"Economists" Discuss Tax Cut

By Charles M. Guthrie
of the editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
March 1, 1964


   WE WERE talking about the income tax cut.  Aunt Martha said as soon as Uncle Horace started getting a few more dollars in his pay check they were going to salt this extra money away.
   I objected.  "You haven't got the idea at all.  You're supposed to spend this money and pump new blood into the economy so everybody can be prosperous.  We have four million unemployed."

   "You mean we have to spend more money than we're spending now?"

   "DEFINITELY.  Business is not good enough.  The gross national product is supposed to hit $623 billion.  If it does we'll have one of the best years in history.  That's what Luther Hodges, the secretary of commerce, says.  So does Walter Heller, the President's chief economic advisor.  But if everyone turns skinflint and squirrels the extra money away there might as well not be a tax cut.  In this day and age, you can't be afraid to spend money, even money you don't have," I explained.

     "But then you go into debt."
     "Sure you do.  There's nothing wrong with debt.  If you never bought a car until you had the  money to pay for it, where would Detroit  be today?  People like you need to get hep to the modern use of credit."

   "WELL," Aunt Martha snapped, "I know this rudimentary fact about credit.  You finally have to pay for what you buy.  And this tax cut looks fishy to me.  It looks like politics.  It'll mean less income for the government, won't it?"
   "Well, yes at first, but of course...""
   "And they aren't going to spend any less money--cut off any jobholders or squeeze the Pentagon or anything  like that?"
   I said I hadn't heard so.
   "In other words, the country will spend just as much but take in less and get prosperous.  I wish Horace and I had learned about this years ago."

   "BUT YOU forget that the people will be spending more.  New plants will go up.  Fellows who don't have jobs will get them and start paying taxes.  Uncle Sam will lift himself up by his own bootstraps."
   "And push down the consumer.  Prices will go up for sure.  Hamburger will go out of sight.  The sick dollar will get sicker.  Mark my word.  This money we save on taxes will be eaten up by inflation."
   "Oh, you don' get the picture," I said, sick of arguing with someone so ignorant of economics.  "It's part of the war on poverty.  You aren't in favor of poverty, are you?"

   "No.  Not for anybody--including me.  And a good way to tumble into it is to spend more than you make. If we have to spend ourselves broke to get full employment, sooner or later someone will get hurt and it may be everybody, including Uncle Sam."

   "But the government is not an individual.  The government is all the people.  The public debt represents money the people owe to themselves.  It isn't like what you owe the plumber."

   "Fiddlesticks!  It's debt, isn't it?  It gobbles up  more than $9 billion in interest a year, doesn't it?  And for your information, Horace has paid the plumber-- and without borrowing money to do it."


Copyright 2013 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Technical Wonders Are Nice to Know About

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
October 28 1953

   WHEN so many people know so many things that you don't, you are forced to a couple of conclusions. Either you didn't go to the right night school or aren't alive enough to notice what's going on.
   It forever puzzles me how the other guy knows all about radio and television and automobiles and photography.  All are now part of the everyday.  People know about color tubes and how automatic transmissions work and about compression ratios and tape recorders and wide-angle lenses and exposure meters and communication gimmicks.

   EVERYBODY does but me.  All I know is when a tire is flat and when I need gas.  I know when the radio is out of kilter and when the phone line is busy.  That about covers my capacity in the technical field.
   A pal of mine, name of Bill Weber, knows all about these mysteries, though and took up the technological cudgels in my behalf a couple of years ago.  He soon should be convinced he's tilling barren ground.  I'm as dumb now as I was then and why he bothers I don't know.  Maybe because when our canasta group gets together and he isn't telling about the traveling salesman he usually yaks about the march of science and would be happier if my responses were a shade sharper than "You don't mean to tell me!" or "For gosh sakes!"

   TO HELP get me abreast of today's world he invited me to an open house at the phone company last winter.  I covered 12 floors and saw science at work on each one but all I took away was a souvenir key ring and a rose for my wife.
   They exposed  me to crossbar switches, line finders, horizontal intermediate distributing frames, circuit breakers and normal post-contacts and I didn't get the foggiest notion of what any of it was about.
   I saw a microwave demonstration and , on a burst of mad impulse, asked the guide why they still used wire if microwave was so hot.  Why not put the whole works on a radio relay system and get rid of all that wire?  I doubt that my proposal went into the company suggestion box.  The guide gave me a smile both patronizing and withering, like it would be just as well if I would keep my ears open and my mouth shut.

   BILL SAID the other night we should go to the camera show at the Radisson and maybe I could pick up an interesting hobby and also learn to take pictures.  I told him I already could.  My wife gave a bitter laugh at that and recalled the snaps I took last summer with the heads cut off.  I said maybe I should take our box Brownie to the camera show and make like one of the boys but she thought that would be a bit ostentatious.
   While we drove to the show in Bill's car he explained about the transmission.  He said it had a direct drive clutch which engaged when you were going from 20 to 60 miles an hour--depending how hard you poured on the gas.  Torque-converter action then stopped, he said, and the car was in solid mechanical direct drive.  Just like it was, I guess, after they got rid of the horse.
   I didn't know what he was talking about so had no notion whether the contraption was good or bad.  My only conviction about cars is that the motor industry's finest hour came with the self-starter and when they abandoned the notion that the side-curtain was adequate for keeping the riding public out of the wet.

TO ANYONE who doesn't know an F 2.8 lens from the butt end of a beer bottle the camera show was quite an eye-opener.  I trailed along behind Bill, letting him ask the questions while I gaped around and mumbled "gee whiz" and "what will they think of next?"
   When I got home I told my wife it was high time we got into the three-D home movie act.  I told her about the tape recorders and fancy cameras and projectors I had seen.  I said we should begin enjoying such stuff right away.  I said it was time we began living.
   "You can't get into an argument with me there," she said.

Copyright 2013 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Valentine is a Big Help in Making Marriage Tick

By Charles M. Guthrie
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune 
Feb 13 1954

 IN THE FIELD of romance I am not particularly nimble and would not presume to advise the lovelorn.  But with Valentine's day coming on and spring not far off I am moved to pen a few sweet nothings--to expound on affairs of the heart and point the way to enduring matrimony.
   After a 26-year survey of the problem I believe that the business of getting along in marriage simmers down to one big fundamental and that after this has been pounded into your skull you have the problem licked.
   The experts, of course, who pontificate almost daily on the subject in all media of communication, would not buy this.  It's much too simple.  They would have you think that the whole husband-wife relationship is saturated in nuances, subtleties and psychological twists that would confound a Philadelphia lawyer--and that if you don't spot them early and take corrective action Cupid will take a powder.
   Why, a year after the ceremony, they ask, does Joe have to spend three or four evenings a week at the office?  Why have Mary's eyes quit lighting up when her man crosses the threshold?
   It could be that Joe is enamored of the office blonde and that Mary's eyes now shine for the grocery clerk.  But it's probable that no triangles are involved.  It's more likely that Joe and Mary simply have begun taking each other for granted and that, with the thrill of the chase gone, Joe has returned to the poker game and Mary to evenings with mother.

   THE ONLY WAY for marriage to work is for the participants to make it work.  I grow sad to hear of kids getting married and then kicking over the traces on discovery that the honeymoon doesn't last forever and that the union involves stern and relentless obligations.  I doubt that any marriage ever was so perfect that no adjustments were necessary, that there weren't quarrels and moments of rebellion.  But I never wasted much envy on bachelors and deem marriage a great and rich experience.  I dislike seeing it profaned by those unwilling to clear the early breakers and sail into the smooth water.
   It's no trick to be happy with your spouse.  You got along well enough while courting.  Why should love turn cold after you're legally hitched?  It wouldn't if Joe and Mary used the same finesse after marriage that they did before.

   WE HIT the nub of the thesis now.  Here is where the valentine routine comes in.  Or, to phrase it more exactly, the attention to little details.A fellow always gives a valentine to his girl.  Why not his wife?  Any husband who down-grades the valentine should see a psychiatrist.  Get her a box of candy, boy, or a nosegay, a pair of stockings or a bit of jewelry-- or a valentine.  If you're broke write her a mash note.  Just do something to mark the day.

   Do something to mark every special day, bearing in mind that many days are special to a woman.  There's the wedding anniversary, of course, and birthdays and Mother's day --the obvious ones.  If  you really want to be a smash hit you might keep in mind, too, the anniversary of your first date and your engagement.  Personally, though, I feel that this is going a shade far and that any woman who turns on the frost when hubby slips up here is too great a perfectionist for her own good.

   THE RECIPE for happy marriage, then, in a nutshell, is to keep right on courting after the preacher has made you one.  Many of the ways of courtship fall away, of course, with time.  If you've lived with one woman ever since the Lindbergh flight the pulse does not flutter at her approach and there is no noticeable shortness of breath.  And a fellow married for a quarter of a century is no physical barn-burner.  He has all the allure of a corn-pad.  But by then the major differences have been resolved and love, although not as vibrant as when hands were held during a Garbo and John Gilbert movie, is a lot more enduring.
   You'll slip up now and again.  The courtship occasionally will turn sour and you'll ponder a life of solitude in the Arctic.  But keep your eyes on the stars and there'll be no trip to Reno.  You and the sweet woman will come to figure that you've done rather well.


Copyright 2013 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune

   

How to Keep a Party From Going Dead

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
date unknown; probably 1952-1954




 AS IS OUR recurrent fate, my wife and I are mired in social debt.  It is necessary within the month to invite in at least half a dozen couples if we are to square accounts graciously.
    This is quite a project for so short a time and the conflict as to procedure is not yet resolved.  I am ready to forget the whole thing and risk being an outcast, but you know how women are.
   The smart thing might be to have all the debtees over simultaneously and write off the obligation in one whirl.  But this method, while expeditious, has its drawbacks, particularly if the couples aren't acquainted.

   THERE is always the danger that they will be so utterly polite that the affair will stiffen and die, or that two or three of the boys will be violently devoted to old Harry while as many others will be passionately fond of Ike, with a yelling match resulting.
   Or maybe a third of the customers will want to gather at the piano and sing, since they do not know a ruff from a finesse, while the balance figures that an evening without bridge is an evening lost.

   WHEN confronted with a major social ordeal, I always urge my wife to include some character who provides the light touch, somebody who can talk when there is nothing to say but who is not always agonizing about the implications of Russia's new, conciliatory attitude or the goings on along the Gaza strip.
   Call the fellow I have in mind Joe Jamison.  My wife protests that we had the Jamisons over last January and we haven't been inside their house since that committee meeting back in '52.  Besides, if we invite them that will make 16 and we haven't that many decent dessert plates.
   All of which fails to divert me.  Joe will keep the party on its feet.  There will be no strained silences and there will be some laughs, even if we have to roar at that one about the cattleman and the banker.
   "What's the matter with you keeping the party rolling," milady wants to know.  "Are you completely dumb?  You know as many old jokes as Joe Jamison does."
   The point, I try to tell her, is that Joe is a life-of-the-party type.  Not only can he tell jokes, he can also butter up the ladies and talk about baseball, fishing, gardening, painting and women with the men.  He makes a party click.

   ALTHOUGH in the daily routine of activity I seldom go more than 15 minutes without at least mumbling, by inheritance I am Joe's complete antithesis.  At dinner parties I repeatedly clam up like a shy adolescent and am able to manage little more than "please pass the herring."
   My father was even worse.  I have known him to make 50 words suffice for two or three days.  I never knew whether it was because he thought talking was a waste of time or whether he could think of nothing to say.  Whether he could or couldn't, he didn't.

   TO BE ABLE to converse is a talent to envy.  The fellow who can make small talk--which is the type that the mixed social affair requires--fills a pressing need.  If he is brilliant, charming and entertaining and lets the other guy get in an occasional word, he is a real treasure.
   But my hat is off also to the chatterbox and scene-hogger.  He may be a bore or an egoist but he can avert trying social situations.  Better to have someone around who can say something than to sit dumb or be forced to fall back on the weather or Aunt Lucy's arthritis.

   SOME HOSTS guard against silence by confining their entertainment to cocktail parties, or by serving several rounds before dinner.  Then there is conversation aplenty.  At least there is talk.  But this is the coward's expedient. It carries the implication that humans cannot abide each other's company without alcoholic reinforcement.
   The cocktail party represents the greatest of our social insanities, as any enthusiastic participant next morning will attest.  Things will come to a pretty pass indeed if we all finally turn to the jug for laughs and conviviality.
   This is where Joe Jamison comes in.  His tribe should increase.


Copyright 2013 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.