Bad Habits

by Dave Barry

  So we’ll be in good shape after the war. And there are advantages I haven’t even talked about, such as that the Miss America Pageant will probably be postponed for a couple of years at least.

  Caution: Government At Work

  I’ve been seeing these television commercials lately in which Tug McGraw, the noted nutritionist and left-handed relief pitcher, points out in a very cheerful manner that many major soft drinks contain caffeine. Tug is concerned about this, because caffeine is one of the many substances that have been shown to cause laboratory experiments involving rats.

  Tug implies we’d all be better off if we drank 7-Up, which does not contain caffeine. He neglects to point out that 7-Up contains sugar, which, as you are no doubt aware, usually causes instant death. But I can’t blame Tug for forgetting to warn us about sugar: nobody can keep up with all the things you’re not supposed to eat and drink, because scientists come up with new ones all the time.

  You young readers should feel very fortunate to live in an era in which we know how dangerous everything is. When I was a child, people thought everything was safe except communism, smutty books, and tobacco, and a lot of people weren’t sure about tobacco. For example, the cigarette manufacturers thought tobacco was fine, and as a public service they ran many advertisements in which attractive persons offered thoughtful scientific arguments in favor of smoking, such as: “Luckies separate the men from the boys ... but not from the girls,” and “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.”

  But then the U.S. Surgeon General, who is the highest-ranking surgeon in the Army, decided that cigarettes are bad for people, and recommended that the manufacturers put little warnings on cigarette packs. Congressmen from tobacco-growing states offered to help with the wording, so at first the warning was a bit vague:

  NOTE—The U.S. Surgeon General thinks that cigarettes could possibly be somewhat less than ideal in terms of your health, but of course he could be wrong.

  But over the years the warning has gotten stronger, so now it says:

  WARNING—Cigarettes will kill you, you stupid jerk.

  These days the government won’t even allow cigarette manufacturers to advertise on television. All you see are those public health commercials in which smug ten-year-old girls order you not to smoke, to the point where you want to rush right out and inhale an entire pack of unfiltered Camels just for spite.

  Some of you may be wondering why the same government that goes around warning people not to smoke also subsidizes farmers who grow tobacco. The answer is that the government is afraid that if it stops paying the farmers to grow tobacco, they’ll start doing something even worse, such as growing opium or beating crippled children with baseball bats. So the government figures the wisest course is to pay them to grow tobacco, then warn people not to smoke it.

  The anti-smoking campaign was such a hit that the government decided to investigate the chemicals that make diet soft drinks taste sweet. Researchers wearing white laboratory coats filled a huge vat with Tab and dropped rats into it from a sixty-foot-high catwalk, and they noticed that most of the rats died, some before they even reached the vat. So the government banned the chemicals, but the diet-soda manufacturers immediately developed new ones, which also failed the vat test. At this point, the government realized that the manufacturers could come up with chemicals as fast as it could ban them, and that at the rate things were going the country would face a major rat shortage. So the government decided to let the manufacturers keep their chemicals, but it ordered them to put a little warning on diet-soft-drink containers that says: “Do not put this product in a big vat and drop rats into it from a catwalk.”

  Nowadays, Warning the Public is a major industry. Every schoolchild knows the hazards associated with cigarettes, caffeine, diet soft drinks, sugar, alcohol, dairy products, nondairy products, electronic games, air, league bowling, and chemicals in general. Any day now, you’ll pick up the newspaper and read:

  BOSTON—Laboratory scientists at a very major scientific university announced today that everything is terribly, terribly dangerous. Dr. Creston L Pesthole, who headed the research project, said scientists got a bunch of rats and just let them lead normal lives—eating, drinking, sleeping, watching television, making appointments, etc. “They all died within a matter of days,” reported Dr. Pesthole. “Most of them had cancer. Some of them also had irregular bowel movements.” Dr. Pesthole said the scientists weren’t sure what the study proves, but they feel the government ought to do something about it.

  Until we get that Final Warning, we’ll all have to make do as best we can. I, for one, plan to consume nothing but filtered rainwater. For amusement, I may take a chance on some smutty books.

  Taxation Without Reservation

  A Taxing Proposal

  Here it is again, income tax time, and I imagine many of you readers, especially the ones with smaller brains, are eagerly awaiting my annual tax advice column. Those of you who were fortunate enough to read last year’s column no doubt recall that I advised you to cheat, on the grounds that by reducing the amount of money you gave the government, you’d be supporting President Reagan in his program to reduce government spending. I’m proud to report that many of you went all out to support the President, and I’m sure he’d thank you personally if the Secret Service allowed him to visit federal prisons.

  But this year we have an entirely new plan, taxwise. This year, President Reagan needs all the money he can get, because he was going over the figures recently with his aides, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and they noticed that the government was going to be short by something like $200 billion. “Gosh,” chuckled the President. “That’s even bigger than those humongous deficits the Democrats used to run up when I went around making fun of them on the radio! Why, for all the difference I’ve made in the past two years, the nation might just as well have had Ted Kennedy as president! Or a toaster!” Then they all had a good laugh and decided to jack up taxes. The other option, of course, was to cut government spending, but they rejected that because they have already cut spending to the bone in the form of raising it by about $100

  billion a year.

  The Democrats are happy as clams about raising taxes. The Democrats believe that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have created the Internal Revenue Service. So finally, after two years of bickering, the President and the Democrats are beginning to see eye-to-eye on the importance of taking money away from the public. Recently, for example, the Democrats supported the President’s plan to have a new gasoline tax under which the government will take $50 billion from motorists such as yourself! This will create jobs. See, if you were allowed to keep the money, you wouldn’t create jobs with it. You’d just throw it into the bushes or something. But the government will spend it, thereby creating jobs. In this case, the government will spend the $50 billion on a major road-repair program, including several million dollars for highway-construction signs that say:

  CONGRESSMAN ROBERT “BOB” LUNGER and the United States Department of Transportation are pleased to announce that for the next 86.8 miles there will be federal traffic cones all over the place and hundreds of friends and relatives of a contractor who contributed to the campaign of CONGRESSMAN ROBERT “BOB” LUNGER standing around with red flags directing traffic so casually that they may occasionally wave your car right into an oncoming tractor-trailer filled with propane gas, sorry for the inconvenience, but as CONGRESSMAN ROBERT “BOB” LUNGER pointed out when he flew in by federal helicopter to make a speech taking credit for this $364.7 million highway-repair project, we cannot allow our nation’s highways to deteriorate, especially the ones that provide access to land owned by CONGRESSMAN ROBERT “BOB” LUNGER. Thank you.

  But the $50 billion won’t be nearly enough to allow Congress to create jobs on the level it would like. And on top of that, President Reagan needs money to buy additional exploding devices to defend you with. So what can you, the ordinary taxpayer, do to help? Here’s what: this
year, when you prepare your income tax return, I want you to lie in the government’s favor. I want you to declare more income than you actually received, and I want you to deliberately fail to report large numbers of legitimate deductions.

  Some of you will be caught, of course. Some of you may be called in to face IRS audits. You may even be forced to accept a large refund, thus depriving the government of money it could have used for your benefit. These risks are unavoidable, but they can be minimized if a few of us continue to cheat, so the IRS will be less likely to see any particular pattern. I’m willing to volunteer to be one of the few. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

  Our Patriotic Booty

  I say we all help President Reagan cut government waste. I say we cheat on our income taxes this year.

  I mean, let’s face it: the reason the government wastes hundreds of billions of dollars is that we give it hundreds of billions of dollars. Even an intelligent organization would have trouble spending that much money usefully; the government can’t even come close. So it ends up spending money on things like the Office for Micronesian Status Negotiations. I am serious. According to the Congressional Directory, one of the things the government spends your money on is an office devoted to negotiating the status of Micronesia. I’m not saying its employees are goofing off. I’m sure they get up early in the morning, negotiate the status of Micronesia all day, then come home and collapse. I’m just saying that if they haven’t been able to get Micronesia straightened out after all these years, then the hell with Micronesia.

  Now I know President Reagan has promised to comb through the budget and get rid of everything we don’t need except nuclear weapons, but I seriously doubt he’ll ever even notice the Office for Micronesian Status Negotiations, let alone the International Pacific Halibut Commission. You didn’t know we had a Halibut Commission, did you? Well, we do. It’s in Seattle, Washington. When the folks at the Halibut Commission answer the phone, they say: “Good morning, Halibut Commission.” They’re just as bold as brass about it. No shame whatsoever. They know Ron will never find out about them, and even if he does, some congressman will claim the Halibut Commission is vital and therefore needs the support of all taxpayers, including the ones who live in Kentucky and don’t even like halibut. And then some other congressman will say: “Well, if you’re going to keep the Halibut Commission, I’m going to keep the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission.” Before long, the budget will be bigger than it was when Ron started to cut it.

  So let’s help Ron out: let’s keep the money out of the government’s hands altogether. Let’s each claim an extra thirty or forty dependents on our tax returns this year. We should view it as our patriotic duty, sort of like buying war bonds.

  Another patriotic thing we can do is send Ron lists of government activities we do not want to pay for anymore. The top item on my list is newsletters from congressmen. The way I see it, we taxpayers have an agreement with our congressmen: we give them fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year each and offices and staffs and traveling expenses and cheap haircuts and subsidized dining rooms and other privileges, and in return they go away for two years. If we valued them or their opinions, we never would have voted to send them away in the first place. The last thing we want them to do is clutter up our mailboxes with accounts of their activities:

  Dear 647th Congressional District Resident:

  I’m just taking a minute out from my hectic schedule down here in the nation’s capital to let you know that my schedule down here is very hectic. As a member of the House Joint Plumbing Committee’s Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Spigots and Drains, I recently went on a two-week Special Fact-Finding Mission to Rio de Janeiro. Here’s the fact I found: In the Southern Hemisphere, water goes down the drain in a clockwise direction, whereas in the Northern Hemisphere, which includes the 647th Congressional District, water goes down the drain in a counter-clockwise direction. Or else it’s the other way around. Next month, I plan to go to Argentina to determine which way water goes down the drain there, and whether any of this is related to the spread of International Communism.

  All the best,

  Congressman Bob Bugpit

  Here are some other government activities I don’t want to pay for anymore:

  National weeks and months, as in National Seedless Prune Week or National Faucet Repair Month. All programs that are administered by people whose titles contain more than three words. Take, for example, the National Science Foundation’s Division of Engineering. The Division Director, Physics, could stay, because his title contains just three words. But the Division Director, Division of Polar Programs, would be given two weeks to clear out his or her desk and find useful work. And the Executive Assistant, Planning and Evaluation, Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences, would be taken out and shot.

  Taxpayer’s Blues

  I am beginning to suspect that many of your big-time Washington national news reporters have coleslaw for brains. My evidence is that for the past few months they have been telling us that the Reagan administration and the Congress are busy reducing government spending. You can’t pick up a newspaper or turn on a television newscast without reading or hearing about all these drastic budget cuts. If you were a very stupid person, you might get the impression that the administration and the Congress really are reducing government spending. This, of course, is utterly ridiculous.

  The big-time Washington national news reporters evidently have fallen into the obvious trap of believing that politicians actually intend to do what they say they intend to do. Administration officials say they intend to reduce government spending. Most senators say they intend to reduce government spending. And most members of the House of Representatives say they, too, intend to reduce government spending. Only a fool would conclude that they intend to do anything but increase government spending.

  And they will increase it. No matter what budget they end up adopting, next year the government will spend more money, and collect more taxes, than it does this year. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

  What happened is that just before he left office, Jimmy Carter (remember Jimmy Carter?) proposed to increase the federal budget enormously. Then along came Ronald Reagan, the Taxpayer’s Friend, the Foe of Big Government. Ron decided to replace Jimmy’s enormous budget increase with one that was merely huge. So for the last few months, the politicians have been arguing over whether to increase the budget enormously or just hugely. The news media refer to this process as “Cutting” the budget.

  The best way to understand this whole issue is to look at what the government does: it takes money away from some people, keeps a bunch of it, and gives the rest to other people. This means there are two kinds of people in the United States:

  People who pay more to the government than they get from it (taxpayers); People who get more from the government than they pay to it (senators, welfare recipients, cabinet members, defense contractors, government employees, etc.)

  So if you are just a plain old ordinary taxpayer, the Great Budget Debate doesn’t really concern you. One way or another, the government is going to spend more of your money; the only real issue is who is going to get it.

  For the past forty years, the government preferred to use your money for Social Programs. Most of these are aimed at Helping the Poor. Now the problem poor people have is obvious: they don’t have enough money. They can’t afford food, housing, or medical care. The simple, obvious, efficient way for the government to help them is to give them money so they can buy these things. So that is not how the government does it.

  See, if the government merely gave money to poor people, no matter how inefficiently it did it, it would need only one bureaucracy. This would force a lot of people to leave government employment and find honest work. So instead of simply giving money to poor people, the government Administers Programs for them. You’ve got your food programs. You’ve got your housing programs. You’ve got your medical care programs. And so on. This way you ge
t lots of administrators. You also guarantee that poor people remain poor, since they’re so busy being administered they don’t have time to work. This is fine with the poverty-program administrators; the worst possible thing that could happen to them is for poor people to stop being poor. If that happened, the administrators would have nothing to administer. But fortunately, poverty has continued; in fact, it has been a major growth industry. A lot of people have made very good livings Helping the Poor.

  Then along came Ronald Reagan. Ron believes taxpayers are tired of having their money taken away and used for massive, inefficient social programs. He wants to take their money away and use it for massive, inefficient defense programs. So the poverty-program administrators are extremely unhappy, while the defense-program administration are tickled pink. But they have the same problem the social-program administrators had: They have to figure out how to spend the extra billions on defense without actually making the country any safer, because if they really do make it safer, they won’t be able to demand more money.

  This is tough, because the United States is obviously not directly threatened except by Russian missiles, and we already have enough missiles to blow up the whole world if the Russians ever attack us. So the defense program administrators have come up with a very imaginative plan: they have decided to defend virtually every country in the world other than Russia and its allies. Since most of these countries are hopelessly unstable, we could spend every dollar every taxpayer ever earns to defend them and never come close to succeeding. But the defense-program administrators will certainly be busy.

  Right now, for example, they are busily administering the defense of El Salvador, a wretched little country that has suddenly become Vital to Our National Security. According to many people familiar with El Salvador, including a former U.S. ambassador there, the El Salvadoran government spends much of its time shooting El Salvadorans. But our government is sending them arms anyway. I mean, it has to do something with the money. Anything but let taxpayers keep it.