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tl;dr The expert's recommendation is "to make moving out of the region a goal."

How making $300,000 in San Francisco can still mean you're living paycheck-to-paycheck

Dec. 7, 2021

Editor's note: This story originally ran in 2019, but has been updated with 2021 figures.

With the median price of a home in the U.S. at $300,000, you can can achieve homeownership and the idealized middle-class lifestyle in most parts of the country making a salary just under or above six figures.

In San Francisco's land of $2 million fixer-uppers, the income needed to reach this status is obviously more. But how much more?

S.F.-based finance expert Sam Dogen pinned that number at $300,000, after surveying dozens of readers on his Financial Samurai blog and asking about their incomes and expenses living in the notoriously high-priced coastal cities.

With their feedback, Dogen broke down the budget of a couple with one to two children in San Francisco, Seattle or New York. He found $300,000 is the income necessary to put something away for retirement, save for your child's education, own a three-bedroom home, take three weeks of vacation a year and retire by a reasonable age.

"It's not an extravagant lifestyle," Dogen says. "It's a middle-class lifestyle if you consider a middle-class person should be able to afford a modest home, have at least one car, have a kid or two. There are no private jets in this budget."

Dogen has put together a detailed post where you'll find analysis and explanation on each expense, but here are a few points to note:

• The $29,400-a-year childcare expense takes into consideration a babysitting rate of about $20 an hour, the standard charge in a city such as San Francisco. Preschool easily costs $18,000 to $20,000 a year in metro areas.

• The mortgage is based on a $1.5 million, 1,750-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home on a 2,500-square-foot lot.

• The car expenses are based on a single car that accommodates a family.

• Entertainment expenses include everything from Netflix to tickets to an occasional ball game to date night, which easily costs $200 in San Francisco when you consider expense for dinner and babysitting.

Dogen adds that at $300,000, a family is still living paycheck-to-paycheck and not saving outside their 401K and 529 plans.

"We're in this perpetual grind in San Francisco, and it's a city for people who are willing to hustle," he says. "At one point in the past, $300,000 was a lot of money. Now at this amount, you're probably always going to end up working a long time and having a constant struggle to keep up."

His recommendation is to make moving out of the region a goal.

"There's a moving truck shortage in places like San Francisco because so many people are moving out of this expensive city and other expensive coastal cities," he writes. "If you live in an expensive metropolitan area, consider relocating to lower your cost of living or at least try and take advantage of the valuation differential by investing in Middle America.

"Thanks to technology, there's no need to grind so hard in cities where the median home price is over $1 million."

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I know it's like crazy sci-fi to think Biden ever would. I just want to know if the following article by Ryan Cooper is accurate. I find it nearly impossible to believe.

I've got a simple and easy solution for this. Biden declares judicial review null and void.

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Democrats have a better option than court packing

There has been comparatively little attention to the simplest and easiest way to get around potentially tyrannical right-wing justices: just ignore them. The president and Congress do not actually have to obey the Supreme Court.

The weird thing about judicial "originalism" is that the explicit principle of judicial review is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. All of that document's stipulations on how the courts are to be constructed are contained in one single sentence in Article III: "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." Actual judicial review was a product of a cynical power grab from Chief Justice John Marshall, who simply asserted out of nothing in Marbury vs. Madison that the court could overturn legislation — but did it in a way to benefit incoming president Thomas Jefferson politically, so as to neutralize his objection to the principle.

Jefferson famously hated judicial review. In one letter, he said it is "a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so." But because of Marshall's canny political strategy, from that day forward Congress and the president have mostly deferred to the court's views and allowed it to strike down laws or establish entirely new legal principles even on completely spurious grounds.

As Matt Bruenig argues at the People's Policy Project, it would be quite easy in practical terms to get rid of judicial review: "All the president has to do is assert that Supreme Court rulings about constitutionality are merely advisory and non-binding, that Marbury (1803) was wrongly decided, and that the constitutional document says absolutely nothing about the Supreme Court having this power." So, for instance, if Congress were to pass some law expanding Medicare, and the reactionaries on the court say it's unconstitutional because Cthulhu fhtagn, the president would say "no, I am trusting Congress on this one, and I will continue to operate the program as instructed."

No doubt many liberals will object to this idea. It would be a fairly extreme step in terms of how America's constitutional system functions, and a lot of Democrats fear the idea of a Republican president not being hemmed in by the legal system. Big chunks of liberal political advocacy (like the ACLU) rely on pressing political cases through the courts. Conversely, conservatives have long advanced the idea that they are against "judicial activism," which makes liberals favor it more through negative polarization.

[...]

Most Americans are taught from a young age that the Supreme Court being able to strike down laws is what it means to have the rule of law. But this is not true. For one thing, as Doreen Lustig and J. H. H. Weiler write in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, judicial review is not nearly as intrusive in every other country as it is here. Some nations, like Austria or France, have a special Constitutional Court which rules on constitutional questions, but relatively infrequently. In others, like Finland or Denmark, judicial review basically never happens. In no other developed democracy does basically every piece of major legislation have to run a years-long gauntlet of tendentious lawsuits trying to get through the courts what parties could not get through the legislature.

Moreover, simply refusing to agree to judicial review has happened before in American history. As historian Matt Karp writes at Jacobin, when the Civil War broke out, President Lincoln and Congress ignored the Dred Scott decision in a law banning slavery in all federal territories, and when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled Lincoln did not have the power to suspend habeas corpus, the president ignored him. As Karp argues, storming the citadel of reactionary court power was necessary to destroy slavery.

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Opinion | The Sexism That Led to the Elizabeth Holmes Trial - The New York Times

Ms. Pao is a tech investor and chief executive of Project Include, a diversity, equity and inclusion nonprofit. She is the author of "Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change," about her lawsuit against a venture capital firm and her experience running the technology company Reddit.

The op-ed is shit. Pao throws in whataboutism and she doesn't even bother to explain how Holmes isn't actually a criminal and a con artist.

———

Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Anne Holmes (born February 3, 1984) is an American former businesswoman who was the founder and chief executive of Theranos, a now-defunct health technology company. Theranos soared in valuation after the company claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing testing methods that could use surprisingly small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick. By 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company. The next year, following revelations of potential fraud about Theranos's claims, Forbes had revised its published estimate of Holmes's net worth to zero, and Fortune had named her one of the "World's Most Disappointing Leaders".

This really seems extreme and a harbinger of what is to come: veteran (and tenured) high school teacher and baseball coach dismissed from school after he assigned a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay and poem about white privilege.

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A parent complained that the Coates essay painted Trump in a negative light.

Sullivan County school board approves teacher termination charges, supporters outraged

Posted: Jun 8, 2021 / Updated: Jun 9, 2021

UPDATE – The Sullivan County Board of Education Tuesday voted 6-1 that the charges of dismissal against teacher Matthew Hawn are true and warranted.

Supporters and former students gathered at the meeting wearing light blue and holding placards voicing their support for the contemporary issues teachers.

Supporters of Hawn told me they were frustrated with the board's decision to continue the dismissal process against the Sullivan Central HS contemporary issues teacher @WJHL11 @ABCTriCities pic.twitter.com/HF8L68IOyo

— Bianca Marais WJHL (@BiancaWJHL) June 9, 2021

During the meeting, only Board Vice-Chairman Matthew Spivey voted against the dismissal continuation.

Director of Schools Dr. David Cox said during the meeting that he's been accused of racism due to these charges of dismissal against Hawn.

"There has been a lot of talk online that accuses me of moving to dismiss Mr. Hawn because he taught anti-racism lessons. Let me be perfectly clear. Sullivan County Schools, and I in no way condone racism of any county. We have encouraged all of our teachers, including Mr. Hawn, to promote an environment welcoming to all students of all races of all backgrounds," Cox said.

He added that he has been told that white privilege was the reason for his dismissal charges against Hawn.

"This is also simply not true. In the charges I just read aloud in fact, I read that appropriate discussions around concepts like white privilege remain perfectly appropriate for a high school class, like contemporary issues. These charges of dismissal about Mr. Hawn refusing to provide his students with access to varying points of view, which is required under Tennessee law. And these charges are about Mr. Hawn, again, assigning inappropriate materials to his students," he said.

Former students told News Channel 11 that latent racism was ever-present when they walked the Sullivan Central High School halls.

One student who graduated in 2018 from Sullivan Central High School, and attended Hawn's contemporary issues class for two years, said that he felt Hawn was a fair and balanced teacher. @WJHL11 @ABCTriCities pic.twitter.com/KPlJocQse4

— Bianca Marais WJHL (@BiancaWJHL) June 9, 2021

One student who graduated in 2018 and attended Hawn's contemporary issues class for two years, said that he felt Hawn was a fair and balanced teacher.

"We talked about a lot of hot button issues in our class, we talked about white privilege, and he was very open and fair and balanced on both sides of the argument, and presented a like I said an open discussion we never saw any, anything that I believe would warrant a dismissal," Kyle Simcox said.

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BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. (WJHL) – A Sullivan County school teacher and baseball coach is facing possible termination by the school district.

The charges of dismissal come after two incidents pointed out by the school district.

The first was after a parent who complained in early February about an opinion article Matthew Hawn assigned to his Contemporary Issues students by Ta-Nehisi Coats entitled "The First White President," which the complaining parent claimed painted the former president in a negative light. Matthew Hawn. Courtesy of Laura Hawn.

Hawn was issued an official letter of reprimand which passed unanimously at the March Board of Education meeting.

Later in March, Hawn faced a second round of reprimands from the school district when, according to officials, he showed a video called "White Privilege," a spoken word poem by Kyla Jenee Lacey.

The school district wrote to Hawn that though the concept of discussing white privilege and the like during a contemporary issues class is perfectly acceptable, the district administration did not believe some of the terms used in the video were appropriate for high school students.

Hawn faces charges of dismissal at the Tuesday Sullivan County Board of Education meeting at 6:30 p.m.

According to a Facebook group showing support for Hawn, roughly 50 people are expected to gather to show their support for the teacher at the meeting.

It is unclear whether the public will be permitted to speak on this subject during the public comment section of the board meeting.

He has been tenured at the Sullivan County School District since 2008 and has been teaching Contemporary Issues and coaching baseball at Central High School.

Sullivan County Schools administrators sent News Channel 11 the following documents regarding Hawn:

[a gallery of six images]

Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins)

Kafka's Metamorphosis is called a major work of literature. Why? If it's SF it's bad SF. If, like Animal Farm, it's an allegory, an allegory of what? Scholarly answers range from pretentious Freudian to far-fetched feminist. I don't get it. Where are the Emperor's clothes?

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Follow-up tweet...

She’s now trending higher than stories about the mass shooting.

Twitter will not free Palestine, but it will certainly make the world a more antisemitic place

by Eve Barlow • May 25, 2021

I don't know who crafted the first tweet that simply said "Eve Fartlow," but whoever it was—bot or human—started a fire. Over the past two weeks, Twitter has been littered with the words "Eve Fartlow." Every time I tweet, this title is the response I attract, and it is pelted at me irrespective of what I write. Hundreds of trolls, some with blue ticks and some without, just start responding to me "Eve Fartlow" (some people have recently switched it to "Eve Shartlow" but "Eve Fartlow" seems to be the one that sticks). If we donated a JNF tree to Israel for every time someone tweeted "Eve Fartlow," there'd be no Negev left.

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#2 now