The Weekly Screed #841)

Barn cats, Botox

and fiscal conservatism
by David Benjamin

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing. As opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies." 
                                                   — Sen. Chuck Grassley

Ever since mein Drumpfenfeuhrer started stumping for the most tremendous, super-duper, kickass tax cut in the history of White House generosity, I’ve been thinking about my Uncle Harry and my dad, Big Bill.

Uncle Harry had cats, lots of them. They all lived in his barn, bred there, fed there and bedded there. Their diet consisted entirely of food scraps and mice, mostly mice. The barn was a veritable cornucopia of edible vermin. Uncle Harry and his wonderful wife Lou, in all their sixty-odd years on the farm just outside Tomah, never bought a bag of cat food and, if they’d been presented with a can of “Fancy Feast,” would have likely stirred it into one of Lou’s casseroles and eaten it themselves.

As for Big Bill, I went to him one summer in desperate need of a baseball glove. I was scheduled to play baseball in the St. Mary’s altar-boy picnic and I had no mitt. But Dad, as was his wont, was flat broke. A fifteen-dollar Roberto Clemente outfielder’s glove was spectacularly beyond his means. Mom was even less solvent and I failed in efforts to squeeze a loan — for a $3 pseudo-glove available at Steele’s Rexall Drug — from my sister, Pinchpenny Peg. I went gloveless to the picnic and struck out four times. It wasn’t ’til Christmas, when Big Bill floated his annual holiday loan (and ruined his cash flow for the next six months) that I got my glove from Santa. No kid ever cherished more passionately a five-fingered slab of cowhide.

Harry and Big Bill came to mind a while back, after I’d written about how to simplify the 2018 and 2020 electoral message of the Democratic Party. I boiled the policy formula down to six letters: FCUCPW, which stand for “free college, universal coverage and public works.”

I didn’t bother to defend or elaborate these proposals in much detail because a) they’re self-evident, b) they’re intuitively necessary, c) they’ve been tried and proven in most of the developed nations in the world, and d) they conform to a century of Democratic Party ideals and values.

However, among the objections to FCUCPW was a question from a friend who’s a “closet Republican.”

(Closet Republican (klaz´it ri pub´li kan) n. [[OFr, small enclosure, dim. of close, L republica < res, thing, affair 1. one who, although self-described as “independent,” votes reliably for Republicans, never speaks well of Democrats and cannot name a Democrat he or she respects, spouts GOP and/or Fox News talking-points while never delving deeply into political issues or showing any interest in politics until, roughly, the last two weeks before a national (never local) election  2. low-energy, low-information voter…)

This friend — let’s call him C.R. — retorted to my proposal with the seemingly sensible question: “How ya gonna pay for that?”

The only cogent response to this facile jerk of the right knee is: “This is America. We are not the richest nation in the world. We are the richest nation in the history of the world. We can afford to pay for any goddamn thing we want to pay for.”

For example, C.R’s fiscally conservative Republicans in Congress (who coined the phrase, “How ya gonna pay for that?”) just wrapped a $1.5 trillion Christmas gift for the richest plutocrats in America. Well, to be “fair,” I have to concede that about $300 billion in tax cuts will be divvied up among roughly 304,000,000 “ordinary” Americans (reaping, per capita, about $700 a year — for a while). About $200 billion will go to the 50,000 richest dead people in America ($3.6 million each). The remaining trillion will be used to swell the Scrooge McDuck money pits of the largest corporations in the history of the world, who will a) tuck it away in nameless banks and numbered accounts in Grand Cayman, Lichtenstein and Cyprus, and b) kick it back thankfully to Republican candidates.

Most nations, ripped off to this extent, would simply collapse. The United States, the richest nation ever conceived, will take this colossal larceny in stride and just keep on spending, wasting and feeding gourmet cat food to Fluffy.

Here’s where Harry and Lou become relevant. How can we afford to rebuild our schools, create an entirely new renewable power grid, save our bridges from crumbling, open 100,000 day care centers, restart the space program, build new hospitals that welcome people to use them — affordably, and send our kids to state college for free?

Why not, when we can easily afford to do for our pets what Uncle Harry never imagined doing for his hundred generations of barn cats?

Every year, according to the American Pet Products Association, Americans spend $60 billion on pets, including $23 billion on food, $14.39 billion on supplies and medicine, $15.73 billion on vet care, and $5.24 billion on grooming and boarding. (This doesn’t include the the furniture they destroy, the rugs they ruin, the songbirds they kill and the shoes they eat.)

Consider also the issue of my baseball glove. When Dad bought my Christmas mitt, he increased his annual expense for “youth sports” from zero to about fifteen bucks. Of course, the number reverted to bupkes the following year and every subsequent year. Dad’s total youth-sports outlay for my entire childhood came down to about 85 cents a year.

If we had all stuck with Big Bill’s average of less than a buck a year, would American society suffer? Probably not. Kids would still feel the compulsion to go outside and play — something. I did. But never mind. Nowadays, youth sports cost American families $15.3 billion every year. The average lacrosse parent forks out $7,956 a year. Your typical hockey mom and dad cough up $7,013 for skates, pads and uniforms the kid will outgrow every year ’til he or she is 20 years old. The annual toll for Little League is $4,044, which would have buried me under a pile of 270 Roberto Clemente outfielder’s gloves.

The average family’s monthly outlay for youth sports, according to an Ameritrade study, equals their mortgage payment.

And then, for one last example, there’s Botox. Of the $16 billion Americans spend on elective cosmetic surgery — not usually covered by health insurance — $2.7 billion goes for these really icky injections, straight into women’s faces, of the botulin toxin, a poisonous compound that smooths wrinkles by paralyzing nerves. Think Cher. The arithmetic I learned at St. Mary’s School informs me that this expenditure on toxic vanity is enough to rebuild St. Mary’s, and the public school across the street, at least 500 times — at today’s prices.

So, how we gonna pay for that?

This might be the stupidest question in the history of the richest nation in the world. We’re already paying, and paying, and paying.

We’re just buying the wrong shit.