My column in the paper today is about a Lenten money fast, as promoted by Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary (read her columns here).

The idea is to make yourself free of payday lending places by taking control of your home finances. Cut your spending down to the most basic of basics, you can save enough to put aside an emergency fund so, the next time you need a couple of hundred dollars for an emergency, you have it.

This ought to be a simple concept, but in America in 2010 it is anything but. Americans are addicted to credit, consider debt normal, and don’t seem to mind living on the edge.

Banks depend on us going over the edge. They need us to, and even want us to.

For example, today’s New York Times has a good article here (click) about how, with the new debit card and credit card rules, banks are going nuts trying to figure out how to keep people paying overdraft fees. Those fees, something like $20 billion a year, are now a huge part of banks’ profit, figured into future growth, necessary for their stockholders survival.

In short, banks NEED people to be foolish.

The new law requires you to specifically opt-in to the overdraft “protection” program. What this means is, if you swipe your debit card, and you don’t have enough money in your account, instead of being denied, the payment is approved and you pay a $35 overdraft fee to the bank, even if the overdraft was just a dollar or two.

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Hey, loyal readers, I offered a free lunch at St. Anne’s to anyone who could come up with a way to balance the federal budget. So far, no winner.

Come on, people, I hear they got a new shipment of government canned salmon — good stuff!

The problem is getting critical. As Paul Krugman argues in today’s NYTimes, the guys who want to “starve the beast,”  of government by reducing federal revenues so much that government will be forced to cut services have pretty much achieved their goal. Federal revenues are down, spending is up, the budget is so far out of whack it just boggles the mind.

His column asks for the same thing mine did: OK, you got what  you wanted, now what do we cut? Absent cuts now, he warns, we will have a true crisis, a true meltdown, and then we’ll all be in deep do-do and have to face the mess. Ideally we wouldn’t wait for that to happen, but we seem to lack the sort of leaders it would take to take intelligent, proactive measures.

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The story in today’s paper about a guy driving a truck who got into some sort of road rage deal — or so the police say — makes one wonder what sort of conversation the guy had with his wife.

Now, I must stress, the road rage part is only alleged by the police. We do not know. If that is what happened, however, it must be embarrassing to have to go home and tell the wife “Oh, by the way honey, I wrecked the truck and endangered our kids’ lives today, but I did show that other guy on the interstate who had the baddest attitude.”

And, we all know his wife will say “Oh, OK dear, as long as you showed him. We can always make new kids.”

Seriously, is this a good argument for insurance policies including a “testosterone-induced stupidity” clause or what? Why should the rest of us have to pay medical bills, and repair bills, for people who do this sort of thing?

I am guessing that everyone who believes in accountability will jump on this.

There’s a huge article about the Tea Party movement in today’s NYTimes that’s gathering a lot of comment — more than 1,300 and counting as I write this. It’s a good read, and you can do so here (click!)

I have a two-fold reaction, one snarky, one serious.

Snarky: Why the heck are all these people violating the US Flag Code? An early picture with the story showed a guy wearing a shirt that was one giant American flag. Does he not love America?

OK Serious: What do these people want? Specifically? Very specifically?

No, seriously, I’ve asked this before regarding Sarah Palin, and I’m asking it again because I never get an answer.  We know what they don’t like — pretty much everything related to national government, for starters  – but what do they want to do  about that?

What actions on the ground, today, do they want to see? You’re dictator for a day — what do you do to restore America?

I actually went to Sarah Palin’s web site looking for answers but all I could find in an admittedly not massively rigorous search (I DO have a life) was links to more web sites with more links, usually ending up in some opinion piece that repeated what Ms. Palin said, which was nothing specific.

Anyone can talk circles. Action means actually doing something. So far, nobody is saying what they will do beyond some amorphous “We’ll stick it to those so-and-sos!” sort of sentiment, not that far removed from the ”Up against the wall, M-F’kr!” of my own generation.

OK, how?

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I was trying to be calm, to be at peace, but then found myself pondering the truely inane statements by Dorsie Van Orton, of the Utah Grassroots Alliance, after passage Thursday of a bill in the Utah House to reject all federal health reform measures.

It’s an obscene idea, mostly because it is based on the idea that Utah can get along just fine, thank you, without the federal government.

As I pointed out in my column last Sunday, taking the feds out of Utah would be like setting off a nuclear bomb — 37,000 jobs, multiple billions of dollars of economic impact, not to mention Hill Air Force Base and ATK and the IRS, but these whackos think we’ll be just fine going back to pioneer days when we sure as heck told Johnston’s Army where it could go, yessir.

This idiocy is infuriating enough, and one hopes it won’t be passed by the Senate as well. Even so, I’m trying real hard here not to make my column in the paper one angry rant after another. I get the feeling it bores the readers and is bad for my blood pressure anyway.

But then I listen to Dorsie, who not only said that Utah can take care of its own, but said Utah doesn’t need any health care reform of its own either. One gets the feeling she’s not even real sure about this whole medical insurance thing, except for her and her own kids, of course.

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Interesting story on NPR today about how California’s insurance companies are raising rates for people who are not in jobs that provide insurance for them, although I’m sure those will be next.

The story may be viewed here (click). The key paragraph is this one:

So what does WellPoint have to say?  The company got the letter and is working on a formal response. In the meantime, the insurer issued a statement saying rates reflect rising costs of health care. “Unfortunately, in the weak economy many people who do not have health conditions are foregoing buying insurance,” the statement says. “This leaves fewer people, often with significantly greater medical needs, in the insured pool.”

In other words — the insurance plan depends on healthy people to pay the bills for unhealthy ones. Farther down in the story the spokesperson for the insurance say, in so many words, that people need to be required to join policy groups to spread the costs around.

That, my friends is socialized medicine. It’s nothing new, it is how insurance works.

With medical insurance costs rising as the cost of medical care rises, the people who feel healthy enough to gamble are dropping out, leaving the sick and the non-gamblers to pay their own bills.

What I find interesting is the lack of cheering from the anti-socialized medicine crowd over California’s situation. Market forces are coming to bear, people are declaring their freedom from socializing medical care, and those who actually get sick are having to face their responsibilities, not shift them off on the rest of us. All we need to do now is get rid of Medicare, make those slacker old people pay their own bills (or their equally slacker children, which is more likely) and life in America will be free and perfect once more!

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Since the Utah Legislature is now passing bills based on world conspiracies (see my blog friday) I thought it would be fun to ponder what other directions our Legislature could take in its musings as it seeks to protect us all from “THEM!”

Which were, as it turned out, giant ants.

THEM! is a great movie that allegedly starts out in New Mexico, although I like to think it really starts out in Utah, since we have a long history of radioactive animal disaster movies being filmed here. There’s “The Conqueror,” which has the double attraction of staring John Wayne as Ginghas Kahn (huh?) but also was filmed downwind from some of that harmless radiation southern Utah is so famous for. Radiation also plays a role in “Them!” making the ants big, so I think the movie producers saying the movie takes place in New Mexico is a fine piece of disinformation, the very key to a good conspiracy.

To begin with, the Legislature could take on space travel, which we all now know is faked. This could have unfortunate effects on one or two Utah firms, but what the heck, we’re talking fighting international conspiracies here, not protecting jobs. I’m thinking a law protecting all Utah-made and launched rockets from all federal oversight because, heck, they’re good enough for Utahns.

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Someone needs to tell The Legislature that The Onion is not for real.

But no, they gotta take it as fact, a model to be followed.

A little bit ago The Onion, nominally a satire newspaper, ran an article saying that abortion foes wanted a new law that required a mother seeking an abortion to first paint the baby’s room and name the kid. Ha ha.

The Utah House, Friday, approved a bill to allow women seeking abortions to first see an ultrasound as soon as 3 weeks into the pregnancy and, even though doctors said its medically impossible, look at the fetus heartbeat. Told that three weeks is too soon to see a heartbeat, Rep. Carl Wimmer said “there are arguements on both sides of the issue.”

Huh? Oh, right, this is the Legislature that regularly tells climate scientists that they’re wrong based on belief. Now gestational development is a matter of faith?

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