by Andy Rooney
There must be thousands of corporations shaving their taxes with bookkeeping tricks of which the average citizen knows nothing. They give free enterprise a bad name and make ordinary Americans yearn for more, not less, government oversight of Big Business.
It’s really strange that while the religions so many people profess to believe in are generous in their philosophies about the distribution of money, the majority of religious Americans approve of the dog-eat-dog economic premises of capitalism. We are all becoming more aware that too many people are not getting a fair share.
A relatively small number of people are smarter, more energetic and more capable than others, and they end up getting 90 percent of all the good stuff. Without discouraging this able minority, we have to find a way to keep the Enrons of our capitalist society from stealing so much that they turn all of us off the free enterprise system.
There are still lots of great corporations making big profits from producing good products, but in recent years, too many American companies have been making nothing but money. Their only product is on paper; they don’t make anything but stock market statistics. They shuffle their books, buy out small competitors, borrow and loan money so fast that bookkeepers can’t keep up.
It seems inevitable that more people will begin thinking we have to devise a better system than either communism or capitalism for distributing the good things on earth. The great power of big business is out of control.
ALL HAIL THE RICH!
We Americans wave the flag and admire our own greatness but fortunately we have a mitigating tendency to be critical of ourselves. We agree with the articles we read about ourselves saying we’re decadent. We know we have too many luxuries and spend most of our effort trying to acquire more of them.
We nod, agree with the criticism and keep working to get all we can. There’s no question that we have an unlimited appetite for the limited supply of good things on earth. Neither should there be any argument that, with a lot of exceptions, the most capable people get most of the good things. These are the people we call “the rich.” We call anyone rich who makes a lot more than we do. We have a natural aversion to the rich. We hate them but we want to be one of them.
The rich are the bad guys. If anybody needs a PR agent, it’s rich, successful Americans. We take great satisfaction in complaining about the kind of people we’re working so hard to be like.
You never hear anyone say anything nice about the wealthy. When politicians talk about taxes, they want to raise them on the rich. Politicians never say they want to reduce taxes on the rich. Something like 6 percent of Americans pay more than 50 percent of all personal income taxes the government takes in. The top 1 percent of people pay 36 percent of all income tax. You’d think it would dampen their interest in being rich but it only whets their appetite for more.
The number of luxuries we enjoy can seem ridiculous in a world where so many people are starving to death. Expensive clothing, jewelry, pampered pets, five-bedroom homes for two people—do we need all this in a world where so many people don’t have enough to eat? Should we feel guilty because 20 million American families own three cars while there are whole countries still using donkey carts?
There are good things to be said about the rich that no one ever says. So help me for saying so, but I don’t think the poor work as hard as the rich. Is this blasphemous? Will I go to hell for thinking so? Is this just an arrogant American attitude? You don’t see a lot of lazy rich people.
I cannot stop thinking that people seeking to acquire the luxuries of life work harder to get them than people working for the bare necessities. Many people work an eight-hour day, knock off and go home. They sleep and watch television until they get up and go to work tomorrow again the next day. They have enough to buy what they need to eat and pay for a roof over their head.
The appetite successful people have for more has created more, and that’s not all bad. There’s no limit to what they want and try to get. They are never satisfied because as soon as they get one thing, they want something else. They want to go out on the lake, so they buy a rowboat. First thing we know they want one with an outboard motor. What they really want is a yacht.
Desire is a great motivating force. The fact that our desires are so often for things that provide physical pleasure doesn’t diminish their importance as the principle driving force behind American business. We probably ought to have some motivating force superior to greed but we can’t seem to find one. Schools haven’t taught one. Religion hasn’t come up with anything. The businessman who goes to church on Sunday is no less acquisitive at work Monday morning than one who never goes.
We ought to start being nicer to rich people.
THE BILLION-DOLLAR POOH
One of history’s great injustices is how often the great artists of any age—painters, musicians and writers—fail to make a comfortable living from their work. Long after Gauguin, Beethoven and Shakespeare were gone, their work still produces billions of dollars. In their lifetime they got small change.
Listening to the radio last weekend I was fascinated by a report involving literary rights and the Walt Disney Company. It’s always fun when you know some things about the story that the reporter telling it does not.
Amy Wallace, a very good writer for Los Angeles magazine, was giving details of the problem Disney is having with a lawsuit brought by Shirley Slesinger Lasswell. Her husband, Steve Slesinger, who died in 1953, owned the rights to A. A. Milne’s characters, including Winnie-the-Pooh.
Apparently, Pooh is making more money, billions a year, for Disney than Mickey Mouse and, while Disney has been paying about $I2 million a year to Steve’s widow, she claims that’s peanuts compared with what they ought to be paying her. She is known in Hollywood now as “The Pooh Lady.”
I knew Steve Slesinger well. At the end of World War II, I had written a book about my experiences with the Army newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, with my friend Bud Hutton. Steve was operating as a sort of literary entrepreneur and we took the book to him to see if he thought there was any chance of selling it for a movie.
Over our first lunch together, Steve told us how he got started. When he finished college, his parents gave him $2,000 as a graduation gift. He decided to go to London. While he was there, he sought out A. A. Milne. He had always loved Winnie-the-Pooh. This was about 1930, the beginning of the Depression, and prices on everything were down. Steve offered to buy Winnie-the-Pooh rights in the United States for $I,500. A. A. Milne was not rolling in money at the time and he accepted the offer. It was Steve’s $I,500 that has, since about 1960, been producing $I2 million a year for his dissatisfied widow.
Steve was easily likeable and disarming. In his back offices, an artist, Fred Harman, worked on a cartoon strip called Red Ryder, which appeared in 400 newspapers. Amy Wallace said the strip was Steve’s idea, but I believe Fred Harman took it to Steve, who then bought the rights from him. That’s the way Steve worked. Fred always said Steve paid him “about $60 a week.”
Steve was a merchandizing genius. He went to the Daisy Air Rifle Company and sold them a deal to make a Red Ryder BB gun. In Hollywood, Republic Pictures agreed to pay Steve for the rights to make ten B movies based on Red Ryder. Fred Harman, meanwhile, was cranking out the strip in Steve’s back room for $60 a week.
Steve called one day to say that MGM was buying our book for $55,000 and we were going to work at MGM as screen writers for $I,500 a week. We were two young men just out of the Army where we’d been making $I35 a month as staff sergeants and MGM was going to pay us what seemed like half the money in the world.
We were so naive as business people that Bud and I hardly noticed that Steve was taking 50 percent of the $55,000 and half of our salary. It never occurred to us to resent him.
It’s hard to side with a greedy corporation like Disney in this lawsuit. But when the creator of all this, A. A. Milne, was paid a mere $I,500 for his genius and sixty years later the widow of a smart operator who ha
d nothing whatsoever to do with the literary invention of Winnie-the-Pooh is unhappy with $I2 million a year, something seems wrong.
NAME LOTTERY LOSERS
There is nothing more stimulating to the brain than getting mad. I am easily angered (grade school English teachers correct me when I use “mad” for “angry”) and there are so many things in the world to get mad about that my brain is seldom at ease.
Nothing so regularly angers me as much as stories about lottery winners. There were big headlines recently about the man in West Virginia, Andrew Whittaker, who won $3I5 million.
There ought to be a law forbidding newspapers, radio or television stations from reporting the name of a lottery winner unless, at the same time, they listed the name of every single loser. The names of everyone who bought a losing ticket for the same lottery won by Mr. Whittaker would not fit in all the pages of any newspaper. Governments are empowered to do for people what people are not able to do for themselves. They should protect idiots from their natural inclination to take chances with astronomically high odds.
If you wonder who buys lottery tickets, look at the people who line up to buy them. They are invariably the poorest, least-educated, most unemployed among us. Some people on welfare wait for their checks, not to buy groceries but to buy lottery tickets. I feel sorry for them but I also think we should help them by making it impossible for them to waste their money—and ours—on lottery tickets.
This all came to me this morning, driving to work, when I heard a radio commercial imploring people to buy tickets for the New York State lottery. When I got to the office, I set out to find how much the state spends on commercials like the one I heard. Last year, the state spent $24 million on lottery advertising. Am I the only one outraged to find that the state is spending that kind of money inducing its citizens to participate in so stupid a thing as buying lottery tickets? Originally, proponents of a state-operated lottery said that people were going to gamble whether it was legal or not. The mob bosses were already making a fortune on the illegal numbers racket. They argued that as long as people were going to gamble anyway, the state, not the mob bosses, should profit from it.
If people were going to gamble anyway, how come the state has to spend $24 million a year talking them into it with advertising? State officials promised to do all sorts of good things for education with lottery money. Have you noticed a big improvement in our schools because of all the lottery money pouring in?
Gambling is a national sickness that has become epidemic in the last twenty-five years. Thirty-seven states now have lotteries and twenty-nine allow gambling casinos. It wasn’t long ago that gambling was restricted to a few places like Las Vegas. Atlantic City, a once prosperous seashore resort, somehow lost its luster, went broke and talked New Jersey into letting it open an East Coast gambling operation to compete with Las Vegas. Then some smart operators, preying on the guilt feeling we have as a nation about the desperate condition of Indians in our country, opened “Indian” casinos, most of which are about as Indian as I am.
Lotteries are immoral and stupid. They produce nothing. It is the transfer of money from the dumb poor to the smart rich. It undermines the American work ethic of which we’re so proud. It suggests that anyone can be successful and live handsomely without working for it. All he or she has to do is guess the right number and retire for life.
THE HORSE RACE ECONOMY
Predicting whether the economy is going to get better or worse is about as much a science as picking the winner of a horse race. The race may actually be an easier call because at least you know the horses are honest.
Just when things look as if they’re getting better, they get worse, and just when things look as though they’re getting worse, they get better. The decline in employment is more under President Bush than it’s been in twenty years. This is the first time since the 1930s in which the actual number of people working is less than in the previous administration.
The last time there were actual job losses for four years in a row, Herbert Hoover was President. The total reached 7.7 percent. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the number of jobs increased by 18 percent. The job loss statistics today are amazing—and don’t think you’re not going to hear about them at election time. The number of jobs increased by 22 percent under Bill Clinton’s presidency, the biggest jump in history. Under George W. Bush, overall employment is down 2.37 percent. It may not be his fault and Bill Clinton may have been lucky, but Democratic candidates won’t be telling you that.
A headline this week read: “Jobless rate at 9-year high.”
Of all the things about the economy I don’t understand, I understand unemployment the least. There isn’t any work that needs to be done? Is that what unemployment means? I look at the business I’m in and see nothing but work that needs to be done. I look at my own personal and home life and see nothing but jobs that need doing that I can’t get anyone to do.
Too many of those things that need to be done at home are things I either don’t know how to do or they’re things that would take me longer than is worth my time. We all draw the line somewhere. My hourly wage is more than I’d be willing to pay myself to do the work. I’m looking for someone down the wage scale to do it for me. It’s a cold, cruel world.
The reason the unemployment rate is so high is that a lot of people looking for work have a higher opinion of their value than the people who have work that needs to be done have of it. It’s also true that many people draw a line between blue- and white-collar jobs, and those who think of themselves as white-collar, college-educated, never consider doing physical work, no matter how badly they need a job.
It’s clear that we need more people who know how to do things with their hands. We should forget this collar color division. We have enough administrators, computer technicians, sales engineers and board-of-directors directors. What we’re short of are people who actually know how to make something, do something, or fix something. We long ago passed the point where the hourly wage for a skilled craftsman exceeds that of the average office worker.
I took my 1966 Sunbeam Tiger to a mechanic last week because the brakes weren’t working. He told me it would be a while before he could get at it because he lost the two men who’d been helping him. He was working alone. He’d hire a capable mechanic in a minute, he said, but he can’t find one because almost everyone goes to college now and they don’t teach what he needs done in college.
I don’t know how we ever got thinking that physical labor was demeaning. I wish more colleges would set out to convince students that reading good literature, knowing something about history and philosophy and having a good education is not inimical to working with your hands.
IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID
The politicians running for President don’t really give us much to go on. They make it hard to decide who we want to vote for. Most of us feel more strongly about who we’re against than who we’re for. It’s easier to get someone to say they hate one politician than that they like another.
Polls show that Americans are more worried about the economy now than about Iraq, but most of us are economic ignoramuses. We know, in a general sort of way, whether things are going well or badly because we see the headlines about stock prices being up or down. Economic theory eludes us, so we don’t really know what we’re worried about.
When I was quite young—before I went to college—I had a temporary love affair with the ideas of an American journalist writing from Moscow named John Reed. He was Harvard-educated, a brilliant writer—and a communist. He was the only American apologist for the kind of government that ruled Russia after the revolution. I wasn’t smart enough to be a communist—or a capitalist.
I got over my infatuation with John Reed, but I’ve never given up my suspicion that there’s something wrong with the capitalist, free enterprise system. Selfishness is the God of Capitalism. It doesn’t seem right and it’s a disappointment to me that it works. Success is the only thing in capitalism�
�s favor. There is no intellectual defense for it.
In the real world, businesses cheat to get ahead and the quality of the product always gets worse when a big company takes over a smaller one. Unfortunately, however, we can’t devise a system that works any better.
As early as the late I800s, a handful of businessmen like the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, DuPonts and Morgans had accumulated so much money, while millions had none, that it became apparent to lawmakers something was wrong with pure, unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism. The business tycoons were known affectionately as “The Robber Barons.” To curb their excesses, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.
The Antitrust Act provided government regulation designed to prevent a big, rich company that could afford to do it, from selling its product below cost until the smaller companies selling the same product were forced out of business. At that point, with no competition, the corporate giant could charge anything it wanted.
Most people in business are personally honest, but it’s sad and true that most of our laws pertaining to business assume that business would cheat the consumer if it were not inhibited by law. What’s sad is the assumption is true. The ethical standards of too many businesses fall short of the personal standards of the people running them. I don’t know why that is. Kenneth Lay, the chairman of Enron, stole millions but wouldn’t pick your pocket or cheat in a poker game.
The biggest problem anyone like me has in supporting government regulation of anything is not economic theory or Republican inclinations. What’s wrong is the assumption that elected officials are smart enough to run business any better than businessmen. (I call women in business “businessmen.”)
The fact is neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism works. So we lean one way or the other and draw the line between being conservative and liberal on business issues. If the administration is dominated by Democrats, we draw the line one place. If it’s dominated by Republicans, we draw the line another place. President Bush has tried, successfully, to draw the line closer to where the business community likes it. As an elected Republican President, he gets to do that.