So, Congress and the President are going to stimulate the economy with a payroll tax cut. I heard someone somewhere say that a family making $40K per year will take home an extra $800 in 2011. That works out to $67 per month. Do I feel an extra night out at Ruby Tuesday coming on? Oh yeah!
Why, with an extra $67 in your pocket, you can show that lady who just tattooed the name of your band on her forehead how special she really is. You can even offer to spring for her kids. Ladies like that--when you act like you care about their kids.
(Admittedly you don't really have a choice since she's got them this weekend. But it is a generous offer on your part, especially considering that the boy's father totally screwed you over when he fled the scene of the accident, leaving his dime bag to be found in your unconscious lap by the police. You went away seven months for that!)
So it's a Long Island for you and a strawberry lemonade for your lady (because the refills are free)! Long Island refills aren't free, but you know that if you drink half of it and complain that you can't taste the liquor, the unctuous manager will pour you a new one on the house. Sliders for the kids (extra well done--nobody in this house is gonna puke tonite!) You'll have the half rack of ribs, but you want that broccoli well done too, just like your meat; and a ribeye for your lady.
She knows the drill as well as you do. She'll gnaw on half that steak and then complain, "I don't know... It's just a little too... It's a little too... fatty." It's a ribeye, you moron; it's a fattier cut of meat! But she knows she can weasel out a free dessert if she's insistent enough.
Anyway, ribs, steak, drinks and kids dinners come to, we'll say, $57. And when you think about all the free stuff you weaseled out of them, you made out like bandits!
You leave three twenties on the table. You round up the kids who've been running up and down the aisle for ten minutes now. You walk away with a to-go box of limp french fries in your hand, avoiding the pile of parmesan chicken pasta left on the floor when that boy of hers tripped a server, and tell your waiter not to worry. You can keep the change. Why? Because you got a tax cut!
Where did the extra seven dollars go? Condoms. Cuz later on, you gonna have some shake with those fries (heh, heh). You're feeling full, expansive, generous. Life is good.
Meanwhile, you were the only table your hapless server had the last hour he was on. Why was he working so late, even though he worked a double? Because he's either too stupid or too principled (the two do seem to go together) to flirt with the hostess or the manager, the two people who have absolute power to get him home at a decent hour. So add his base pay of $2.13 to your $3 tip, and once he tips out the bar and the hostess, he made the minimum wage that last hour he worked. That is, the minimum wage for 1997, unadjusted for inflation.
In the aggregate, more take home pay means more nights out, which means more Florida farmers and Kansas ranchers will expand their operations to meet demand for all those steaks, ribs and lemonades. Plus there will be more truck drivers hired to haul all this great American food to restaurants, and more servers hired.
But remember, clawing our way out of this abyss starts with one cheapo family begetting one chump server going home with a chump change burning a hole in his pocket, just aching to do some stimulating itself.
I love this country.
And I'm not bitter.
Recent Comments