RECEIVING BY GIVING

“Tax cuts won’t end the recession.” They won’t? There goes my whole economic plan for restoring prosperity. Somebody else is taking my place, somebody else shares your embrace. Somebody who doesn’t believe in tax cuts, but believes in government payouts to the right people, which will eventually be paid for by tax increases, not cuts.

The problem here is that government money is often…wasted. I know this firsthand. I worked for a government for twenty-eight years, as a cop. In that situation there was no such thing as a bottom line. We were exempt in two ways. One was in the area of our results. They were never good, but they were never questioned. Our excuses were always accepted. Murders went up because they were unplanned and spontaneous and unpredictable and what could we do about that? Other crime? -- same story. Nothing was our fault and nothing could be done about anything.

The other area where no questions were asked was that of our costs. The city held them down in the compensation area by tough negotiating with our unions, but our other expenses were not investigated. We once installed an elaborate city-wide telephone system whereby precinct switchboards could be bypassed and every extension could be reached directly, saving everybody’s time and temper. The list of numbers that was distributed, however, came in a cheap booklet format instead of on laminated sheets as they should have, and the booklets were worn out and useless in a month or less, putting an end to the project, which was written off as a loss.

Things like this were typical, but they didn’t affect our appropriations for the next fiscal year. We had no bottom line, as I’ve said, and losses meant nothing. We got our funds routinely, with no questions asked. I’ve offered an example here of mismanagement on a relatively small scale, but if I had been the commissioner I’m sure I could have provided much more impressive ones. Not that commissioners ever did.

Since that time I’ve worked in private industry and found out about documenting expenses and justifying them and other things unknown to civil service and in fact to the not-for-profit world, I fear. But yesterday I found myself carried back to those days when I spent a few hours in the New York Public Library, doing research for this blog.

The Library’s a great place and I feel lucky to have the use of it. One thing bothered me though. I was going through the files of a departed New York newspaper, looking for material I believed I could use here, based on my recollection of it from other days. There were 778 boxes of microfilm covering the whole lifetime of the paper. Each box contained one roll of microfilm recording two weeks of publication. It didn’t take me long to find out that this ratio might have been right for the New York Times, which can run up to 100 pages in one issue, but had nothing to do with a tabloid like the Mirror, my subject, which probably printed fewer pages in a week than the Times did often in one day.

The obvious way to handle this was to forget the two-week quota for each film roll and go to a two-month quota if that was what it took for publication to fill up the roll. But apparently the two-week quota was sacred. How was it met? Easily. Just keep printing the same two weeks over and over again until the roll was filled. So fourteen editions of the paper were copied repeatedly until this was done. The unlucky researcher, such as myself, who should have been able to go through one roll and find something new on every page displayed instead found himself looking at the same pages repeating themselves and repeating themselves until the film ended.

The discouraging part of this was that it looked like this pattern would repeat itself through every one of the 778 boxes of film available for examination. There was no way I could ever go through all these. The actual number of boxes required for the tapes should not have exceeded one or two hundred. These would have been be relatively easy to examine since there would have been be no wading through page after page of print which only repeated what the tape had already displayed. New York Public Library, what did you think you were doing?

This is, I suppose, a minor flaw in the work of a great public utility. All right, but it still says something about non-profits. Projecting, it says something about government grants of money to them as opposed to tax cuts to the public at large. The difference between the two is that the public can be trusted to waste less than the institutions will. It’s simply a question of responsibility, as armies of people before me have insisted. Executives who are responsible to stockholders, to owners, to lenders, to cash customers, to the bottom line in other words, will do a better job than those who don’t have these obligations.

Following this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, the most sensible thing the government could do would be to refund Bill Gates all the tax money he’s ever paid so that he could use it to do what the politicians claim they can, but he has proved he can -- create jobs. He has created millions of them. How many has Ted Kennedy ever created?

When I say Gates I’m using his name as a surrogate for the thousands of entrepreneurs like him who have created the industries that have transformed the world economy and raised the standard of living of people who grew up driving oxcarts and living in mud huts and now live in real houses and ride in real cars. Taxing the creative people who have brought this about is not the highest and best use of money which textbooks tell us should be the objective of government policy.

I looked for a quotation from somebody to finish this sermon. No luck. Until I found what T.S. Eliot said. You know “April is the cruelest month…” He knew, he knew.