"Things are tough all over" department:
Beth Rogers is taking the family's finances into her own hands — literally.
The 35-year-old from Fayetteville, Ark., ditched her weekly housekeeping service and now mops her own floors. She and her husband, Stanley, work in the yard after canceling their lawn care contract. She cooks at home instead of the family eating out, and she told her husband to iron his own shirts rather than send them to the cleaners. Total savings? About $10,000 a year.
[. . .]
Across the country, people are taking on chores that only a year ago were hired out to someone else. They're dyeing their own hair, shoveling their own snow, washing their own cars and taking up paint brushes to brighten their living room walls.
I guess it's fine that some people are now taking on the kinds of chores most of us have always had to do, but stop and think about the ripple effect. What about all those service providers who now make a living doing such menial chores for others? The last job my dad had was as a janitor for Parkview Hospital. Can you imagine if the doctors had decided to save a little money by mopping the floors themselves? My dad would have been out of a job!
Comments
Ja, and a lot more patients would have contracted staph infections. Maybe we're all in the sequel to "A Day Without a Mexican," unless you are Mexican, of course.
"[i]Can you imagine if the doctors had decided to save a little money by mopping the floors themselves...?[/i]"
Frugaliity is not a "peril," or a particular inconvenience to Americans, nor even a distasteful requirement to nurture an environmentalist green way of living. Frugality is prgamatism which supercedes left-right greenism. It is its own answer.
Let me expound briefly: Frugality is no more perilous a pursuit to Earth than any suspected input by any living, or sentient, entity transmitting within or beyond our understanding of our Cosmos.
Let's not ever forget that our primary calling as True Citizens -- activist defenders -- of the Founders' Entire Bill of Rights is to see that the whole and unedited Bill of Rights is respected, honored, defended and maintained. Article II of the Bill rubs shoulders with Article I, and so on. No supporter of single guaranteed essential freedom in the Bill can rationally defend his weakness regardinga any other.
No detail in the Bill of Rights can be adjudged vulnerable without so-characterizing all other elements of the same Bill. Either the one stands against infringement, or all fall.