David: Hope You Like Reading
First -
read this.
Okay, now here's a slightly altered version...
Beef ‘n Taters
Keeping Some For Myself – A Fulfilling Experiment When Personally Applied!
Last Thursday while walking to lunch on the corner of Massachusetts and Tenth Street, I passed what appeared to be a homeless man standing on the corner of Wentworth and East Bay holding a hand-made sign that read, “Vote Obama, I need the money.†Imagine the laziness of this man sitting on sidewalks that my taxes paid for. I kicked him and told him to get a job.
Once inside one of my favorite restaurants, I noticed that my waiter was wearing a bright blue, “Obama 08†tie; again I laughed to myself as he boldly and proudly advertised his political preference for all the world, and his customers, to see – just imagine the odds of encountering two such 1st Amendment harbingers of change in less than 10-minutes. As you well know, supporting Democratic candidates is not one of the freedoms our troops are fighting for.
When the check finally came I decided not to tip my waiter and explained to him that:
A - I’m an asshole
B - I was going to implement a flawed application of Obama’s Redistribution of Wealth concept that doesn’t exist as my own personal socialistic experiment.
He stood there in stoic disbelief that cranky old men like myself could be such utter dickwads as I expained to him that I was going to redistribute his rightfully earned $10 tip (I’m an excellent tipper, I just hate paying taxes) to someone who I deemed more in need…a homeless fellow sitting in a pool of his own blood a few blocks north in front of the parking lot. The waiter replied with “Sir, do you even understand the concept you’re trying to practice. If anything you should take a small portion from my tip and give it to the homeless man. However, since he doesn’t pay taxes to begin with, he has nothing to lose/gain/do with the convoluted version of the Obama tax plan you believe exists. I mean, even I understand this, and I’m just a local college student.†What a dumbass. I then overheard him laughing in the kitchen about the fact that he’d spit in my food earlier because I’d been such a douche bag through my entire meal.
Apparently, after experiencing firsthand the application of such socialistic governance from the perspective of the rightful wage earner, my young liberal-minded waiter (again, what a dumbass) was quickly convinced that income redistribution was much easier to support as a noble, magnanimous social policy than when some asshole came into the restaurant he worked at and took away what little income he had to depend on.
I went outside, walked back up to Tenth Street, gave the homeless guy a $5 (hey, I’m a successful business man, I know how to skim a little off the top), and asked him to hobble down the street to the restaurant on the corner and thank the waiter there who was wearing the “Obama 08†tie as I’ve decided he could use the money more than my waiter who had actually earned the $10. The homeless fellow smiled in grateful disbelief, tossed his sign in the hedge, and promptly bounded for the McDonalds across the street.
At the end of this impromptu and rather unscientific income redistribution experiment I realized the homeless fellow was truly grateful for the money that he had not exerted any effort to earn (doubtlessly, the man was panhandling after all), but my liberal-minded waiter was highly indignant that I would take from him and then give to another the honest wages that he had worked hard to earn even though the homeless recipient needed the money more.
As I walked back to my office, I began thinking about the heavy burden of corporate ownership (something else I don’t entirely understand the concept of) and the endless frustration from beating my head against the wall of increasing bureaucracy year-after-year. I also thought of the majority of this year’s hard-earned-profits that I had planned to reinvest in a few new employees, annual raises to reward loyalty and hard work, Christmas bonuses for extraordinary effort, and year-end corporate donations to charity. All these were of course weighed against whether they would earn my company more money or not. After all, I don’t just higher new employees because I have too much money lying around, and my annual raises are usually only slightly above cost of living.
After reconsidering my apparent politically incorrect capitalistic beliefs, the needs of my hard-working, albeit financially struggling, middle-class staff (I really want to help these people out, but a federal tax cut for them and increase for me makes me do it, as opposed to the fact I can just talk a big game under the current situation), and the six-figure salaries (what’s my salary? That’s not relevant) of the three non-profits’ directors sitting in the big stately, well-maintained buildings that each called home, I decided then and there to give every last penny of this year’s profit directly to the local homeless shelter, layoff all my staff, close our company, retire early, and take the profits I had and depend upon the largesse of Obama’s promised Redistribution of Wealth (I swear, this exists) for my every need.
In that brief instance, I cemented my status as a total fuckwad.