Dear Donald,

I don’t know whether I should bother to continue sending you my advice. You don’t seem to be paying much attention, judging from your public actions. Nevertheless, I will try again.

This one concerns the Wall.

Now that President Peña Nieto has called your bluff about ‘making Mexico pay for it’ and called you out as a paper tiger, you have turned to Congress and asked for taxpayer money to build your wall. As a taxpayer I therefore now have a personal interest in a subject that I previously regarded as just another example of your TV-style approach to your office.

So I have gathered up a few financial statistics about this proposed addition to our national infrastructure. As a very smart person with a degree from the Wharton School of Business, this is of course what any serious businessman would be expected do in order to evaluate a deal — something you advertise yourself as being a master at.

The approved MBA tool seems to be something called a cost-benefit analysis : when there are two possible scenarios, calculate the present and future costs and benefits of each and then weigh them against each other.

First then, the Wall’s length. The total length of the U.S.–Mexico border is 1,989 miles according to Rand McNally. According to the Institute for Defense Analysis several hundred miles of this don’t need a wall; they are already sufficiently blocked by natural geology such as including rivers and cliffs, and by various already existing stretches of fencing. Estimates of how much wall is needed range from 1,200 down to as little as 700 miles to prevent those Mexican rapists from reaching our country (some of them as young as 8 years old, judging from some of the corpses found in the Arizona desert — they do start them out young, don’t they?). For the sake of this analysis I will take a 900 mile figure, provided by government sources, although on my Google map that looks optimistic.

Next, costs. You can examine on Google pictures and samples of proposed configurations put up by private construction firms on a site in Arizona (One presumes that the option of direct job creation through construction by government employees, who would be protected by the federal legislation government workers are entitled to, is too reminiscent of FDR’s approach via such initiatives as the CCC and WPA to be seriously considered by this administration.) The major differences among the samples seems dependent on whether you believe in discouragement or punishment for wall-climbers. Some models have backward slanted or smooth rounded cylindrical top edges to make getting a handhold difficult, but at least one of them has rows of sharpened spikes along the top.

It is difficult to get reliable figures for the associated costs per mile. The 8 samples currently on view cost a total of between 2.4 and 4 million dollars to erect; they are each only a few yards long, and were constructed on ideal terrain — flat and sandy. Costs for construction in mountainous places, or on rock or difficult slopes would obviously be more expensive. In 2012 you floated a total cost of 6 billion dollars. This January you raised the estimate to 18 billion. I am not aware of any major geological realignments having taken place during that interval, but perhaps the U.S. companies doing the estimating revised their thinking when they discovered that they were not dealing with Mexican pesos but with good old American corporate dollars from firms with large lobbying and campaign contribution commitments. In any case, the latest numbers I can find appear to be an (estimated, not guaranteed) 33 billion for the remaining 900 miles.

In 2015 the Institute for Defense Analysis estimated that there had been about 200,000 ‘successful’ border crossings. Consensus is that the 2016 figure was probably ‘slightly’ higher, but the 2017 figure may have been ‘slightly’ lower. Let’s accept 200,000. That means that if the wall had already been in place last year it would have cost me (as a taxpayer) $165,000 per illegal immigrant (including Hondurans and El Salvadorans) to stop them. Maintenance of the wall, including Border Patrol staffing, is estimated at something like 2 billion a year. There is no offsetting revenue to be expected from the Wall, although a few tourists might visit with selfie phones and buy a few hot dogs from (legal) Mexican vendors with stands set up at particularly photogenic spots.

So, projecting over a 10-year period and ignoring the effects of inflation, we would be deterring 2 million (10 x 200,000) potential illegals at a cost of 53 (33 + 20) billion dollars, at the end of which period we would still have the wall, and — presuming a return to political sanity in the interim — the expense of demolishing it and restoring the land to its previous condition. (I think it is doubtful, given the political implications, that we could include those costs in the original building contracts, so we would be faced with further taxpayer assessments.) That’s 53 billion divided by 2 million, or $26,500 per head.

Now let’s consider the alternative scenario. The official poverty level in this country, according to the Senate Home Security Committee, is today $14,508 for a single person, $16,460 for a family of two. To placate our humanitarian instincts let us add 20% to those numbers to allow a bit of extra breathing space to those trying to live at the edge of poverty, and guarantee new arrivals a basic federal allowance. If half the people trying to cross the border are single and the other half are married, it would cost us 100,000 x $14,508 (call it 1.5 billion) + 50,000 x $16,460 (823 million) a year. Call it two and a half billion and allow for some toys for the children. Unless my calculator app is failing me, over ten years that comes to 25 billion. We could agree to welcome those visitors, assure them that they wouldn’t starve, give them an opportunity to look for jobs or get more education (or maybe both at once), and we could do it for less than half of the cost of the Wall. And that’s without including the revenue side : we would have gained an industrious 20 million recruits to our working population, picking strawberries, mowing lawns, caring for trees, laboring on construction sites, becoming part of the skilled labor force, paying taxes (How much? Who can say?), and feeling patriotically grateful to Uncle Sam for having rescued them.

And we wouldn’t have that ugly concrete snake crawling across the landscape and requiring further outlays to demolish it.

So much for the cost-benefit analysis. You can do the Profit-and-Loss part yourself. (They taught that at Wharton, too, I’m sure.)

Now, what about the politics?

‘Legals’ — those who arrived here through the proper channels, either through luck in a visa lottery, good connections, good lawyers, crooked lawyers, or bureaucratic unpredictability, and have succeeded in establishing themselves in American communities — tend to be indignant at the idea that illegals could now be allowed to cut the line. ‘Amnesty’ to them is a dirty word — a betrayal of what they feel entitled to because they demonstrated respect for the law. They are like the brothers of the Prodigal Son, appalled by the idea that rewards are offered to the slacker for his return. Emotionally this is understandable. Practically it makes no sense.

Successful illegals who have been here for years and made useful lives for themselves and made contributions to the continuing successes of this country have histories. Presumably they first tried to enter by the legal channels, but were turned down, for whatever reasons. But, so desperate were they, and so attracted by the dream of a better life for themselves and their families, that instead of just giving up, they determined to find a way to get here, legal or illegal. They risked their lives in the desert (or in the sealed trucks of coyotes, or in the waters of the Rio Grande), some of them more than once, to make it. They have, to varying degrees, succeeded. To which group would you assign greater credit, and assign more likelihood that it would fight for a merit-based society and less income inequality? Which group would be more likely to exhibit the virtues of patriotism and ‘family values’, if that phrase hasn’t been totally drained of its meaning by the deliberate distortions of our political con men?

Looking at those success stories and the contributions their successes have made to continuing the tradition of self-reliance and hard work that we as Americans so pride ourselves on, (and all the while having to stay under the radar and get no help from the authorities) why would we now send them back? Because some of them are depriving our teen-agers of part-time summer jobs mowing lawns in our gated communities? (I doubt that our teenagers are being deprived of an opportunity to pick strawberries or clean houses.) For every illegal who has acquired a skill and succeeded in inserting himself unobtrusively into an American community and displaced a deserving native-born worker I think I could offer you at least ten others who are doing jobs that had no native-born takers who had the choice between manual and seasonal labor and the relative luxury of U.S. unemployment benefits and food stamps. (Don’t forget that the illegals couldn’t expect to receive any such aid.) Where are the crowds of young men and women of impeccable Anglo extraction with nice pink skins lined up to apply for those strawberry-picking jobs? At the unemployment benefits office, I suspect, which is next door to the one where government tax abatements and real estate development and farm subsidies are being handed out.

But I didn’t go to Wharton and I don’t look at things from a cost-benefit analysis point of view as you were trained to do. I prefer not to go by Wharton’s book, but by a different one — the one that says, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”.

We need a strong leader, Donald, not a paper tiger. Lead us.

On the editorial page of its January 18th issue the New York Times, in a gesture of fairness, devoted an entire page to 13 letters to the editor from Trump voters who remained pro-Trump at the end of his first year in office. How these letters were selected was not explained. Out of how many received? Who did the selecting? We don’t know. We are left to rely on the newspaper’s reputation for integrity for assurance that they were in fact representative of a larger number and were chosen without bias.

The thirteen letters were printed in full, including the names of the writers. That’s admittedly a small sample on which to base conclusions. Nevertheless, in view of my great curiosity about how pro-Trump voters have managed to reject the mounting evidence of his incompetence in favor of keeping his base solid, I thought it was worth the effort to resort to an amateur form of reverse engineering to try to construct a portrait of a typical Trump partisan with whom I might then be able to attempt to empathize. Probably not agree with, but perhaps sympathize with to the point where we might be able to converse without shouting.

So to start with I started by carefully deconstructing the letters. I identified and recorded every point cited by each writer as a reason for his(her) approval. This resulted in a list of 25 separate topics.

(I made four omissions from the list : four critical comments in which the writer characterized Trump as 1) “low-rated for character, personality, and temperament”, 2) “the least presidential president of our time ; crude, ruthless, clueless”, 3) [user of] inappropriate and juvenile language, and 4) a vulgarian. Those opinions hadn’t discouraged the writers from hailing him as their savior, although four out of thirteen represented almost a third of my sample.) The other topics I could discern went beyond Trump’s character to more familiar political concerns, such as foreign entanglements or the Mexico Wall.

By plotting the 25 remaining topics against the 13 writers’ names on a piece of graph paper, I hoped to get a feeling for his supporters’ main concerns. I think I was fairly successful.

Five of the 13 (38%) cited

• The defeat of ISIS

• Showing a more assertive attitude toward our enemies

• Withdrawing from foreign entanglements

• Lowering taxes.

Four of the 13 (31%) cited

• Stopping (or deporting) illegal immigrants

• Appointing conservative judges.

Three (18%) cited

• A ‘booming’ economy

• Showing full support for Israel.

A total of eight subjects were mentioned by only two writers out of the 13 (15%). They were

• “I was against Hillary”

• Killing unnecessary regulations

• Law and Order

• Cutting back on entitlements

• Making sure Obama’s legacy would be a failure

• “I like his chutzpah”

• The stock market is up

• Promised repeal of Obamacare.

The remaining topics that could muster only one mention from among the thirteen writers included were

Lowered unemployment, reining in the ‘agencies’ [presumably the ‘Deep State’], making other countries stop taking advantage of us, killing free trade agreements, ‘national security’, greater respect for the flag, and reduction of the national debt.

*

What can we conclude from this analysis?

We can note that the majority of these concerns express dissatisfaction with the prevailing situation. They aim at reversing current policies rather than proposing new or better ones. For the most part they do not include any new proposals. They may be fairly characterized, I think, as mostly just kvetching, except perhaps for the one to back moving our embassy to Jerusalem.

One might have hoped to see more references to plans to deal with some of the major domestic problems facing us, such as health care, support for education, child care for working mothers, the plight of the ‘dreamers’ (illegal immigrants seeking a way to stay here and contribute to the America they abandoned everything at home to reach — DACA), refugees (abandoned people with no safe homelands to return to), CHIP ( the Children’s Health Insurance Program), global warming (the welfare of our grandchildren), disarmament (especially neutralization of nuclear weapons before we fall victim to a ‘Hawai’i mistake’), the future goals of NASA, our corrupt privatized prison, hospital, elderly and veteran care systems, the future role of diplomacy versus bicep flexing in our international relations, and the endless Washington bickering that seems to have replaced the once-respectable art of politics. These are apparently expected to be dealt with on an ad hoc basis as the chutzpah and assertiveness of our White House confronts them.

But I did develop a picture in my mind of typical Trump voters. They seem to be angry revolutionaries mostly concerned with demonstrating America’s muscle to an ungrateful world, obsessed with presumed threats to their lives (foreign terrorists actually killed a total of 15 people in the U.S. in 2017; automobiles killed roughly 37,000, a slight discrepancy in priorities here?), resentful that our powerful country has been saddled with the responsibility and expense of acting as the leading underwriter of the world order, pissed that illegal immigrants (like the prodigal son) threaten to reap the benefits of national compassion while those who played by the rules have to see their tax money used for Good Samaritan-ship, and feeling frustrated by the judges who actually have the temerity to enforce the rules of Law and Order they claim to be in favor of. The only thing they seem to be happy about is the prospect of lower taxes; the fact that they will be trivial for 99% of the citizenry compared to the major coups Mr. Trump and his crony circle of billionaires and corporate bigwigs will reap seems not to bother them. While they seem to agree that their Pied Piper is a poor excuse for a considerate human being, much less a President, they also seem to agree that they like the tune he is singing so much that they are willing to overlook his lack of qualifications. This is, to say the least, a sorry state of affairs. Their Uncle Sam seems to have the world’s biggest chip on his shoulder. It seems to me unlikely that that posture will achieve much in the way of turning over the planet in decent shape to our grandchildren.

*

I confess that this exercise, while it has clarified my understanding of what makes Trumpists tick, has also depressed me more than I was to begin with. It seems to me that the Republicans, in control so far of all three branches of government, are in danger of squandering their political capital (I like that expression, a reminder that it has to be earned and should be guarded carefully and not frittered away on meaningless showboating) exclusively to tearing down the achievements of 80 years of gradually increasing acceptance of the idea of the prime responsibility of government is to its citizens (Rousseau called it the Social Contract) in favor of plotting on the domestic front to push all the chips toward the one percent and internationally to use our muscle to get our way.

How do we get Mr. Trump and his Republican enablers to face reality rather than indulge in the profanity-laced battles with straw men Twitter encourages? The only way I see is an overwhelming defeat for all Republican candidates in the upcoming mid-term elections. Given the apparent determination of most Washingtonians to remain Washingtonians forever at all costs, this seems unlikely. Could the ladies in those pussyhats really become our saviors? Are there enough of them? If I am ready to ditch the Y chromosome where do I send my dollar?

A dear friend died recently. Our conversations over the last few years were limited to e-mail and snail-mail, since my telephone and travel skills are now fossilized, but we covered a pretty wide range : from literature to Donald Trump. My friend was a poet, and we often discussed her poetry, since she seemed to get some pleasure from defending it against my critiques. I was re-reading some of our correspondence the other evening and I came across a series of exchanges about poetic metaphor.

Dealing with something by using a comparison to something else is a way of calling attention to a relationship that 1) clarifies your meaning and/or 2) calls attention to a connection that may have heretofore gone unnoticed by your reader. In an essay (my game) there is room to make sure the specifics are spelled out sufficiently to make the parallel unmistakable. In a poem, where verbal economy is (or at any rate should be) at a premium, metaphors have to be carefully chosen to prevent them from becoming like the personal icons of idiosyncratic painters like Kandinsky or Miro — meaningless unless the reader has been briefed in advance. In a poem there is (or should be) no space to elaborate or modify. The power of the comparison is in its vivid image.

“The dawn came up like thunder out of China ’cross the bay” is a metaphor. A lot more vivid than “The sun came up.” It did its job by distinguishing the explosive dawn the poet remembered from other possible kinds of dawn — gentle, meek, hardly noticeable — that would not have suited the tone of the The Road to Mandalay. It also helped drive the meter and suggested a martial prequel.

“The dawn came up with a sound like two garbage-can lids rolling across the sidewalk after the sanitation truck has left” is also a metaphor, one that would have perhaps been equally accurate but would have been wildly out of place in a reminiscence about a long-ago Malaysian romance. A poet has to be careful not to destroy the mood by inappropriate imagery.

There is a further requirement. The imagery must evoke the desired emotion in the reader and he will relate it to his own experiences whether you like it or not. It is a reasonable assumption that most listeners know what thunder sounds like. It is not a reasonable assumption that a Punjabi or Inuit listener knows what a garbage-can lid looks like, or would sound like when it hits the pavement.

To be successful a metaphor must be chosen to navigate the elusive territory between triteness and incomprehensibility. My friend and I spent delicious hours debating the effectiveness of our metaphors, since poetry is heavily dependent on them for its power and essays are often in need of graphic spicing up.

Since a poet cannot presume to know the backgrounds of all her possible readers, she must allow for some whose experience doesn’t include the specific allusions she has chosen to use, or some whose interpretation of them will be entirely different from hers. You may welcome thunder as a harbinger of the clear and refreshing day that the passing of the storm will bring. I may mentally cringe at the frightening noise and visions of destruction preceding my silent count-down to it. My understanding of your poem will be colored by my past life, no matter how carefully you have tried to make your message universal.

I bore you with these reflections today because of President Trump’s use of the expression, “shithole countries” to refer to African nations in general and Haiti in particular in a recent cabinet meeting. To most Americans the expression “shithole” has a pretty definite meaning, not ordinarily associated with hih-level government decision-making or international diplomacy.

I will ignore the obvious literal anatomical meaning, since I cannot bring myself to believe that Mr. Trump was asking his listeners to liken an entire Caribbean country, much less an entire continent, to that image. Especially at a formal government gathering of officials supposedly trying to solve international problems.

So I ask myself to what events in Mr. Trump’s own life could he have been relating in his comment, and what inferences he intended to provoke in us, the citizens whose best interests he is sworn to protect and defend?

Perhaps, I think, he was recalling a boyhood like mine that included a once-familiar structure known as a “Chick Sale” — the outhouse — a tiny shelter built for privacy and protection from the weather, positioned over a hole in the ground. The hole, of course, had to be filled and covered over every so often, another one dug, and the little house moved to a new spot. As in “All right, gang, today we are moving the outhouse. Grab a shovel, hold your nose, and let’s go do it.” In that case a “shithole” country could be one that from time to time needed renewing. Perhaps through revolution (like our own or Mr. Putin’s, once). He would simply have been acknowledging the tough road ahead for Haiti and those African countries so plagued by drought, disease, and corruption and intending to encourage them to face the struggle. But no, little Donald grew up in Jamaica Estates, New York, where the last outhouse probably disappeared 200 years ago.

Then perhaps he was harking back to one of the distasteful chores of his army career? If he served in the Infantry, at least, he would have remembered the drill :

first you dig a foxhole for protection, then you (“I want three volunteers — you, you, and you.”) to help dig the squad a latrine. A tough but necessary job of housekeeping in the unlikely event that you might be staying in the same place for more than a day or two. In that case, he might have been acknowledging, in another way, that the countries he had in mind had a difficult job ahead of them, and that we who had already been through a similar process should view their efforts sympathetically, and offer them as much help as possible. But no, thanks to fallen arches (at least according to his daddy’s podiatrist’s affidavits) he was never allowed to serve in the Infantry or any other branch of the military.

So, what else in a boyhood in Jamaica Estates, New York might have corresponded to his choice of “shithole”? According to sources on Wikipedia the median home value there last year was a million dollars. (Well, $983,400, if you want to be nitpicky about it.) The odds of anyone in such a pricey enclave even knowing what a Chick Sale is are, in my estimation, pretty low unless they have recently been reading John Steinbeck or thumbing through an album of Walker Evans’s photographs. I do not have a large picture in my imagination of Mr. Trump doing either of those things.

Could he have been referring to the supposed wasteland he inherited from the Muslim infiltrator Barack Obama? (A dispirited, nearly ruined society, joblessness rampant, and no security for us innocent white settlers against a wave of stubby Mexicans with calves the size of grapefruits from lugging drugs across the Arizona border despite the valiant efforts of our patriotic Joe Arapaios.) Maybe he meant that America was the “shithole” country and we misinterpreted his remark? No, I re-read the reports. He clearly meant that any country not blessed with a 99.99% white citizenry, a North Sea oil field and free education and health care for all its citizens was a shithole and its people should not be permitted to contaminate our nice white community.

Then what are we dealing with here? A poor choice of metaphor or a poor choice of President? I wish my cherished poet friend were still here to kick that one around with me.

SAD! SO SAD!! to watch my country go down the drain, ushered by Stupid Fat Donald and the gutless crew of Milktoast McConnell, Ass-Kisser Ryan, and Company. How could this happen after 250 years of careful vigilance? Or will the Koch Brothers and the Silicon Valley Mafia eventually go the way of the Morgans and the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies? Will I live long enough to see the tide turn? What will the country look like when the tide goes out? SO SAD!

If God gave you such a good brain why don’t you use it?

Large publicly owned companies, whose officers and managers see their main responsibility as trying to produce the largest possible financial return on shareholder investment — perhaps as well as to generate the largest possible end-of-the-year executive bonuses — have a vision of what an ideal company would look like. In such a company every worker below the level of vice-president would be a robot. It would be summoned to life by means of a simple on-off switch and would thus be instantly ready to adapt itself to variable staffing requirements. It would need only a minimum of initial training (possibly even accomplished through artificially intelligent self-programming) and perhaps a little oil from time to time. That would spell end to all the annoyances of such things as wages, merit increases, motivation, unions, sick time, sexual harassment, favoritism, or contentious perks like health insurance, pensions, 401(k)s, or labor negotiations. Capitalist Heaven.

By contrast, in Workers Heaven employees would to be offered full-time jobs, portable union membership, and a guaranteed and a living wage. They would be provided with health insurance, long-term job security and a fixed-income retirement plan at the conclusion of their working lives, independent of the booms and busts of the stock market for the security of their ‘golden’ years. Workers would also get some federally mandated and insured protection against tactical bankruptcies of the kind routinely practiced by our current White House major domo.

When I was starting out in business 65 years ago this second version was regarded as the Japanese model and its quick demise was confidently predicted by nearly all western economists, although it had been successful in Japan for several generations. New entrants into the Nipponese job market were careful about whom they chose to work for, in the expectation that they would remain employed by ‘their’ company for their entire working lives. In return for this fidelity workers expected reciprocity. The company was a second family. In good times and bad the workers and the company were assumed to be in it together. Here in America the conventional wisdom was that this paternal model was doomed from the start, since the burden of so many benefits was sure to overwhelm the ability of the company to make a profit.

And so in fact in time it came to pass. The Japanese economy eventually did tank and the economic gurus of the ‘dismal science’ shook their heads and said, “I told you so” and went back to their pews in the Church of the Invisible Hand. But lo and behold! It also came to pass soon afterwards that the American, and then all the capitalist world economies also tanked in their turns, and the economic gurus had to admit that their science, while it may have been dismal all right, was not science at all but just the usual dreaming and guessing and wishful thinking. What the unions had worked so hard to achieve was left for government regulation to defend. And so it was up to the New Deal to recognize that the welfare state model was going to be the future shape of the industrial world, and act accordingly.

Today we see the pendulum swinging back the other way, as kleptocrats and billionaires once again gain the upper hand and try to dismantle worker protections again, under the sheepskin camouflage of ‘flextime’ and the ‘gig’ economy. These fancy terms are nothing more than euphemistic labels for the never-diminishing Republican drives to privatize Social Security and discredit universal health care, while outlawing access to the courts for relief.

It would seem to me a safe bet that after a certain amount of damage is done and a certain amount of pain has been inflicted on the blue-collar classes the spirits of Eugene Debs and the Reuther Brothers will arise from their graves and re-ignite the flame of collective resistance, and we will have to give unionism another try.

Not such a radical idea when you think of it. The old feudal concept of noblesse oblige was a powerful idea. Yes, the serf owed allegiance to his liege, but this also operated in reverse : the serf could rely on his liege for support. He was obliged to contribute his efforts when planting and harvesting and construction time came, even soldiering if his liege let his temper get out of hand. But in return he got face-to-face adjudication of his complaints, assistance with his personal problems, defense of the few rights he could claim, and such health care as there was available in those days.

So sixty years ago in 1951 when I started my little company unions were stronger and employees seemed to have achieved some significant portion of their wishes, but then the country did a sudden and surprising conservative turnaround in favor of shareholders, bonus-rich managers, and cooperative Supreme Court Justices. The legal and political professions, in conjunction with super-rich donors, have demonstrated since how fragile social gains can be in a democracy. Everything is always for sale. Capitalism means everything has a price. Unfortunately this includes many congressmen and senators, who are mainly concerned with rubberizing the rungs on their chosen career ladders. It’s all about negotiating the strike price.

At this juncture it begins to look as though a major player in this latest act of the drama is fated to be the Internal Revenue Service, which, through its rulings, has the tricky job of making a legal distinction between two classes of workers : employees, who have established rights, and subcontractors, who essentially have none. Companies are by law obligated to their employees in many ways, hammered out over the years in much enmity and even bloodshed. These gradual accomplishments are generally viewed — by intelligent politicians, non-partisan social commentators, sincere labor-business negotiators, and the majority of economists of the world’s advanced countries — as developments in the direction of more stable global relations, ones that are more likely to help the planet survive as its reserves of natural resources dwindle and its population relentlessly increases. Where they are often not viewed as advances is in the boardrooms of many major United States corporations and 19th-hole perpetual happy-hour watering holes, where government regulations, and the taxation that supports them, are viewed as unjustified impediments to ever increasing profits and eternal growth : the twin handmaidens of the God Mammon. I don’t have to point out that this is also the view of today’s tenant of the White House and his persistently entrepreneurial family.

The question for the IRS then becomes, in this Age of Uber and Airbnb and your next week’s hamburger-flipping schedule arriving on your cell phone on Sunday evening, who is a subcontractor versus who is an employee. The Right wants to go back to the freebooter days of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. Uber and Airbnb and McDonald’s would like to rebuild the economy on the backs of ‘independent’ workers in a dog-eat-dog market where the invisible hand determines how little the boss can get away with paying his workers and how much security workers are willing to surrender in order to eat more or less regularly. Workers will for the foreseeable future have to rely on their elected government for the protections they once got from their union contracts. It is easy to see that both sides can’t have their druthers. It is harder to see what the resolution of the differences of opinion will be, but it is clear that the IRS is going to have a major role in determining it.

On the outside chance that my fifty-years of experience as a small business owner might possibly offer something of value to anyone seriously thinking today about starting up a business, I offer some thoughts here, not as a model (all businesses, large or small, are different) but as a reference. I don’t think it will be of any interest to the Harvard Business School as a Case History. No would-be Master of the Universe will amass billions following my lead, but what worked for me then might still work for you if you want to be a success and still sleep with a clear conscience.

I started my small business in 1951, by accident. I had just been fired for trying to hold a union election where I then worked. I was fortunate in having had no formal management or business training. No MBA and no stockholders. Just a desire to eat regularly and pay the rent. I was therefore free to experiment. I started by stealing my boss’s secretary and ended up 50 years later by retiring from a successful company with 50 employees. (Fifty seems to have been my lucky number.) We were selling the hours of skilled workers, the way law firms do, except that we had to do all their training ourselves since there were no trade schools to do it for us. An experienced employee was thus our most precious asset, and it was important to us to retain the people in whom we had invested a both time and expense. (We were in the scientific typesetting business, and we had some patented equipment that had to be mastered.) By the end of our tenth year we had worked out our house rules, which we printed up as a little pamphlet. New hires started on probation, full-time, in the shop, with no benefits for three months. At the end of three months recruits were promised they would either be hired on one of three to plans or let go.

Choice Number 1. Full-time status. Health care coverage (no deductibles), paid vacation and sick leave, regular seniority raises, overtime after 37½ hours, full-coverage health insurance and a $5,000 life insurance policy. (That was 1961 don’t forget. In today’s money that policy would be  $40,000.) Disability and unemployment insurance coverage were already mandated by state and federal law. Ours were generous terms for 1961. They were also self-serving. What we were seeking of course was as little turnover as possible.

Choice Number 2. Part-time employment, on a schedule negotiable two weeks in advance, a minimum of 20 hours a week, performed on the premises. No benefits except paid sick leave and ten vacation days a year.

Choice Number 3. Subcontract status on a piecework basis (we called it freelancing), with special tools provided by us (some were modified and not available on the market. Subcontractors agreed not to use any of those if they did work for anyone else.) Piecework rates, quality standards, and deadlines were established by us, but working hours and conditions were left up to the freelancer. We did not consider that these people were employees under IRS definitions. That was never challenged, although our accountant warned us that one day it might be, since the IRS was alert for scammers aiming at avoiding Social Security and unemployment and disability insurance payments.

In all 3 categories, we made payday loans available (at no interest) to any employee, up to his or her current date or status of deliveries or hours worked, with no questions asked.

As owners, we would of course have preferred that everybody chose Number One. This would have given us a dependable full-time labor force, with attendant simplifications of scheduling, training, innovation, and motivation, but we realized this would not be possible in a small company that could not offer a promotion ladder or a pension. But the hours our bookkeeper and office manager spent juggling workflow to match the varying needs of our jobs and our employees were repaid by essentially zero job turnover. (We had occasion to fire only one employee during 50 years. He was hired as a salesman — on a salary, because we regarded commissions as invitations to corruption — and it turned out that he was holding down another full-time job elsewhere.)

We employed many college students, actors between roles, and a number of single mothers, as well as some memorable weirdos who were whizzes at math typesetting provided no one distracted or annoyed them, to whom we gave keys to the shop so they could come in and work in the middle of the night if the spirit moved them.

The company gained a reputation with several to scientific book and journal publishers, even as they recognized our oddball nature. (One of our customers once characterized our shop as ‘The Port of Missing Men’, a reference to the number of gays who found our conditions congenial to their lifestyles.) We also took pride in providing opportunities to some people whose personal situations made it difficult for them to find work. This was particularly helpful to single mothers and to students. An example was a convict who needed a guaranteed job to get out of jail, also a man with Tourette Syndrome. (His hiring took some politicking, but the other employees eventually gave a majority thumbs-up despite his sometimes frightening involuntary outbursts. He did his job.) We also took on two immigrants from India who had overstayed their visitors’ visas (deliberately) and had no green cards, a breach of the law we simply chose to ignore.

We also chose to ignore some of the prevailing prejudices among New York’s blue-collar working populations. I don’t have records, but I remember approximately equal numbers of blacks and whites, a lot of Latinos and Latinas, as well as a talented Taiwanese lady who later started her own business in competition with me, and several Asian keyboarders who could type rings around me with their flying fingers (and I was no slouch in that department, something I enjoyed demonstrating when challenged). In addition to the two Indians who ran our Xerox department and delivery services, we had proofreading expertise from a Columbia student of Sanskrit who later went on to a distinguished career as university professor, and a Mormon student preparing for his two-year stint abroad (who induced me to read the Book of Mormon all the way through, from Moroni and the story of the Golden Plates to Brigham Young’s vision). One young Puerto Rican teenager who never finished high school ended up being in charge of our computer night-shift, keeping the mag tape drives spinning with all the dexterity of a rave D.J. I was especially proud of him, but my favorite was a forty-something-year-old lady who played a wicked slide trombone in an all-girl jazz band. She always checked in with us between gigs.

You can accuse me of tooting my own horn. You would be right. I am tooting it because I am proud of what we accomplished. But more importantly there is a hint here of what can result if an employer starts with the notion that happy employees are as important to him as a healthy bottom line. The bottom line will not  be harmed if the environment is humane. Our bottom line did very well. Evolving technology eventually did us in, replacing our skills with algorithms and electronic equipment, but we had a good ride. Buggy whips were once a big business, too.

Uber and its siblings seem to have started out exploring the same path. I have great sympathy for the Pakistani cab drivers who have mortgaged their worldly goods and maybe even those of some of their friends and family members to buy New York Taxi Commission medallions, but a monopoly is a monopoly no matter what you choose to call it and those medallions are like the bar examination — their purpose is to prevent competition. Doctors can tell you all about that, and plumbers and electricians — and even university professors — as well.

From a broader perspective there are broader questions. One is the question of what is the relative importance of paid work in a just society? How many of us would be doing what we do every day if we didn’t need the paycheck? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect those who truly enjoy their work are in a fortunate minority. There is always the possibility of personal fulfillment in any form of group activity (even war), but its likelihood decreases with the assembly-line organization that characterizes so much of our ordinary working life. (“Cubicle world”, a friend calls it.)

In that connection I can add that in order to be flexible and meet our deadlines, we made it a point to train everyone (who was willing to learn; not all were) in every one of all our job categories. This sometimes made it harder for production managers to assign only the most qualified people to a project, and sometimes undoubtedly decreased day-by-day efficiency, but it was by choice. Our competitors mostly relied on specialists — copy-markers, proofreaders, keyboarders, layout and paste-up people, illustrators, checkers — to the point where no individual fingerprints were visible on the books or journals they produced, and hence no one could feel much pride in the result. We had an Ego Shelf where we prominently posted samples of finished publications, along with the names of those who had worked on them. We felt that the benefits of as much personal identification as possible with a finished product and a resulting sense of personal achievement were important.

Workers these days in some industries (as varied as Silicon Valley and Uber) are increasingly being treated as partners (on the German workers’ council model), but they are still mostly in the minority. For most big companies ‘Labor’ is just an impersonal budget-line category to be kept as low as possible so that the ‘Dividends’ and ‘Stock Price’  (and perhaps ‘Bonuses’?) lines can be kept high.

But what about peoples’ individual lives? There are 24 hours in a day. The doctors say eight of them should be spent sleeping. That leaves 16. One of those remaining, the personal trainers say, should be for exercise. Two more, spread over three meals and coffee breaks, must be devoted to nourishment. So we now have 13 left. Presently-accepted employment norms prescribe eight for working, plus a probable average of one or two for commuting and/or ‘preparation’, such as getting into and out of uniforms or work clothes. We are now down to three or four remaining for the satisfaction of all our personal passions, if we have any energy left and any identifiable passions — children, maybe, or do-it-yourself home improvement, studying, writing, watching TV, or checking Twitter for the latest idiocy from Trump. Considering that an individual lifetime is a one-shot proposition, of highly uncertain duration, it seems to me that the prevailing ‘normal’ division of our allotted span might at least be considered debatable. How does the ABC Company’s profit and the nation’s GDP stack up against one’s right to a modicum of just plain individual satisfaction?

I got fired in 1951 for declining to work overtime. I told the boss his money entitled him to control over me for eight hours a day but no more. He first offered me a raise, then offered to make me a manager (salaried; no overtime), and then when I declined that he fired me. I don’t know whether or not he regretted it afterward; but it turned out to be a good deal for me. I set myself up as his competitor and (of course) wound up working personal 12- and 16-hour days to keep my customers satisfied. But I made it a point never to exert any pressure on any of my employees to work overtime. I put in the extra hours myself when it was necessary (and skipped dinners and soccer games and school orchestra recitals) but willingly, because I remembered.

Has this somewhat rambling excursion through the world of employer-labor relations clarified anything? Probably not, but it may have prompted you to consider alternatives to the ‘standard’ 8-hour day and the 5-day week as somehow having been handed down with Moses’ tablets. They were hardly the norm in the pyramid-building years in Egypt, or in Dickens’s time when workhouse hours were more likely to be 16/7. Workers have over the years fought for more humane schedules and established them as ‘normal’. At least unless you are a Filipina working in New York City for an Arab sheik with a condo in Trump Tower and your passport locked in his safe. It is a collaboration of employers and workers who have assigned 9 to 5 as normal, and they should be subject to re-negotiation when conditions change. When most work was farm work, determined by the weather and the needs of crops and animals we did manage to change, gradually in minor ways (milking machines, mechanized harvesters), if not without stress. Now that robots promise to offer us respite from some of the more onerous jobs we were once unable to avoid, we need to ask afresh how much of their waking lives those who actually have to work for a living should be expected to devote to lining the pockets of the world’s parasites : the rentiers — those who make their living just playing with their investments (their inheritances, their buildings, their portfolios, their constantly cited rewards for their largely mythical ‘risk taking’) — and how much of their lives can be reclaimed for them for activities of their own choosing.

At least we should talk about it.

What else, if anything, can be gleaned from this somewhat disjointed and rambling account? I can think of only one lesson — my little start-up survived on the basis of two simple presumptions : One, you have to produce something that fills a real need (not create a fleeting need that will require your product only so long as the fad lasts). And two, you have to treat your employees as individuals — respect them as people, not just as producers of x widgets an hour.

The first presumption, lasting need for your product, will insure you against becoming last year’s success. In the end I failed at that, as computer  typesetting programs replaced our workhorse typewriters (which had in their turn earlier replaced the printing industry’s lead type) and anyone with a PC and the patience to learn a bit of programming could generate professional-looking pages right at his or her desk.

At the second presumption I was more successful. We weathered the vicissitudes of eleven U.S. presidential administrations and their different approaches to what forms of encouragement and discouragement would work best for the national economy. As each new national strategy was announced, hyped, installed, and found more or less wanting, we managed to keep our feet because people wanted and needed books and scientific journals. They still do, although the means of delivery may be shifting toward the monitor screen (this is not yet sure) and the formerly skilled work of translating ideas to readable and preservable form has devolved more on the original author than on an editor-publisher-typesetter-printer chain of assistance. The world no longer needs (or fancies it needs) a trained keyboarder to know whether to hyphenate the word as ‘rec-ord’ or ‘re-cord’ at the end of the line. A computerized hyphenation dictionary does as good a job as my trained keyboarders did. My little company is out of business. This would have happened regardless of whether Truman or Bush 2 had been in charge, because the real changes in the world are driven by clever people in Palo Alto garages, not by ambitious showboats in the White House or the Kremlin. We might take some comfort in that realization, watching the Orange-Haired One do his best to destroy what 250 years of serious politics have labored to create, or Victorious Vlad try to revive the glories of the tsars. They will undoubtedly produce enormous disruption, but — with luck and a sincere effort — we will be able to regain the lost ground after their bellowing and smirking have passed from the stage. The real advantages of treating everyone by the same rules, respecting everyone’s individuality and right to a decent life, will still remain to be honored by new leaders armed with brains instead of bombs and bombast.

At least we can hope so.

Inspired by Mr. Mnuchin’s one-page analysis of the 400-page tax bill now sneaking its way through both houses of Congress on the strength of a probable one-vote majority, I am moved to offer my own one-page solution to our fiscal problems. It’s not the same as his.

Mr. Trump claims that high taxes have so tied the hands of business leaders that they have been prevented from the kind of reinvesting of their after-tax profits that normally would keep the United States economy growing and growing without limit, providing well-paying jobs for all citizens with skills in coal-mining, oil-drilling, fracking, cutting old-growth trees on formerly park service lands, and similar traditional blue-collar (but white-skinned) fields. He is particularly adamant that these high taxes need to be cut drastically on the high-earners who are presumably straining at the leash with shovel-ready projects from golf courses to hotels and weapons factories throughout the red states. Having been instructed by the boss to base his predictions on 10 years of uninterrupted 2.9% annual economic growth (a level attained only twice since the turn of the century), Mr. Mnuchin has kissed the ring and produced a rosy scenario in which the tax cuts will not only pay for themselves but show a surplus by the end of that stretch which could be devoted to reducing the national debt. Why 2.9? Why not 3.9, which would make every white person a millionaire? Only Donald Trump knows.

I have a simpler proposal. It’s called the Anti-Hoarding Act, which doesn’t even have to be voted on by Congress — it can simply be put in effect by having all of Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” donors put their surplus cash to work.

According to the best sources I could find on Wikipedia, American companies are sitting on offshore piles of cash to the tune of 2.6 trillion dollars. You read that right — 2.6 thousand billions. They choose to not bring it home and put it to use at the moment, waiting for Mr. Mnuchin’s magical tax cuts to make it more tempting. They have an additional 1.9 trillion in domestic bank accounts, which they are sitting on in case of legal problems or natural disasters or opportunities to buy out competitors who are crippled by unforeseen events. That’s a total of 4.5 trillions sitting idle instead of contributing to economic growth. If it could be injected into our economy voluntarily by enlightened businessmen who believe in the theory of endless growth lifting all boats, it would have a greater effect than any conceivable tax cuts devised by Trump, Ryan, and McConnell and Co.

Just to give you some idea of how these numbers work, let’s assume that we could convince only half of these corporate hoarders to give it a try. That would instantly pump up the economy with two and a quarter trillions in ready cash. How much is that?

Well, the U.S. budget for 2018 is projected at 4.084 trillion, of which 3.654 trillion is expected to be paid for by current revenue sources. That leaves us with a deficit of 440 billions for the year.

Thirty-nine percent of that deficit, according to the budget accounts, can be laid to just three accounts : health (27%), education (3%), and entitlements including welfare (9%). They add up to 171.6 billion dollars. Assuming normal levels of growth instead of Mr. Mnuchin’s fairy-tale numbers, that repatriated cash, reinvested in the economy, could be used to eliminate the annual deficit entirely over the next 13 years, while the country’s businesses benefited from all the new profit opportunities opened up by newly flourishing activities.

What might happen if these entrepreneurial minded businessmen decided to repatriate the FULL four and a half trillion boggles the mind! We would be able to expand Medicare and Medicaid and finance single-payer health care and buy a few dozen more useless nuclear-tipped missiles for Big Rocket Man to threaten Little Rocket Man with without even breaking a sweat.

As a further benefit, this money, being from private sources and not government funds, would not be subject to the laws that forbid government investment in private entities. It could be invested in all sorts of high-return equities that would share in the guaranteed stock market boom, thus possibly doubling or even redoubling its effect. There might even be enough to establish a permanent slush fund to pay the lawyers who reach settlements with all the women who have suddenly found their nerves and their megaphones. The argument over whether such hush-money from taxpayer funds is illegal would become moot.

Sounds foolproof to me.

My newspaper came up with a fascinating story recently. In a dispatch from a place called Grants Pass, Oregon (no apostrophe visible in the dateline) a reporter wrote about a county so strapped for government funds, and so dedicated to reducing taxes that its once 22-man-strong police force, serving a population of 83,000, had been reduced to just one sheriff and one deputy and a jail capacity so limited that even in the unlikely event that a criminal should actually be apprehended by one of those remaining two lawmen he is generally just given a bench warrant and sent on his way to a neighboring jurisdiction.

Of course, there are extenuating circumstances, (Aren’t there always?) Two-thirds of the land in the county is owned by the federal government, which pays no local taxes. Its population is sparse. Eighty-three thousand in a county about the size of Rhode Island, which boasts 1.64 million, is makes it thinly settled by any definition. There are also federal timber subsidies, which underpin many local jobs. The mafia has not yet found opportunities there to attract a significant population of scam artists. But after it is all boiled down the basic facts remain. The population refuses — and has refused repeatedly in local elections — to entertain the idea of increased local taxes to support a larger police force, while at the same time making plain their expectation that someone will protect them and their property if a need arises.

The article reports that the solution, so far at least, has been two-fold : (1) applications for gun permits have gone up 49% over the past year, and (2) a volunteer group called Citizens Against Crime has taken over the duties that would formerly have been performed by the police. This arrangement involves certain hardships on the citizens — hours of patrolling, on foot and in (self-designated and self-financed) squad cars, supported by contributions from the same citizens who refuse to consent to raising taxes. This situation was described years ago by a professor at Oregon State University as a “slow-motion disaster”. And that was before the Trayvon Martin “Stand Your Ground” killing in Florida.

I can see how from a strictly local taxpayer point of view this no-taxes move is a straightforward approach to a community problem. If crime is the problem, let’s just get together and fight it. One crime at a time. We don’t need an army of trained and drilled specialists. Just give us pistols. Well and good, but from the viewpoint of the local high-school civics teacher there are wider implications. How can we use that approach to deal with potholes in the town roads — everyone grab a shovel? Or with homeless citizens — let them sleep in our cars? Or with handicapped and disabled students — let them stay home and stay out of our way? Or with trees that fall across and block our roads or destroy our houses — chain-saw and barbeque parties? Or with 911 services — everybody gets a flashing blue light and a siren for the family car?

Shall we tackle each of these things separately on an ad hoc basis only if as and when we find that they are pressing, minimally funding or professionalizing them one by one as they prove necessary and gradually re-creating, service by service and special fee by special fee, the entire integrated government we are now refusing to support by general tax revenue, until we once again find the burden too onerous and have a new fee-for-service revolt and go back to the if-as-and-when approach, in an endless cycle?

And in the meantime, what of the citizens caught in the cracks between organized democracy and vigilantism? What of the drug addict denied treatment, the thief denied an opportunity for rehabilitation, the homeowner whose TV set has been stolen or whose house has been de-roofed by a tornado? Or the (few) people who have been mugged and put in hospital despite the Good-Samaritan efforts of their neighbors?

If I lived in Grants Pass, Oregon, what would be my attitude? Would I refuse to volunteer for civilian patrols on the grounds that the whole idea is like a snake with its tail in its mouth, and incur the wrath of my neighbors who like the idea of pay-as-you-go government, or would I sign up with Citizens Against Crime and take my shift in the neighborhood patrol in the hope of keeping my schoolgirl daughter un-raped and my home un-burgled? What should I do?

I think the first thing I should do is apply to that high-school civics teacher for her advice, and maybe a quick refresher course in community building. Taxes are inescapable if we are not to go back to every-man-for-himself. Neighborhood patrols are like walking the dog : if you can afford it, you hire dog-walkers. Especially in winter. And they probably will be glad to get the job.

I could also turn to Washington for advice. Those currently in charge claim to have solutions for everything. Presumably Betsy de Vos would tell me to buy some pencils and schoolbooks and home-school my children, or enroll them in a private school if I hit the lottery. Paul Ryan would advise me to lay in a supply of Band Aids and aspirin and learn to put up with a little chronic pain, in the bones as well as in the wallet. Mitch McConnell would advise me to invest in bitcoins and hope they didn’t evaporate before it came to the time for me to retire. Jeff Sessions would assure me that crime would disappear along with the last Mexican and Muslim kicked off the back porch. What Donald Trump would say to the prospect of abandoning tax-supported government might be more complicated. He would want reassurance that he could keep all the subsidies he has been given over the years, as well as his mortgage and interest tax deductions and his exemption from the Constitution’s emoluments clause — all of which require a strong government and a solidly Republican Supreme Court, not to speak of reliable Secret Service protection. Somehow I don’t think these gentlemen would eagerly adopt Grants Pass’s solutions when it came time to do away with their official salaries and access to PAC-inflated slush funds and free airplane flights in favor of an every-man-for-himself society.

Of course I could be wrong.

SenatorTedCruz@gmail.com

The press reports that you have expressed a desire to simplify our tax law so that “most” federal taxpayers will be able to send in their returns “on a postcard”. I think this is a highly commendable goal, and I would like to be of any assistance I can in helping you to achieve it. One of the first requirements of course would be to draw up a sensible tax structure, in which the wealthy, instead of the poor, bear the biggest burden. So we should begin by throwing the present 3,000-odd page tax code out the window (and all state and local taxes as well), and replacing it with a single federal personal wealth tax. No more income taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, Social Security taxes, corporate taxes, fuel-surplus fees, special gasoline taxes, or all the other add-ons that have accrued over the years. Back to basics. One single tax. One postcard.

• Taxes will be levied on personal property only, and then only on one figure — net worth. (Net worth is all one’s assents less all one’s obligations. Citizens with zero or negative net worth should pay no taxes.)

• The aggregate value of all the property in the country, except what is owned by the government (that’s all of us together), is our official National Net Worth. We should tax that only exactly enough to balance the National Budget. (Everything not government-owned is in the end owned by some real person, not a company or an organization or a church or a foundation. Real people own these entities by means of shares. All ownership is thus finally vested in individual people, regardless of where, in what city or state or country they say they, or their assets, exist.)

• The tax rate thus becomes a simple problem in third-grade level long division : The Total National Budget divided by National Net Worth equals the percent of the national net worth that must be devoted to paying for the budget, which will be that year’s tax rate. Each of us needs to contribute that percent of our personal wealth. We all pay the same rate.

• Each person’s net worth can be calculated by that person, as we all now do. We do the math on our own 1040s, and the IRS accepts our calculations, subject only to random checking. (The penalty for omitting an asset — deliberately or accidentally — will be confiscation and public auction, with a reserve price set by a government appraiser and with the original filer being granted the privilege — after paying a substantial fine — of matching the highest public bid.)

Individual tax returns will thus fit quite easily on a postcard :

• 1. Name, address, and social security number (for spouse as well, if a joint return) ____________________________________________________.

  2. Net worth (less a standard deduction for dependents and an adjustment for low income): $__________. (Details available on request.)

  3. Amount of tax due at X%. (X is based on the previous year’s Total National Net Worth and the National Budget for the coming year. The rate is the same for everyone.) $________.

And there you have it. What could be simpler? How much bureaucratic expense will be eliminated by this simple step? I don’t know, but your $4,722,899 a year Senatorial allowance should be enough to cover a study by your staff to figure it out. If you have questions, you may reach me by commenting on this blog.

You’re welcome.