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Who are the 47 percent? 5 jobs held by people who pay no income tax.

Mitt Romney says 47 percent of Americans don't pay federal income taxes – and he was right. Half of that 47 percent are workers who hold jobs that don't pay enough for them to owe income taxes to Uncle Sam. What kinds of jobs are these?

2. Manicurists and pedicurists

Allure Magazine/PRNewsFoto
Natasha Bedingfield gets a manicure from Maybelline New York at the Allure Lounge at Fashion Week on Sept. 9.

  • By Ron Scherer Staff writer

Nail salons are popping up in urban areas nearly as fast as the nail polish companies can concoct new colors. And with the salons is a demand for manicure technicians, most of whom have to take a cosmetology training program and then become licensed.

The manicurists enjoy their work since it involves helping other people, says Megan Blue, the guest care coordinator at Tania, a salon in Wakefield, Mass. “It makes people feel good to have pretty feet and nice nails if they are working with guests,” she explains. “We all want to be beautiful.”

However, the occupation is not without a few challenges. “Probably the most difficult part is if someone comes in with an issue with a nail or toenail,” says Ms. Blue.

Blue says a good nail technician can do very well for herself if she has a good clientele. However, on a national basis the wages are not that good. According to the BLS, the 56,270 manicurists in the nation made a mean income of $21,760 in 2011.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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