Every morning, while they were still in bed, the phone would ring. Jack would get out of bed to answer it, and, after a brief conversation, he would hang up. Sarah wondered who it was that kept calling, but in the entire time they were living together, she never said anything. After about six months, they got married, and when they did, the phone calls stopped.
It would be another year before Sarah found out why. It turned out that Jack’s mother had once had to pay off his debts, and she did not want to have to do so again. He would go to the bars, run a tab on his credit card, and when he really got to feeling good, he would buy drinks for others as well. Then, being all hung over the next morning, he would not go to work, and he eventually lost his job. So, once his mother paid off his credit card balance, and saw to it that he got another job, she would call in the morning long distance to make sure he got out of bed and went to work. But once he got married, his mother stopped calling, figuring that he was his wife’s problem from then on. And so he was.
Sarah was one of my coworkers, and one day she showed up for work on her day off. “I decided to come in and work some overtime,” she explained to me, “because we need the money.” But Jack could spend it faster than she could earn it: week after week, she came in on her day off to make the extra money, and week after week, he continued to drink it all away.
And then there was this other married couple I used to know. They just never seemed to have enough money, living paycheck to paycheck. And when Judy had a baby, what little income they had was stretched even further. Judy would use her lipstick down to the very end, and, she confided in me, her brassieres were all worn out, because she didn’t want to spend the money on new ones. And then, one fine day, Carl came home with a new bowling ball. He already had two in the closet, but he thought if he changed the fingering slightly, he could add a few points to his average. They argued about it, but in the end, Judy kept pinching pennies in hopes that they would eventually get ahead, and whenever they did, Carl would find a way to squander it.
Economists tell us that we are committing the fallacy of composition when we try understand the national economy as if it were a household, but I can’t help thinking that if we are not careful, we may be guilty of as much folly as that of either of the hapless wives in the stories above. If the entitlements are cut, forcing seniors to work longer like Sarah, or to scrimp like Judy, their forfeit of benefits will be in vain, for politicians like Carl will find new toys to spend the savings on, and the politicians like Jack will go on a tax cutting binge.
It is easy to see that Sarah should have just taken her day off, and that Judy should have bought herself a tube of lipstick and a couple of bras. At the risk of being accused of committing the fallacy of composition, I say it is just as easy to see that the poor, the sick, and the elderly should not willingly allow entitlement cuts out of some misguided sense of patriotic duty. To do so would be a pointless sacrifice.