Q: Are you really the Wizard of Oz?
A: No. I am the Wizard of Economics, but the two Wizard-hoods, being dependent on a talent for projecting an illusion of wisdom from a miasma of doubt, are actually interchangeable.
Q: Would you prefer to talk about the Straw Man or the Carter Administration?
A: Is there any difference?
Q: I’ll ask the questions, thank you. Why are my taxes about to go up?
A: Because Congress has just learned about penicillin.
Q: Nonsense, Wizard. Penicillin has been around more than thirty years. Congress would have learned about it before now.
A: Not at all. Communication is very slow in Washington. It took almost ninety years for Congress to learn that slavery had been abolished.
Q: What does penicillin have to do with my taxes?
A: Thanks to penicillin almost everybody now lives long enough to collect Social Security. Congress didn’t count on penicillin when it invented Social Security, so it didn’t worry where it was going to get the money for Social Security payments to all those folks penicillin was going to conduct into their seventies, eighties, and nineties. Last week Congress heard the system was broke. This week they’re preparing some new taxes to patch it up.
Q: Will they be very steep taxes?
A: As the Royal Executioner told the gentleman who was about to be drawn and quartered, you, sir, will know pain.
Q: Aren’t there also going to be heavy new taxes on my oil and gas, after the energy bills are passed?
A: As you seem to be a glutton for bad news, yes.
Q: Is there no good news?
A: Of course. The Senate is proposing to reduce your Social Security tax by making your boss pay a lot more than you do.
Q: What’s good about that? If the boss pays more taxes he’s got less money to give me a raise to meet the ever-rising cost of living. Don’t I end up paying the boss’s share, too?
A: The Senate proposal is based on the assumption that you’re too dumb to know things like that. If you’re not, you lose the tax benefit of the Senate plan.
Q: Can’t anything be done to save me from these taxes?
A: Of course, and the Administration is dedicated to doing it. Its aim is to create more jobs. With more jobs, more people will pay taxes and the individual burden will be reduced.
Q: How do you create more jobs by raising the tax employers have to pay on every jobholder? Won’t this encourage employers to hold down the tax bill by holding down the payroll?
A: You don’t understand economics. Of course a big rise in the Social Security payroll tax might hold down employment. That is why the President proposes to compensate for raising the Social Security payroll tax by cutting the income tax.
Q: Let’s see if I have this right. The Government proposes to take from my left pocket and add to my right pocket. Wouldn’t it be easier just to leave both pockets alone?
A: You forget that more lucre is needed to keep Social Security afloat. What is returned may not be so great as what is taken away.
Q: Then why doesn’t the Government take only what it needs from the left pocket and let it go at that, instead of taking too much from the left pocket and then having to put some of it back in the right pocket?
A: Because, you see, the President has promised tax reform. With the extra income-tax forms you’ll have to fill out to recover what’s due your right pocket, not to mention all the new forms you’ll need to cope with the new credits and deductions in the new energy bill, the President figures you’ll finally become angry enough to write a letter to Congress demanding tax reform.
Q: Would that do any good?
A: Does a flea scratch dogs?
Q: Can’t you give me something, Wizard, to help me make sense of it all?
A: That, alas, is medicine which does not exist. But here—take two of these dumbness pills every four hours, and it won’t hurt so much.