Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (15 page)

1995

ROSS LINKARD, LINKARD & SONS ANTIQUES, ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA: And what can you tell us, sir, about this bowl you’ve brought in—ceramic, it appears, with a rustic scene on it that looks to me like … Is that a man standing in a hole?

RED-FACED MAN: We’ve never really been able to determine whether he’s in a hole or it’s just a very short man. People were a lot smaller in those days, you know.

LINKARD: And may I ask how you come to have this bowl?

RED-FACED MAN: I bought it at a garage sale in New Jersey. From an old woman. Quite old. Blind, actually. Legally blind, that is. A lot of those legally blind people can see, you know. But I remember she never contradicted me when I kept saying how if we bought the bowl we’d probably have to spend a lot more money on it getting the stain out.

LINKARD: I don’t see any stain here.

RED-FACED MAN: Well, that’s just it. There wasn’t any stain. I read in one of those books about how to bargain that you have to take advantage of your adversary’s weakness, and I figured that her big weakness was that she couldn’t see. So I think I really outsmarted her and picked me up a real bargain.

LINKARD: You cheated a blind person to get this bowl?

RED-FACED MAN: I wouldn’t say “cheated.” It’s what you call a negotiating device. If some ignorant bozo came into your shop to sell you some old picture he’d found in the attic, and you recognized it as a Henry David Thoreau, would you tell him that? No, you’d take advantage of his weakness—ignorance, in this case—and you’d buy it for a pittance. Isn’t that what this whole business is about—putting one over on people?

LINKARD: Henry David Thoreau was not a painter.

RED-FACED MAN: Just my point. That would make the picture all the rarer, wouldn’t it?

LINKARD: Well, I’ve gone over this bowl, and I should say first that this type of artifact is relatively common in the Middle Atlantic states.

RED-FACED MAN: Is New Jersey a Middle Atlantic state?

LINKARD: Yes, indeed, it is.

RED-FACED MAN: Right! That checks out exactly! I think we’re onto something.

LINKARD: As I was saying, these artifacts are relatively common in the Middle Atlantic states. They tend to be wide, hemispherical vessels, used to hold food or fluids. We see them quite often in kitchens. This one has the classic bowl-like shape. Concave. And then, you see, if you turn it around it becomes convex. That’s classic. You’ll find that in all of them.

RED-FACED MAN: This is all starting to fall into place. I’ve obviously got a real find here.

LINKARD: Did the woman tell you anything about how the bowl happened to be in her possession?

RED-FACED MAN: She said it had been in her husband’s family for generations. Her husband had recently died and she felt she had to sell it, along with a lot of other items in the garage, to raise money for his headstone. But I wouldn’t try going to the bank with that headstone story. You probably hear that a dozen times a day in your line of work, right? I mean, if every helpless-looking old blind woman who said she wanted to sell something to get money to pay for her husband’s headstone really did, the countryside would be littered with headstones. We’d be tripping over headstones. The highways would be blocked.

LINKARD: Did she have any idea how the bowl got into the family?

RED-FACED MAN: Her husband had always been told that one of his ancestors got it as a wedding gift in the late eighteenth century from a wealthy flax broker. Since then, a cousin of mine has told me that in the late eighteenth century it was a custom to do pictures of men standing in holes, and that there was also a custom of doing pictures of short men. I understand that when they did both at the same time, you sometimes couldn’t see the man at all. So all that checks out.

LINKARD: Well, I don’t doubt that it could be of Middle Atlantic
origin, but I’d say it’s a piece that’s quite a bit more recent than the eighteenth century.

RED-FACED MAN: What makes you say that?

LINKARD: Well, for one thing, this inscription on the bottom here that says “microwave safe.”

RED-FACED MAN: You don’t think that could have been added later?

LINKARD: I think it’s highly unlikely. May I ask you, sir, how much you paid for this bowl?

RED-FACED MAN: I paid a hundred dollars. Got her down from a hundred and fifty.

LINKARD: You paid a hundred dollars for a bowl you can get for two or three dollars at Wal-Mart? You’ve got to be kidding!

RED-FACED MAN: I don’t see anything funny about this.

LINKARD: Oh, my, that’s rich. Mercy me. A hundred dollars. Lance, Charlie—did you hear that? A hundred dollars. Oh, that’s just too good.

RED-FACED MAN: Stop laughing!

LINKARD: Got her down from a hundred and fifty! Got the blind woman down from a hundred and fifty! I can’t stand it. I’m going to split a gut.… Sir, I don’t think you should hold the bowl above your head that way.… Argghhh!

[
Brrnng
. Cut to graphic.]

CERAMIC BOWL: $2 TO $3

2001

2009

The proposal by the House of Representatives to put a 10 percent tax surcharge on income over a million dollars a year—the proposal that so horrified the White House and caused grown senators to shake in their tasseled loafers—is seen by the tax specialists around our house as a considerably watered down version of what we call the Alice Tax.

If George Bush had heard about the original Alice Tax—which has been proposed for years by my wife, Alice—he would have had, to paraphrase the populist philosopher Bart Simpson, a horseshoe. The true Alice Tax would probably inspire what the medical profession sometimes calls “harumph palpitations” in those senators who used the word “confiscatory” to describe a surcharge that would have brought the highest possible tax on incomes over a million dollars a year to 41 percent. To state the provisions of the Alice Tax simply, which is the only way Alice allows them to be stated, it calls for this: After a certain level of income, the government would simply take everything. When Alice says confiscatory, she means confiscatory.

The Alice Tax is not Alice’s only venture into economic theory. She also came up with Alice’s Law of Compensatory Cashflow, which holds that not buying some luxury item you can’t afford is the equivalent of windfall income. So that she might say, “Well, of course we can go to the Caribbean, now that we have the money we saved by not buying that expensive sound system,” while I, a befuddled look on my face, start patting various pockets in a desperate effort to find the money she’s talking about. But Alice’s Law of Compensatory Cashflow is more in the realm of what the experts call Personal Finance. The Alice Tax is meant as Alice’s contribution to national economic policy.

The ruling principle of the Alice Tax is the concept of enoughness—a concept so foreign to the current American notions of
capitalism that senators are able to see naked confiscation in a tax rate that people who made over a million a year in just about any other industrialized country in the world would consider piddling. Alice believes that at a certain point an annual income is simply more than anybody could possibly need for even a lavish style of living. She is willing to discuss what that point is. In her more flexible moments, she is even willing to listen to arguments about which side of the line a style of living that included, say, a large oceangoing boat should fall on. But she insists that there is such a thing as enough—a point of view that separates her from the United States Senate.

A congressman I saw on television being asked why the surcharge that passed in the House of Representatives was defeated in the Senate pointed out that a tremendous number of senators are millionaires—although, if I may be permitted to be fair for a change, they may not take in that amount each and every year. He was, in other words, arguing for the interpretation that the senators were loath to vote for the millionaire’s tax not because their main bankrollers would be affected, but because they themselves would be affected—that rare modern example of absolutely direct democracy.

To be fair once again—actually, I hate being fair twice in a row, but I feel I’m representing Alice to a certain extent here—the senators would argue that they were not protecting their own incomes, but making certain that people vital to the economy were not robbed of their incentive. According to that reasoning, imposing a truly confiscatory tax after, say, an income of ten million dollars a year—a figure we can use for the sake of argument as long as Alice is not in the room—would mean that the entrepreneurial and highly motivated would stop their money grubbing as soon as they reached that level, and thus rob the economy of the expansion and activities their efforts bring.

In the first place, Alice would argue, they wouldn’t stop. She would argue that the very fact that they devote their lives to trying to make more money than anybody could possibly use indicates that they behave that way not because they want more money but because they don’t know any better. Also, the incentive argument assumes that what most of them do is economically beneficial to the public—an assumption that flies in the face of the past ten years of American history.

Let’s take the case of Michael Milken, who made $550 million in 1987. If the Alice Tax kicked in at $10 million, he might have continued trying to rake in the booty anyway, meaning the treasury would be $540 million richer. But let’s say he did call off his business dealings for the year when he reached an income of $10 million—which would have been on about January 6, according to my calculations. A lot of people who were laid off because merged or acquired corporations had to divert resources to pay debts might now be working. A lot of companies that went under because of the burden of truly junky junk bonds might have survived. A lot of the felonies committed by Milken after January 6 might have not been committed. A lot of people who were cheated by those felonies might not have been cheated. I rest Alice’s case.

1990

1990

I am faced with the problem of how to discuss the president’s new economic plan in a way that does not reveal that I have no understanding of economics whatsoever.

For a while, I used the old method of devising one sentence that made me sound rather knowledgeable. Whenever the subject came up, I repeated the sentence in a confident tone of voice, even though I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what it meant. For discussions of the new economic plan, my sentence was “The question is: What’s going to happen when the deficit-reduction component begins to bite?”

This is a sentence I cobbled together from a couple of different phrases I heard on the radio in a discussion between two economists who were both unintelligible in an impressive way. One expert said the key would be when something started to bite, although I didn’t catch precisely what it was. For all I know, it might have been trout. The other expert mentioned the deficit-reducing component. I stuck the two phrases together. That opening—“The question is”—was my own little contribution.

I liked the result. It had a nice, authoritative ring to it. I’ve always thought that the word “component” alone could make you sound as if you knew what you were talking about, and this seemed to confirm that theory. For a while, my sentence was very effective. People would say, “What do you think of the economic plan?”

“The question is: What’s going to happen when the deficit-reduction component begins to bite?” I would say, in a voice that I hoped sounded like the voice of a tweedy man with a pipe.

“That’s a good point,” they would say.

“It’s just one aspect,” I’d say, without bothering to include the fact that I didn’t know another. In fact, if you wanted to be absolutely literal about it, I didn’t exactly know that one.

“Precisely,” they’d say.

How was I able to get away with such blatant fakery? Simple: Most of the people I talk to don’t have much more of an understanding of economics than I do. They’re faking just as much as I am. They simply used another method: unfocused agreement (“that’s a good point … precisely”).

Actually, that might be overstating it a bit. Almost everyone knows more about economics than I do. I believe that the last time I gave any serious thought to the subject was when I was about eight years old, and I haven’t progressed much since then. Listening as an eight-year-old to my parents and their friends talk about how nobody had any money during the Great Depression, I asked my father, “But where did all the money go?”

He couldn’t tell me, and nobody since has been able to tell me.

“That’s not the point,” a businessman I know said many years later, when I asked him where all the money went during the Great Depression. “That’s not the way you’d express the economic situation that obtained.”