The November 4, 2025 National/State/Local Election Thread

[Its On A Slab]

Kudos to you on your discipline. I can't stand to have debt. The only debt my wife and I carry are mortgages on our house and some of the investment properties. The interest on them is so low (e.g. 3% on our home) that it doesn't make sense to pay them off early. We compromise a bit by paying an extra $1000 a month on our house. because having debt irritates us. LOL!

I should make clear that people should have whatever interests/hobbies they want - like being a "car guy" - as long as they can afford to do so. Makes no difference to me what someone does as long as they aren't a drain on society. I'm just not a car guy. That is one purchase that can get very expensive - initially and downstream - and put a lot of people in a financial hole. It becomes a habit.

Way back in the day, in my lawyer years, I worked with this guy who loved BMWs so much that he didn't go more than two years without a new one. And this guy's earning potential seemed to peak around age 30 for some reason. He was always changing jobs and working for less and less prestigious firms. His job losses were always for political reasons, or someone had it out for him. It was never his lack of professionalism or mediocre acumen as a lawyer. Anyway, his appetitive for new BMWs never changed. That's a lot of revolving high/bad debt. (I have no doubt his credit score sucked and so did the corresponding interest rates on his car note.) That's some expensive overcompensation!

We have one of those ridiculously low mortgages. About a year ago, we decided, "Hey, let's downsize and save money." Started looking at townhomes,only to realize that, with the higher interest rates, we wouldn't be saving any money. Well, maybe utilities. And short-term maintenance since we were looking at brand new townhomes.

Still wasn't worth it.....given we don't plan to stay in these parts past 3 years. 10th grade kid refuses to graduate early. Gonna move to either Madison, WI or The Twin Cities, closer to friends in those cities.

 

[Bamabuzzard]

We as a society need to quit rewarding bad behavior. I don't have a problem with welfare if it is a brief experience for a young adult just trying to get started. Say their first job terminates due to forces outside of their control, and they need help until they can be gainfully employed again. I have no problem with that. Yet, our system encourages people not to work. Far too many people are comfortable just getting by on the dole. And they are encouraged to keep having more and more children. Generation after generation. The incentive structure is ass-backwards.

I've been briefly homeless a couple of times in my life.* Both times I was left scrambling to find a place to live and slept in my car for a bit until I could get a new place. I learned to go without. It is a great motivator to achieve.

So is hunger. My wife can tell you about growing up always hungry. I've seen pictures of her and her siblings as children. Skin and bones. Talk about channeling that into motivation and achievement. She never felt sorry for herself or felt like someone else owed her anything. She just wanted the chance to control her own future. Once she got here, she took full advantage of it. When we visited Binghamton, NY a couple of weeks ago, a couple of Lan's former classmates told me a story I had not heard before. They marveled at Lan as a student. She spoke very little English, but she was in nursing school. Lan was always studying with two dictionaries. One was a dictionary of medical terms. The other was an English-to-Vietnamese dictionary. She had to do the three-way translation forwards and backward to be able to understand the material and then write about it. Hunger (both for food and a better life) is a great motivator.


*ETA: One time in particular is perversely amusing with time. I rented a room in a house from this guy in DC. I just started a job after business school and wanted to cut costs as much as possible to build up my bank account. The plan was to live like a hermit for year before going to rent a nice apartment. After several months, I come home to find all my possessions on the curb. It turns out Joe never owned the house. He was a squatter and made extra money be renting out a couple of the bedrooms. The eviction finally came through, and he fled, leaving his tenants to find out the hard way what was going on. And it was raining. So, most of my possessions (like my bed) were destroyed or stolen (my computer) by the wonderful neighbors. And I never saw Joe again. So, I had to stuff what remaining possessions I had into my car and sleep in it for a few days until I could secure a new place.

I fully agree the system gives too much incentive not to work and have children while not being able to take care of them. It also doesn't help that technology and machinery have taken away jobs that used to be done by humans. AI is just another level of it that will remove jobs from the job market that humans used to do. UPS just terminated 48,000 jobs that are now done by AI. There will be more of this taking place in the near future.

Criteria for being on and staying on the dole need to be revamped to not incentivize people to not look for work and to continue having kids just to get more money. The original thought makes sense, but it has been manipulated and taken advantage of by hundreds of millions of people over the years to do nothing more than completely live off the dole their entire existence. It has also brought innocent children into the world who end up suffering because of it.

I'm not a fan of mandated mininum wage, but I'm also not naive enough to think that employers like Wal Mart and other big companies use the minimum wage along with SNAP to pay employees crap wages. Again, I use my daughter as an example, she works in an outpatient PT clinic, is on her feet twelve hours a day (while going to college as well) working her butt off, yet doesn't even gross $100 in one workday. However, the owner's profit margin per patient is unreal. She also helps out with billing and gets to see the financial side of the work she does. She figured it out once she saw how much per patient the owner was receiving for services and how little the employees were making per hour. He's literally keeping the lion's share of the money, which is his right, while paying his workers just above minimum wage.

She always thought how nice it was for the owner to buy lunch for the office on a lot of days, until she realized how much cheaper it is for him to do that, rather than just pay them a better wage. She said "I can bring my own lunch". LOL! It was a blessing and a curse for them to teach her the financial side of the business, because it opened her eyes to how much the workers were getting paid compared to the amount of money the clinic was bringing in. I told her this should incentivize her to stay in school, get your degree and certifications, and not have to be subject to that type of career. But, given the opportunity, most employers aren't in a hurry to truly "take care of" their employees. They are more inclined to take care of themselves and not really worry about their employees. They'll just hire someone else.

 

[selmaborntidefan]

I fully agree the system gives too much incentive not to work and have children while not being able to take care of them. It also doesn't help that technology and machinery have taken away jobs that used to be done by humans. AI is just another level of it that will remove jobs from the job market that humans used to do. UPS just terminated 48,000 jobs that are now done by AI. There will be more of this taking place in the near future.

Criteria for being on and staying on the dole need to be revamped to not incentivize people to not look for work and to continue having kids just to get more money. The original thought makes sense, but it has been manipulated and taken advantage of by hundreds of millions of people over the years to do nothing more than completely live off the dole their entire existence. It has also brought innocent children into the world who end up suffering because of it.

I'm not a fan of mandated mininum wage, but I'm also not naive enough to think that employers like Wal Mart and other big companies use the minimum wage along with SNAP to pay employees crap wages. Again, I use my daughter as an example, she works in an outpatient PT clinic, is on her feet twelve hours a day (while going to college as well) working her butt off, yet doesn't even gross $100 in one workday. However, the owner's profit margin per patient is unreal. She also helps out with billing and gets to see the financial side of the work she does. She figured it out once she saw how much per patient the owner was receiving for services and how little the employees were making per hour. He's literally keeping the lion's share of the money, which is his right, while paying his workers just above minimum wage.

She always thought how nice it was for the owner to buy lunch for the office on a lot of days, until she realized how much cheaper it is for him to do that, rather than just pay them a better wage. She said "I can bring my own lunch". LOL! It was a blessing and a curse for them to teach her the financial side of the business, because it opened her eyes to how much the workers were getting paid compared to the amount of money the clinic was bringing in. I told her this should incentivize her to stay in school, get your degree and certifications, and not have to be subject to that type of career. But, given the opportunity, most employers aren't in a hurry to truly "take care of" their employees. They are more inclined to take care of themselves and not really worry about their employees. They'll just hire someone else.

One of the tricks they like to use with us medical lab people is the "sign on bonus." I'm sure other jobs have this, but here's how it works:

They have a "sign-on bonus" of something like (to use round numbers) $10K for a lab job. Of course, there's a catch: they give you something like 1/3 of it in your first check and you have to stay at that job for two years, and you get the other 1/3 each at your one- and two-year marks.

But if you put pen to paper, you realize how stupid it is - because the ONLY places paying a sign-on bonus are places you are going to work your tail off because they're so short-staffed they're putting the big advertisement out there for everyone.

1) The bonus is taxed at 45%, so your "take home" from a $10K bonus is only $5500.
2) If you do the math of 10,000/4160 (the number of hours you work in a 40-hour wk over 2 years), it comes out to $2.40 but it's lower than that because you're not taxed 45% on normal wages.
3) figuring the actual take-home (5500/4160), you actually "get" $1.32/hour over two years.

Why not just hire me for $41.32 instead of $40/hour? Because, of course, it's about KNOWING THEY HAVE YOU for two years. And if they fire you for cause, you have to pay ALL OF IT back you've received, not just the net. Or if you decide, "This place is awful, I'm leaving."


I got smart to this after I got burned on my first contract with a $4K completion bonus. I figured the tax would be somewhat higher, but I figured probably the usual military 28% on a move. When I saw it was 45%, well, I wasn't so happy.

But I learned. When I switched agencies, my recruiter figured out quickly I knew the score and was as honest with me as an agent can possibly be.