Bad Habits Page 9

  The problem is that after a few years the cheese hardens to the consistency of formica, and the government has to get rid of it. The original plan, developed by Alexander Haig, was to drop the cheese from Air Force bombers onto rebel troops in El Salvador, but military analysts pointed out that the rebels might be able to melt it down and eat it, so the government decided instead to give it to poor people here in the United States. But this should not be taken as a sign that we are in a depression.

  What we are in is a recession. The key economic indicator of a recession is that government economists go around announcing that the economy is improving. The truth, of course, is that government economists don’t have the slightest notion what the economy is doing; if they did, they would have decent jobs. But they keep trying. Every few days they come out with some economic statistic and attempt to explain it, using charts and pointers, to the news media:

  WASHINGTON—The U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Calculations announced today that the rate of increase of the Average Price of Things that People Buy So They Can Make Them into Other Things and Sell Them for More Money Than They Paid for Them was slightly lower than might otherwise have been expected. “It is a very, very hopeful sign,” said government economist Elwood Welt, once he located the room where the press conference was held. “To be perfectly frank, we had feared that the rate of increase would be something like 6.67 percent, when in fact it was 6.53 percent, so we here at the Bureau of Calculations are extremely pleased and hopeful and will probably take the rest of the day off.

  Government economists are always hopeful, for two reasons:

  1. They have jobs.

  2. If they aren’t hopeful, the President will fire them.

  So government economists go around with big smiles on their faces all the time. For the past thirty years, presidents increased spending deficits like clockwork, and the government economists smiled. Then Ronald Reagan said he was against big spending and deficits, and the government economists smiled. Now it turns out that spending and deficits are still going up, and the government economists are still smiling. Phyllis George would be a good government economist.

  The big question, of course, is, What can we, as citizens, do for the government during the recession? Well, for one thing, it would be a big help if we would stop being unemployed in such large numbers. A lot of us have managed to get ourselves unemployed lately, and some of us are guilty of extremely high interest rates. As a result, we are making it very difficult for government economists to remain hopeful. So far they have managed to pull it off, but it’s only a matter of time before they start to feel depressed:

  WASHINGTON—The U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Calculations announced today that the nation’s economy is going to hell in a hand basket and probably will never get better. “I’m so sorry, but I just can’t feel hopeful about anything anymore,” said government economist Elwood Welt, clutching a fifty-pound block of government surplus cheese. “We’ve tried everything. We’ve tried coming up with new statistics, and more recently, we’ve started using more color charts, but the truth is we are all very depressed about the economy and will probably take the rest of the day off.”

  Full-Service Bankruptcy

  What makes international finance so fascinating is that, thanks to the miracle of modern electronic banking, you are linked financially with billions of people you don’t even know, which means the actions of a deranged scum-bucket politician in some country you never even heard of could cause you to lose your home and your life’s savings and wind up living in a cardboard refrigerator carton and licking discarded candy wrappers for nourishment. This has caused some people to be concerned about their banks. The banking industry has responded with reassuring television commercials, wherein a man wearing a reassuring suit says:

  “We’re the nation’s banks, and we’re not the least bit worried about anything, which is why we’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to let you know that nobody is worried about anything. Here, for example, is an extremely solid bank. Just look at this momma.” (Here he kicks the bank.) “You’re talking solid masonry construction. And on top of that, your deposits are protected by the full faith and credit of the United States Government, the same organization that gave so many of you shots for swine flu. This means that if anything goes wrong with the banking system, your elected representatives will fly back from Switzerland or France or wherever they are, and they’ll hold press conferences and call each other names, and eventually they’re bound to come up with a nifty plan to get your money back. So there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all. Forget we even brought it up. Thank you.”

  To illustrate how you are connected to international finance, let’s look at how the banking system works. First, people like yourself deposit money in banks. The banks put the money in their safes, where the amounts gradually increase thanks to the sound banking practice of never lending money tO people like yourself. Eventually the bankers at the smaller banks get nervous about having all that money around, so they transfer it to gigantic international banks in New York, in return for which they receive very attractive desk calendars. At this point, the gigantic international bankers are sitting around, wondering what to do with the money, when officials of a country such as Poland pull up in a taxi, race into the bank without paying the driver, and apply for a loan:

  BANKERS: And just how much money did you have in mind?

  POLISH OFFICIALS: We were thinking in terms of one million trillion dollars in small bills. BANKERs: That’s a great deal of money for us to lend to people who have horribly mismanaged their country’s economy for years and whose authority depends on the armed oppression of the Soviet Union. What assurance do we have that you can repay us?

  POLISH OFFICIALS: We’re willing to sign our names to several pieces of paper.

  BANKERS: Would tens and twenties be okay?

  The Polish officials flee back to Poland with the money, all of which immediately disappears into the black market in exchange for Elton John records. After maybe five years, the international bank sends Poland a letter:

  Dear Poland:

  This is just a friendly note to remind you that, according to our records, you now have a past due balance of $832,674,709,908,772.54. Although we value you as a customer, continued tardiness in payment on your part could force us to precipitate an international banking crisis.

  Warmest regards,

  Your Gigantic Full-service International Bank

  So the Poland officials telephone the bank collect and, shouting to be heard over the Elton John record playing in the background, claim the check is in the mail.

  Over the years, this process has been repeated with so many countries that virtually all the money originally deposited in U.S. banks is now in the hands of foreign street vendors, which is why your local bank is willing to give you calculators and toasters if you’ll deposit more money. This can’t go on, of course. Already, some banks have taken drastic corrective action in the form of lending more money to foreign countries so they can make their interest payments. But this may not be enough; we may soon see a day when the United States Government, fed up with the incredible stupidity of the international bankers, finally steps in and gives them enormous amounts of money taken from taxpayers, which is only fair, because the taxpayers were the ones who got the toasters.

  The Net May Be Gross

  The reason that you are not extremely wealthy, of course, is that you do not carefully keep track of your finances. John D. Rockefeller carefully kept track of his finances, and he ended up with so much money that he started giving it away in bales, and many of his offspring became governors. For a while there, we barely had enough states for Rockefellers to be governors of. So if you want your offspring to be governors, you should drive down to your local office-supplies store and get yourself a little accountant-style notebook and immediately start writing down your expenses:

  Accountant-style Notebook—$7.97

  Gas Used to
Get to Store for Accountant-style Notebook—$1.14

  Depreciation on Car—$4.34

  Parking—$0.25

  Beef Jerky Purchased at Convenience Store on Way Home—$0.49

  Damage to Fender Caused by Uninsured Motorist While Car Was in Convenience Store Parking Lot—$385.62

  Knife Wound Suffered in Argument—$1,830.88

  Legal Fees—$12,757.21

  See? You’re on your way to riches. Not only do you know exactly where your money is going, but all these items are tax-deductible, provided you were talking to your lawyer when you ate the beef jerky.

  When you get home, you should sit down and try to figure out what your major assets are. There are two kinds of assets: “liquid” assets are the ones you have already spent, and “solid” assets are the ones you still have. In our household, our major asset is roughly $4,000 worth of pennies under the furniture. These pennies are a fairly solid asset, because to get them we would have to crawl around and stuff them into those little wrappers you get at the bank, and the bank probably wouldn’t accept them anyway, because of the high floor-lint content. Our other major solid assets are:

  $42.13 worth of U.S. postage stamps that we bought only recently but cannot use because the Postal Commission raises the rate every two or three days. $3,024.56 worth of aquarium supplies, from when my wife and I went through our Tropical Fish Phase, which culminated in our discovery that they are called “tropical” fish because they can survive only in the tropics, which we do not live in. A pure-bred German shepherd dog for which we paid $300, or roughly $50 per brain cell. $80 worth of rolls of undeveloped photographic film, which we don’t want to have developed because we can’t remember whether they contain any memorable pictures, but which we don’t want to throw away in case they contain any memorable pictures. We’ve had these rolls for years now, and we often take them off the shelf and settle down in front of a crackling fire to look at them and reminisce. “Remember this roll of film?” we say. $200 worth of random keys.

  Your only remaining financial responsibility is to balance your checkbook. Every month, you send out a batch of checks to various people, and every month the bank gets hold of these checks somehow, smears them with bank-style graffiti, and sends them back to you. The obvious question, of course, is, What are you supposed to do with them? My wife ignores them. She merely tosses the bank envelope, unopened, into a drawer, and walks away, laughing a carefree laugh. So far, she has gotten away with it, but I’m fairly sure that someday the Bank Inspector will show up with guns and attack dogs and make her stay in her room until she balances her checkbook. So I always balance mine. Here’s the system I use:

  1. On a large, flat surface, such as a washing machine or floor, arrange all the checks in a tasteful, numerical pattern.

  2. With a sharp pencil, put little check marks next to all the numbers on the bank statement and all the numbers in your checkbook.

  That’s all there is to it. You could avoid even this much work if you could prevent the bank from getting hold of your checks and sending them back to you. One way to do this would be to write, in large letters at the top of each check, the words DO NOT LET THE BANK GET HOLD OF THIS CHECK. If everybody did this, we would all save thousands of hours we now waste balancing checkbooks, and we would probably have come up with a cure for the common cold by now.

  Anti-Insurance Policy

  I have been under almost constant attack by life-insurance salesmen for most of my adult life. I was first attacked when I was in college, by this guy named Charlie. One day he was a normal college student, no different from the rest of us, and the next day he was a life-insurance salesman. It was as if the Moonies had got him. All of a sudden, he was wearing wing-tipped shoes and acting very concerned about my Financial Security. At the time, my idea of Financial Security was to have enough money to buy a pizza with extra cheese, but Charlie thought I should have at least six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of life insurance, so that when I died my dependents would be rich.

  To be honest, I didn’t care what happened to my dependents, because I didn’t have any. But Charlie was obsessed with my dependents: he’d sit in my room, hour after hour, and fret about them, until finally, to ease his mind, I bought some life insurance, and he went away. As soon as I was safely in another state, I cashed in my insurance and used the money to go sailing in the Virgin Islands with some friends who had not had the foresight to buy life insurance for their dependents, and thus had a more difficult time coming up with the money. So my life insurance turned out to be a good investment.

  All life-insurance salesmen believe that no matter who you are, or what your financial situation is, you need more insurance. So unless you wear elaborate disguises and sleep in old refrigerator cartons, sooner or later a life-insurance salesman will come to your home, calling you by your first name a lot and subtly hinting that you’re going to die. Suppose your name is John. Here’s how your insurance salesman will attack you:

  INSURANCE SALESMAN: John, I just stopped by to chat about your Financial Security. John, our records indicate that you’re going to die someday and leave your dependents penniless and they’ll end up out on the street eating garbage in the cold. I just thought we should chat about that, John. YOU: Well, I certainly appreciate it, but I already have eight million dollars’ worth of life insurance, and my only dependents are these tropical fish.

  INSURANCE SALESMAN: Frankly, John, in these inflationary times, eight million dollars just isn’t going to buy all that much tropical-fish food. And I’m not even talking about the cost of fish-tank filters, John. YOU: But they’re just fish, for God’s sake. I just can’t see buying more insurance for fish. But thanks anyway.

  INSURANCE SALESMAN: John, not long ago I was sitting in a room just like this, talking with a man, just like you, who thought he didn’t need more insurance. I left his house, and the next day he was struck by lightning and run over by a bulldozer and his body was eaten by ants, and within a matter of days his fish had all developed fin rot, all because he didn’t think he needed more insurance. So, John, if I were to leave your house tonight and something like that were to happen to you, I’d never forgive myself. So I’ll just unroll my sleeping bag here and cook some freeze-dried food, of which I have a three-week supply, while you think about it, John. And another thing, John. John John John John John.

  Finally, of course, you will buy insurance. As the salesman leaves, he will put a secret mark on the door to alert other insurance salesmen that yours is a good house to stop at, and soon they will be at your door in droves. If you want them to go away, either you have to shoot them, which is illegal in some states and which doesn’t always work anyway, or you have to buy more insurance.

  So the only real solution to the problem is to convince the salesman that you are a bad risk. Put a sign outside your house that says: CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE RABID LEPROSY VICTIM WITH SMALLPOX. This won’t stop a really successful salesman from entering, but it will slow him down. When he knocks on the door, hide in the bedroom and have a friend, wearing a surgical mask, escort him into the living room. Then follow this script:

  INSURANCE SALESMAN: Is John home?

  YOUR FRIEND: Yes, but I think he’s dead. Let me check. John? Are you dead? YOU: Not yet. Who is it?

  YOUR FRIEND: A visitor. YOU: Oh, goody. Send him in. I haven’t had a visitor since poor old Wesley Bumpers came to see me last week. Speaking of whom, I wish you’d get him out of here. He’s beginning to spoil.

  INSURANCE SALESMAN: Perhaps I’ve picked a bad time. YOU: Not at all. Come on in. (Here you cough violently, and toss a bucket of giblets into the living room.)

  INSURANCE SALESMAN: I just realized I’m late for an important appointment in Belgium. I’ll stop by later. (Holding his breath, he barges out the door.)

  If this approach doesn’t work, you should try vicious dogs.

  Build Your Own Mess

  You young couples out there who dream of having your own houses someday have pr
obably read a lot of depressing articles about housing costs. You know:

  WASHINGTON—The American Institute of People who Keep Track of These Things released a study today showing that by 1990 the average single-family house will cost eleven million dollars, not counting drapes, and that the only people who will be able to afford houses will be members of the Saudi Arabian royal family and major drug dealers.

  Well, cheer up, young couples: You can have your own house. All you need is a large sum of money. The best source of money is your parents. You can get almost anything you want from your parents, provided you’re not afraid to whine. I remember when I was twelve and really needed a BB gun. My parents didn’t want me to have one, on the grounds I might shoot my brother. But I put together a string of about thirty-five days during which I was without question the most sniveling, obnoxious child in the entire world. It got to the point where, to preserve their sanity, my parents had to either give me a BB gun or hire someone to kidnap me. They eventually elected to buy me a BB gun, mainly because it was cheaper. I was so grateful I didn’t shoot my brother for three or four days.

  Anyway, your parents probably have a bunch of money rotting away in things like savings accounts and investments and pensions and insurance and retirement homes. So what you should do is follow your parents everywhere—to the supermarket, to work, to parties—tugging at their sleeves and saying “I wanna house.” Sooner or later, because they love you, they’ll give you some money. Or flee to Brazil.