Dear Reader,
I would like for you to contact the President and promote my candidacy to make me the “Knife Czar.” If you don’t know what that is, it’s a new government office I concocted where I have unlimited power to slice federal spending. I promise there is no one more competent or more passionate than yours truly.
My qualifications:
I’m a stingy son of a bitch. I know how to squeeze a nickel until the buffalo squeals. When my car needs new tires, I go to the edge-of-town tire joint and get retreads. When some sort of silver jewelry was all the rage at my 14-year-old daughter’s overprivileged Episcopal church school, I found a knockoff and then paid $1 for a Tiffany box to put it in. Merry Christmas, Ella! She was so happy, as was I, because all the other dumbass fathers spent $1,000. Me? $87.84. She never knew the difference.
I tip 20%, but I don’t tip on top of the sales tax. I’m pretty good at math, so when I tip it is always exactly 20% of the pretax bill—$4.37 means $4.37. Not a penny more. When I go through the checkout line at the grocery store, my brain already knows what the total is going to be. I often tell the cashier, “That will be $101.10,” before she rings it up. She stares at me like I just bent a spoon with my mind.
You know how family members give you nice leather wallets for Christmas, Father’s Day, etc.? I have six of them in my top dresser drawer. I often get asked why I don’t use any of them. Well, I haven’t used up the one I’ve had for the last 30 years. It is literally held together by duct tape. Why retire a veteran still willing to serve.
I haven’t bought a new sports jacket in 20 years (and that one was on sale). Thrift shops, baby! Motel 6, Red Roof Inn, and Days Inn. I drive a 23-year-old car. I remember a buddy of mine telling me what a good deal he got on a used Jeep Cherokee and thinking to myself, “I could’ve bought four Jeep Cherokees for that price.” Many of my friends have never set foot in the bad part of town where all the used car lots are. I know a fellow—a Syrian Druze—who owns a car lot on Jefferson Davis Turnpike. Great guy, great prices. If you want a good deal, you go where the deals are!
My three brothers are also cheap bastards. They all went away to boarding school, and my dad provided a nice life for all of us, but I reckon we boys just inherited a latent parsimonious gene. More than likely it got infused into our DNA after the heathen Yankees went on their godless burning and looting rampage in the early 1860s. One must save to be prepared in case those Philistine savages come over the hedgerow again.
My brother Fat Wally makes Silas Marner look like Imelda Marcos. Wally’s good with money, and the number one rule of being good with money is not to spend it on stupid stuff. I remember when I was 14 and Wally was 16, we went to buy beer in Montross, a neighboring town where fewer folks would know us. I was the lookout, making sure no cops or adults we knew walked into the store. Fat Wally successfully bought the beer and was walking out of the store… I wiped my brow—“Whew, we are going to make it!” Then Wally dropped a nickel. It rolled down the aisle. Any normal person would’ve left the scene of the crime. That miserly SOB looked for it for 35 minutes, crawling around the store on his knees, right in the midst of our underage beer-buying caper. He wasn’t leaving without it.
We Smith boys might be a gnarly, uncouth lot of tobacco-spittin’ hayseeds, but we understand compound interest. Buy that J. Press tweed sports jacket retail for $800, or buy it at the thrift shop for $100, and that $700 savings—invested at the historical rate of return of the stock market—becomes $31,681 in 40 years. It’s a damn miracle! Okay, maybe not quite like turning water into wine, but turning $800 into nearly $32,000 gives Jesus a pretty good run for His money.
One of the greatest cognitive exercises for wealth production is to train the mind away from presentism and toward the joy of future rewards. One hears of women who practice “retail therapy”—buying stuff makes them feel good. I get a dopamine hit by walking into a store, seeing something I like, and then not buying it. By not buying that $800 jacket, my brain immediately calculates and produces a “receipt,” which reads: On February 23, 2065, you will have $36,198.73. It feels good. It makes me happy.
Our federal government, by contrast, is presentism all the time. There’s no long-term thinking because the spending is free to the individual who benefits, but the problems associated with overspending belong to others.
Imbued in my conscience, all the time, is a moving image of soiled, sooty workers shoveling coal into a hot furnace—except there is no coal. Instead, the workers are androgynous federal employee types shoveling money into a raging fiery furnace, and they are all laughing. I can’t sleep at night. It haunts me.
I manage trusts and money for clients. A cash register rings in Paris or Milan. One of my female clients is shopping. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, I get a sharp pain—like a prick in my side—no different than her sticking pins in a Voodoo doll of me. Dear Reader, when you get your car serviced at the dealer instead of at Joe the Mechanic’s, it hurts me. I feel the pain of your wasteful spending.
What set me off this morning was hearing a retired federal worker speak of federal workers getting $150 per month in Metro cards to take the subway from Northern Virginia into D.C. This particular dual federal employee couple moved out of state 15 years ago but still get their Metro cards, which they sell to others. Make me the Czar, and I will eliminate tax money to NGOs and nonprofits, privatize Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, do away with the Davis–Bacon Act and student loans, cut money to universities, and fire 80% of all federal workers.
I’ve never wanted a job more. I’m uniquely qualified. I can’t sleep at night. The pinpricks are killing me. I actually feel the heat from the conflagration of all that money being burned. I have nightmares of Rosie O’Donnell–looking federal employees getting pedicures on their chubby feet, eating buckets of Almas caviar and guzzling Dom Pérignon, all of them laughing hysterically at me!
Please help me. End my turmoil. Make me the Knife Czar!
