Backup Power for Your Well, Decline of Purchasing Power, Wages

Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

http://www.PoorManSurvival.com

For Independent Minded People!

ISSN 2161-5543

In This Issue:

1.       The decline in our purchasing power

2.      Backup power sources for your well

3.      More at home ‘flex’ jobs sources

4.      The squeeze against citizens

"It is not easy to find the relatives of a poor man."
-- Menander

The Decline in Purchasing Power, Wages, Standard of Living

If wages rose at the same rate as executive salaries, the lowest-paid worker would make a whopping $23/hour.

Declining purchasing power: While media coverage has defined the debate along party lines, politicians like Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama have agreed on one thing: Inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage. "Over 30 years, we've had either stagnating, at best, or declining wages for our low-wage workers," says University of California at Berkeley labor economist Sylvia Allegretto to Yahoo!. "This idea that we can have a thriving economy, when we have a good swath of our workers losing ground in pay decade after decade, while those at the top are making more and more money, that does not make a successful economy."

Sub-minimum wages: There's another class of wage-earners who make even less than the minimum: those who get tips on the job.

Like many tipped workers, [Zhanneta] Dunder has trouble making ends meet because of an obscure federal provision called the tip credit, which has established a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers at $2.15 per hour, or $4,333 a year for a full-time worker. Forty-five states have established slightly higher sub-minimum wages...Organizations like the New York nonprofit Restaurant Opportunities Centers don't think that's enough, and recommend at least raising tipped wages to 70 percent of the minimum wage...Tipped workers, the group says, are more likely to fall into poverty than those who receive minimum wage. Servers rely on food stamps at nearly double the rate of the general population. (May 23, Women eNews)

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-now/y-big-story-minimum-wage-gets-195821330.html

15 minute rule for CFL bulbs:  it’s better to keep CFL bulbs turned on if you’ll need them again within 15 minutes.  Frequent on and off burns more energy as they require more energy to start them up.

PM’s Compendium of Useful Resources

  Backup Power Sources for your well pump

Deep well pumps spend their useful service life submerged under a hundred feet of water or more, pushing it to the surface for the needs non-municipal water users. They are constructed with the electrical part of the motor sealed and filled with propylene glycol at the factory to assure long life. Most pump manufacturers warrant their product for at least five years, and most pumps operating in clear-running wells may last from 15 to 25 years. Disassembly of an improperly functioning pump is strongly discouraged. If it becomes necessary for you to replace your deep well pump, however, here's how…

Note: We usually don't recommend replacing existing grid powered pumps with solar. Solar pumps are best used when grid power is too far away and too expensive. If you want to go green and go solar, we recommend adding solar panels to your home and grid-tie them to your electric company. You will get the most "bang for your buck" in today's solar marketplace.

If you have a shallow well, consider a hand pump or shallow well motorized pump to use in case of emergency.  The maximum for a particular well is determined by the combination of several factors, including whether pumping into a pressurized plumbing system, or using manual or motor to power. When using the Motor Extension, the maximum supported depth also depends on the capacity of the pump cylinder used, and the voltage at which it is run.  Learn more about hand pumps here:

http://www.simplepump.com/OUR-PUMPS/Pumping-Depth.html

Read more here:

http://www.poormansurvival.com/Pages/guestcolumn.aspx

More At-Home Earning Options

FlexJobs- Has tons of work-at-home and flexible job options plus a personalized login system that will identify jobs that fit your criteria, ability to have multiple resume profiles, job search tips and checklists, and much more! For the number of jobs and added service, its a must use for the serious work-at-home job hunter.

HomeJobStop has over 100 jobs in clerical, and more in customer service, writing, transcription, miscellaneous plus 100's of others. Very affordable.

Looking for work? Sign up at Elance and search over 30,000 jobs today.

Free job search sites (you need to search by keyword to find work-at-home jobs on these sites).

NEW! oDesk – Tons of freelance jobs in administrative support, customer service and more!
Monster.com
Beyond.com- Check out this video on how to find work-at-home jobs on Beyond.com.

NEW-Buy, sell, swap or post your services at the Poor Man’s Marketplace http://www.poormansurvival.com/Pages/Marketplace.aspx

Find out if you qualify for mortgage assistance programs free of charge by contacting HUD approved counselors at:  888-995-4673

The Nanny State Updates…

Today, a vast array of government agencies is constantly monitoring what all of us say and do on the Internet. They claim that this helps makes us all more "safe" and "secure".

In order to maintain proper "control" over our lives, the nanny state is obsessed with watching us and monitoring us. This point was beautifully made in a recent article by Chuck Baldwin....

America is no longer "one nation under God." Today, America is "one nation under surveillance." Cameras monitoring our every movement, satellites taking pictures of our homes, listening devices being used to record our conversations, hi-tech computers capturing virtually every piece of correspondence, banking institutions forwarding our private financial records to Big Brother, and now armed drones flying over the neighborhoods of the American citizenry all reveal that America is anything but the "land of the free."

No mess way to mix foods – when using a hand mixer, put the bowl into your sink vs. a countertop!

The Parting Thought –

The Squeeze Against Citizens is On!

The more dependencies government creates, the more people it can convince to go along with the conspiracy, and the better off it is. This is why Frederic Bastiat once described the political system as follows: “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”  After all, Americans don’t like socialism, but they sure enjoy bailouts and government assistance.

When the government goes bankrupt, as it is going to do, the bailouts will cease…AND

Due to the immense size of Washington's bureaucracy, it also means that there are a lot of bureaucrats around who are going to lose their jobs after the Great Default.

The government has created more anti-citizen policies than even during WWII

Surveillance State. While the US Government may have tapped one or two phones in 1947 they certainly weren't building a $2 billion domestic spying data center in Utah to monitor all telephone calls, emails and web traffic.

The War on Plants. There was no "war on plants" (drug war) in 1947. Today the US has the largest amount of people in cages per population by a factor of four (see "Kidnapping and Ransom Rampant in the US"). The US has nearly 800 people in cages per 100,000. The US has 5% of the population of the Earth and 25% of the total incarcerated. Of total arrests in 2008, 90.7% were for non-crimes (ie. victimless crimes). Now, possession of a dried flower that millions, including Barack Obomber, enjoy regularly is reason to haul someone off in the night.

Police State. Anyone remember no knock raids in 1947? Fonzi making too much noise up in the garage bungalow? Break it down with a SWAT team! No knock, warrantless raids are such a norm in the US today that songs are written about it. It is so out of control that even members of the "elite" (politicians) have been caught up in the carnage as this Mayor of a town found out when his dog was killed in a mistaken "no knock raid".

The more nefarious side of the U.S. government’s cyber surveillance includes not only physical or cyber-terror threats and from where they originate, but those who have been labeled as “political dissidents.” According to sources close to such programs, the government is monitoring all cyber communications and maintaining a database of individuals and entities merely critical of government operations.

Putting it bluntly, our security apparatus has been turned inward against its own citizens. The threat has been widened to include political adversaries and has nothing to do with actual or perceived terror threats, but those who oppose the current course of operations of our government

Today our freedoms are taken away with the stroke of a pen.

Tomorrow it will be at the barrel of a gun.

And when that happens (because it will...) you had better be prepared.

While U.S. President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law, creating the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council, no one could have imagined that by 2012 the US Government would be signing into law an act that will put 30,000 drones over the US, watching US citizens.
The US Government and the US dollar are in its death throes. There is really only one thing left that can be done to stave off the funeral for a few more years... and that is to begin to leach off of the citizenry until everyone is sucked dry. What's that mean? Taxes, taxes, and more taxes. 2012 and 2013 will be remembered in the US as the years of the tax hike. States across the US have been raising taxes on almost anything. See "Record Tax Hike Isn't Fixing Illinois' Problem" and "Brown pushes tax hike as California's money woes deepen" as just two of countless examples.

But, that's just the states. Brace yourself... next year US citizens will be extorted with a tax hike the likes of which US tax slaves have never seen. The Washington Post called the unprecedented $494 billion tax hike "Taxmageddon," and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke described it as a "massive fiscal cliff."

The squeeze is on... and it won't get any better any time soon. Expect worse and worse until the end of the US Government or the US dollar.

But the last grasp for the government, in our opinion, will be the retirement savings of US citizens. And, it isn't like they are even trying to hide their intentions as this story from the New York Post recently headlined, "Feds eye retirement-fund tax to cut $16 trillion-plus deficit".

Source: Condensed from the Agora Financial Group

“Until the next revolution”, the Poor Man

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