The Weekly Screed (#564)

Deficit solution: A national lottery
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Expecting the Congressional “supercommittee” to fail in its quest for a $1.2 trillion budget solution, I turned to the one man who might have an answer, Dr. Wilhelm “Seven-Come-Eleven” Bienfang, one of America’s leading “idea men.”

Yes! He had an idea. “First thing we do,” he said blandly, “is we eliminate all existing ‘social services’ provided by government. That’s Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, Head Start, public schools, heating oil, rent control, you name it.”

This proposal rendered me aghast. I replied, “But, Willy, this would totally shred the safety net — not just for destitute people but even for the working poor. For Pete’s sake, there are Wal-Mart employees out there who qualify for food stamps. What happens to the poor, the homeless, the unemployed and the disenfranchised?”

Bienfang asked if I’ve been in a poor neighborhood lately. I said I live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. So, Bienfang asked, had I patronized a Bed-Stuy news store lately. “One of those little joints that sells newspapers and magazines?”

I said I drop in now and then for a magazine. Bienfang said, “Ever see anyone else buy the Times or the Post, or a magazine there.”

“No. Mostly you got folks lined up out the door waiting to buy lottery tickets.”

“Well, son,” said Bienfang, “there’s your answer. We take away Social Security, Medicare, public education, subsidized housing, and we give ‘em a lottery.”

I was dumbfounded. “A lottery? That’s it?”

“People love lotteries,” said Bienfang. “You’ve seen how it goes. You’re standing in line ten minutes behind some guy with barely two nickels to rub together — holes in his shoes, crumbs in his beard — but he’s buying three different kinds of daily and weekly Lotto tickets, plus a dozen scratch cards, all the while calculating his odds, figuring the percentages, hoping, praying, negotiating with God. Here’s a guy who has no faith in Uncle Sam, but he’ll sell his soul to Lady Luck for a nine-dollar jackpot.”

Bienfang went on to explain his national Movin’ On Up Lottery. “Every ticket’s a dollar. You could buy as many as you want — fifty, a hundred, 10,000. Once a year, the chief of the Lottery (that would be me) draws a thousand lucky tickets, and those thousand winners get back all the benefits canceled by the supercommittee in 2011 — unemployment insurance, asthma medication, their kids get to go to school again.”

I interrupted. “A thousand? Only a thousand people a year. That leaves millions of others with nothing. What happens to them? Where do they go?”

“Again,” said Bienfang, spreading his hands, “American ingenuity provides your answer. Look around. Coast to coast, the disenfranchised and distressed have shown their willingness to move into public parks, eat at soup kitchens and sleep under the stars.”

I couldn’t believe the cynicism. I said, “You’re turning the ’Occupy Wall Street’ movement into just another excuse for screwing the 99 percent?”

“Well,” said Bienfang, “as Herman Cain has often said of his female employees, ‘They were asking for it.’”

Bienfang, however, offered a silver lining. “By cramming America’s losers into public parks, you position them to fund their own salvation. In every one of these new Hoovervilles, news stores will pop up. Sure as heck, these folks will squander every spare dime they can beg, borrow and steal to buy… what? Lottery tickets. By milking the miserable this way, we’ll probably be able to afford three or four thousand extra winners a year. Meanwhile, we’ll be devising some great scratch-card games — like, for instance, line up three X’s on a 50-cent tic-tac-toe card and you win a food stamp!”

“Whoopee,” I said. “But please, Willy. This plan of yours. Just by ending Social Security, you’re freeing up trillions of federal dollars. Where does all this money go?”

“Well, first thing we do,” said Bienfang, “we eliminate the capital gains tax. Also, the estate tax. We cut corporate taxes pretty much to the bone. We certainly want to end, as fast as we can, taxes on yachts, private jets, purchases at Tiffany’s. Plus, by my math, we can bring the top income-tax bracket down to about nine percent.”

“Bienfang, what you’re prescribing here — on the backs the poorest Americans — is a gigantic payday for the richest people in human history.”

“Yes,” said Bienfang. “What’s your point?”

“Voters won’t stand for this. They’ll… They’ll…”

“ Trust me, son. They’ll stand for it. They’ve stood for it, like sheep, for more than 30 years,” said Bienfang. “Besides, they’ll be happy after I explain things.”

I told him he’d better explain. Bienfang said: “You remember how, when Obama passed his $800 million stimulus, a lot of economists said it wasn’t big enough? Well, my theory is that supply-side (“trickle-down”) economics has always had the same problem. It has suffered from a shortage of public generosity to the ultra-rich!”

As I tried to grasp this paradox, Bienfang said, “Rich people have different standards, kid. What you think of as a fortune is — to Warren Buffett — chump change. I have realized that, up ‘til now, we’ve failed to bestow enough of the nation’s wealth on the nation’s wealthiest one-tenth of one percent. We have to give the super-rich more. Super-more! If we do, the greed-crazed narcissists of Central Park West might finally run out of stuff to buy. Gambling on Wall Street is no fun if Uncle Sam covers every billion you lose. And what’s another villa on the Cote d’Azur if you already own six?”

“You think we can actually bribe the rich into finally giving something back to the nation that made them rich?” I asked. “You think they’ll finally invest in America?”

“You betcha! That’s trickle-down economics — in a diamond-crusted nutshell!”

“OK, let’s see if I understand,” I said. “What you’re saying is if you feed a hog fast enough — constantly — then sooner or later, the hog explodes.”

“Well,” said Bienfang, “it’s more like the hog will start leaking from the rectum.”

“OK, so Americans have to starve for, like, ten years. But then, there’s hope. We should all head for Wall Street,” I said, “and queue up behind the biggest hogs?”

“You got it, kid. But make sure,” said Bienfang, “you bring along a Dixie Cup.”