Ingrace

Here we are again at the time of year when we celebrate a government-sanctioned holiday to pressure me to be thankful even though I'm a whiny, crotchety, old man, with barely an ounce of thankfulness in him. Want me to be thankful? Get off my back about being thankful. ;)

That last bit in the last paragraph was a winking smiley face, for those of you that are 114 year-old hermits living ten miles from nowhere in a shack in the bayou, chain-smoking Pall Malls. It's what people have resorted to use on the Internet to signify "what you just read was an ironic attempt at humor." It's often necessary on the Internet because there are no other clues that the humor-lame need. No laugh tracks, for instance.

Having said all that I remember that many of you don't know what "ironic" means. Well, thanks for asking, it means a lot of things, but in this context it refers to the "winking".

Want me to be thankful this Thanksgiving? Don't make me ever have to use another winking smiley face. You don't need them. It's taken care of in the title: "Adventures in Irony." Don't make me call it "Adventures in Winking."

Here's a relevant news item. Until recently to qualify for Food Stamps your income needed to be under 130% of the poverty level. Now it just has to be below 200% of the poverty level. The theory behind this change is that with rising food prices and rising gas costs, it's getting harder for people to afford food. Hey, I have a crazy idea! Why don't we just raise the poverty level 54%?

Want me to be thankful this Thanksgiving? The Washington State Legislature could get off their collective butts and pass an inflationary increase in government assistance. There's been a 50% increase in the Consumer Price Index since 1993, the last time Washington State raised Government Assistance for the Unemployable (GAU). It's been $339 in all that time, notwithstanding inflation, notwithstanding that, as the state has just recognized in regard to Food Stamps, the CPI doesn't tell the whole story (e.g. rents have gone up way more than 50%), notwithstanding that we're only talking about two-tenths of one per cent of the population that needs it desperately, or they'll become homeless.

Ha, ha, that was a joke! Winking smileys galore! They're already homeless! $339 per month? With rents what they are today?

As a matter of fact, using my outstanding math skills and a cheap $2 calculator, I have been able to estimate with great confidence that if you just increased GAU to an amount sufficient to rent a room and buy clothes, up to 44% of King County's homeless people could get off the streets.

Raise GAU enough, and developers would go after that money. There's your Housing First program. Just like the Food Stamp program is really a benefit for food producers and grocery stores, likewise GAU can be a benefit for construction workers. We could think of it as a bailout, twice removed.

The money it would cost to raise GAU a reasonable amount would be more than offset by the savings in money spent on services.

Of course, that would put a lot of social-service workers out of work. Maybe that's why you don't hear a lot of social-service agencies talking about the ridiculous fact that GAU isn't pegged to inflation, and isn't adequate to prevent homelessness. Hell, I was even tempted not to mention it myself. If homelessness in King County were to end, Real Change wouldn't be needed anymore, and I wouldn't have these opportunities to complain every week.

Want me to be thankful this Thanksgiving? Take some of the energy you were going to apply to feeding the poor one day a year, and apply it to getting our legislature to do what it takes to make half the state's social service industry unemployed. Let them all get jobs in drywall.