very concerned that proposed changes would actually decrease their income. So those well meaning (out-or-state) labor advocates should have consulted with the Michigan restaurant workers that they were trying to protect before pressing for the changes.

One thing is for sure, when outside forces, either lawmakers or advocates or as in this case both, feel the need to tinker with an economic system; there will be unintended consequences. Enforced wage increases, unrelated to normal supply and demand, pushes up prices and may cost jobs. That’s economic understanding.

Side comment: For similar well meaning reasons, some people on social media have been speaking out against self-service checkouts at grocery stores, saying that they are taking away jobs. Last week my grocery store had signs posted at the self-service stations encouraging customers to apply for cashier jobs. Apparently with the current labor shortage, they can’t find enough cashiers and figure that people who have already been checking themselves out have acquired some of the skills needed!

Understanding and Using Perspective

Some people may find it confusing distinguishing between critical thinking and perspective.  Both employ a rational thinking process, but one has to do with accuracy and the other with the appropriate reaction.

For example, when we see a cartoon roadrunner hand an anvil to a cartoon coyote hesitating in midair after stepping off a cliff, we know it’s inaccurate.  Galileo showed that objects of different weights fall at the same speed.  The anvil makes no difference.  That’s critical thinking.  Knowing this we don’t immediately sit down to write an irate protest letter to the company demanding an apology for exposing our children to anti-science material and threaten to boycott their sponsors.  Perspective helps separate the trivial from the important.

But we get caught in slightly less silly perspective traps every day.

As another example, suppose people could wear a pair of lenses that allowed them to see normally, but also to see every germ crawling around them.  It would be a challenge for many people to walk by the kitchen counter or bathroom without stopping to mop something up or dab in a corner.  Such an invention would be a curse.  Those who today overuse hand sanitizers would be found dead in their houses, not from germs but from the inability to do anything else but clean!

But today we have the equivalent of those germ-glasses and don’t even realize it.  They come in the form of the news media and some environmental movements.  We think the condition of the country and the world are much worse than they really are because we see every day, sometimes far more often than that, stories about crises, epidemics and disasters.

Does anyone think that as long as there is a single shooting in the United States, only one natural disaster anywhere in the world, one person starving or one brutal conflict; that the news media won’t have reporters on the scene to tell us about the horrible tragedy? Of course not, their livelihood depends on stirring us up. Moreover they will draw it out for all it’s worth if it reinforces their political beliefs. 

Does anyone think that as long as there is a single speck of dust in the air that some organization would not tell us that we face a serious pollution problem, that we are exposing our children to a potentially toxic environment and that something must be done about it immediately?  Of course not, their livelihood depends on stirring us up.  Moreover they will show us pictures of the direst situations with the saddest looking children to elicit our moral and financial support. 

That feeling of being stirred up is the reaction that perspective should help us deal with. It causes us to stop to see what the situation really is. How widespread is the problem? How dangerous is the situation to us personally? Are those sharks really poised off our favorite beach waiting for a snack? Is that virus that affected 18 (or 318 or even 3018) people out of 330 million really an epidemic? Are the air and water not clean enough?  Is the chance of an accident or occurrence that is less likely than being struck by lightning worth protesting or demanding a new government program?

These are questions that are often never answered, but are important to our personal physical, mental and financial wellbeing, and also to the progress of America.  We need critical thinking to research the facts and perspective not to overreact.

Cats Are Cuter Than People

Here is a story from the PBS News Hour about a group of people trying to help with the problem of stray cats.  They endorse neutering the cats instead of euthanizing them as being more humane, a better solution.  The program is called “trap, neuter and return” (TNR).  They are backed by animal rights activists and are working to spread the practice nationwide.  On the surface it seems like a nice cause to be involved with, however, as the story progresses, several flaws become apparent.

It starts with the story of Antioch, California where there are an estimated 17,000 strays, one cat for every 6 citizens.  This is a microcosm of the 80-million feral-cat problem across the US.  Most are wild animals, not appropriate for adoption, leaving euthanasia as the traditional solution.

Cat lovers rally to the rescue organizing “a network of a quarter million advocates who fight for feral cats.”  They boast of changing cat care forever.  The objective of TNR is to stop the breeding of wild cats so there are no more litters of kittens.  They trap the cats in bated cages, neuter them, mark them and return them to the wild (streets, alleys and woods in neighborhoods).  More than 400 cities and counties have adopted this practice raising “tens of millions of dollars” in donations.

But there are problems.  Wild cats are considered invasive predators by the American bird conservancy and others.  “[A] study from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute...estimates cats kill around 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals every year – not only rats and mice, but frogs, reptiles, amphibians and other small mammals.  Studies show that even well fed cats in TNR programs continue to hunt, from instinct rather than hunger.  The food used to attract the cats to traps also draws in raccoons, skunks, and possums, all of which may carry disease. 

To address this, Antioch tried to ban the feeding of cats in public, but had to back down due to the public outcry in favor of the cats.

Yet another problem is that experts don’t believe it will work.  “Dr. Patrick Foley teaches at California State University in Sacramento. He says there’s no proof TNR reduces large populations of cats. They just reproduce too quickly.”  He estimates they must neuter 10 times more cats than they do today to be effective.  The advocates’ solution is to pour more money and resources into the program, which “continues to gain political clout.”  By disregarding the evidence, the conclusion is clear.  “When it comes to controlling cats, it’s not only about science. It’s about our emotions.”

Finally, what struck me as the scariest part, but was not emphasized at all, was the mention of groups "wanting to end homelessness – cat homelessness."  Cat homelessness?  Have we run out of homeless people?  I don’t think so.  Yet we have hundreds of thousands of people and tens of thousands of donated dollars dedicated to the problem of cat homelessness. 

These cat advocates are hard working and dedicated.  They have such devotion to the cause that they use their energy and precious spare time to raise money, to feed the cats, to trap them for neutering so as to avoid euthanasia, and to build a nationwide network with similar goals and growing political clout, all the while ignoring expert opinion about the inadequacy of their solution and the damage and potential disease caused by the feral cat population and the program itself.

At the same time, statistics remind us that on any given night we have “643,067 people experiencing homelessness in America” with about 17% of those (just over 100,000) considered as chronically homeless.  Maybe what we need are a few more people lovers instead of cat lovers.  Maybe what we need is a little more perspective in America.

Putting the Minimum Wage Cart Before the Horse

As I read this article on yahoo news, I was appalled.  It reports on a fast food workers’ rebellion in NYC inspired by the Wal-Mart protests over Thanksgiving.  The workers, paid little more than minimum wage, now feel empowered to push for higher pay plus benefits.

On a side note, I thought the Wal-Mart protest was a study in irony.  Here we had people arguing that their employer was heartless for forcing them to work on Thanksgiving Day when they should have been allowed spend the time with their families.  They protested by refusing to go to work, but instead of staying home with their families, a number of them spent the day demonstrating against Wal-Mart.  That was a real head-scratcher.  It’s really all about expectations.  

Coming from a military background followed by a career in transportation, I understand that many people have to work on holidays and birthdays and miss family events.  Whenever possible, those celebrations are moved to a more convenient time not dictated by the calendar.  My local newspaper interviewed some workers at a regional big box store who were working on Thanksgiving.  The store is open 24 hours every day except Christmas.  The workers there had no complaints; they knew the schedule.  It’s all about expectations.

The reason I was shocked by the article was a sentence in the sixth paragraph defending the fast-food protest by saying that these workers “don't make enough money to support their families.”  As a result, the taxpayers absorb costs (that the big corporations refuse to pay) as the workers must “rely on public assistance.”

Wait a minute!  Where do they get the idea that they should start a family without having the means to provide for that family?  Isn’t that a little backward?  With only a fast food job, someone decides it’s OK to get married and/or have some kids and then to assume that the government, that is, we taxpayers must ensure they can afford to raise their children properly.  This behavior is the opposite of responsibility.  It may be different if it’s a temporary situation between better paying jobs, but to start a family without the means to care for a family should not be defended or seen as justification to shift the costs of a poor decision onto the employer or the customers.  If you want to start a family, first do your best in school and get a good job.  Leave the minimum wage jobs to those just starting out.

This is not presented as one or two isolated instances, but a pattern of expectations.  As a nation, do we now set such low standards for our citizens that we are not troubled by this behavior?  Have we been conditioned to accept this reverse thinking as acceptable?  We call ourselves caring, but is it really caring to set up a system that condones, even encourages, people to makes such ill-advised life decisions? 

We are back to expectations. Such problems cannot be solved unless they are recognized and acknowledged.  It’s time for America to raise expectations – put responsibility where it belongs.  We can’t continue to allow others to shift the blame for the consequences of their own behavior, expecting the costs to be covered by us taxpayers.  Nor should we continue to tolerate those advocates who support them.