Shampoo Economics
In the old days, we had Gypsies with crystal balls, seers who saw the future through the medium of tea leaves and phrenologists who claimed to read your future through studying the bumps on your skull. Today, the whole gaggle of them are pretty much gone, but because Nature tends to abhor a vacuum, they’ve left the field clear to economists. There are those who insist that economics is a science. But whereas actual scientists all agree about such things as the existence of gravity, the distance to the moon and such laws as the one that holds that things in motion tend to remain in motion, economists can’t agree about anything.
In the old days, we had Gypsies with crystal balls, seers who saw the future through the medium of tea leaves and phrenologists who claimed to read your future through studying the bumps on your skull. Today, the whole gaggle of them are pretty much gone, but because Nature tends to abhor a vacuum, they’ve left the field clear to economists.
There are those who insist that economics is a science. But whereas actual scientists all agree about such things as the existence of gravity, the distance to the moon and such laws as the one that holds that things in motion tend to remain in motion, economists can’t agree about anything.
Back in the late 1980s or early 90s, a woman was divorcing an economist. In the settlement, she made sure it contained a codicil granting her half the money if within the coming decade, her ex-husband was to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Eight years later, he copped the Prize and she got her $500,000.
While it was he who went to Stockholm and got to give a speech, I would argue that his ex-wife should have copped the honor.
Although I can’t claim to be a professional economist, I think that President Trump could do worse than to give me a cabinet position and put me in charge of recharging the economy, a job I am far better-equipped to handle than Hillary’s choice, Bill Clinton.
That’s because I have a sure-fire solution. I call it shampoo economics because I can’t claim full credit for it and wish to acknowledge the role that the shampoo industry played in my coming up with the brainstorm. My sole contribution was in recognizing the huge effect those few words on every bottle of shampoo could have on our economy: “Shampoo. Rinse. Repeat.”
It’s that “Repeat” that caught my attention. Imagine the audacity of it. You use a product specifically created to wash your hair, and once you’ve done the job, you’re told to do it all over again!
Think of the effect it could have on our economy if we brought that policy to bear in every area of commerce. Buy a loaf of bread…and now buy a second loaf. Buy a 64-inch TV…and now buy another. Buy a new Chevy…and now go out and buy a second. Think of the economic boom if every farmer, every fast food outlet, every manufacturer, was compelled to double the supply of goods to meet the demands of an insatiable public.
Whereas Trump talks about an annual 4% economic growth, the Prelutsky plan promises 8%, but the sky’s the limit because if the economy shows the slightest downward curve, we simply change to a three-peat plan.
That is why I insist that my plan is Head & Shoulders above all the others.
Frankly, I’m surprised that people like John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith and even Alan Greenspan, academics who weren’t also writing three or four articles a week, writing books and movie scripts, never thought of it. But perhaps they were so involved with that single job, it never even occurred to them to think outside the box or to read the instructions on the shampoo bottle.
Actually, it’s rather ironic that it took a bald guy to beat them at their own game.
If a cop, even a black one, didn’t occasionally shoot a black criminal, I wonder what black mobs would find to riot about. In a way, I suppose the riots are simply an example of a different economic theory in action. I mean, when one black man shoots another black man, as has happened over 500 times in Chicago thus far in 2016, it merely provides Obama, Mrs. Clinton, Loretta Lynch and their stooges in Congress and the media, an excuse to once again try to nullify the Second Amendment.
But if that first black man happens to be wearing a police uniform, it results in an entire neighborhood being outfitted with new Nikes. After all, nothing says social justice quite as much as looting a Walmart’s.
The notion that the so-called black community only wants jobs is proven a hoax once you realize that the black unemployment rate when George Bush left office stood at 12%, whereas today it’s 17%. Nevertheless, blacks gave Obama 97% of their votes and a similar percentage are anxiously awaiting the opportunity to do the same for Hillary Clinton.
A reader recently wrote to reminisce about William F. Buckley’s TV show, “Firing Line.” Although I admired Buckley’s work on behalf of conservatism, I never thought he was at his best on the tube. For one thing, he was so dedicated to displaying his pedantry that he would never stoop to using a couple of six-letter words if he could possibly wedge in one with 12 letters.
I found his debates with uberliberal Gore Vidal especially excruciating. Vidal always came across as an uberfruitcake while Buckley, a mad gleam in his eye, would inevitably lean forward, looking like Snoopy portraying a vulture, while tapping his pencil incessantly against his front teeth. At times, it seemed as if he were channeling Lionel Hampton playing “Flight of the Bumble Bee” on his xylophone.
In discussing words and phrases now out of favor, another reader voiced confidence they would never disappear from the scene, but I disagreed. I wrote: “One can hope, but none of the kids are using them these days, although they are far more likely to have been exposed to ‘hunky dory,’ ‘swell,’ ‘knee-high to a grasshopper,’ ‘jumping Jehoshaphat’ and ‘pshaw!’ than their kids or grandkids will be.
"Besides, they are addicted to communicating 140 characters at a time and using Ur, 4 and LOL, in place of actual words. Yet another generation of jibbering idiots. Is it any wonder they lined up behind a pinheaded Pied Piper named Bernie Sanders? I wonder if they even know what slang is, let alone use it.
"I hate to be the very personification of a cliché — the old codger who sees America going to the dogs — but thanks to a fifth-rate education system, a 10th rate media and demographics that are destroying the character of the nation — I see little reason to feel hopeful for our beloved nation’s future. Regards, Burt”
Oh, and did I forget to mention that at Brown and Cornell, they will now be dispensing feminine hygiene products in what in a bygone age were known as men’s rooms? It is one small step for mankind, but one giant leap for lunacy.
The CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, under whose stewardship the company created two million phony accounts that led to 5,000 employees being canned, told a congressional committee that he is taking full responsibility for the crime. By which he means he is not resigning or giving back the enormous bonus he received for all those fictitious new accounts.
Although I can sympathize with a guy having to go through life with a name ending in “pf,” that’s still no excuse for him not to spend the next two million years in the slammer.
Gloria Steinem, who used to be an attractive young bubblehead and is now, decades later, a bubblehead with wrinkles, has recently declared: “Forced childbirth is the single biggest cause of global warming.”
In case you’re confused as to cause and effect, she went on to say: “I’m glad the Pope spoke out about global warming, but does he know he’s causing it?”
My interpretation of her theory is that if we didn’t have so many people, we wouldn’t have to expend so much energy in feeding, clothing and housing, them. As you may have noticed, whenever liberals complain that not enough blacks or Hispanics have influential, high-paying jobs, they never offer to sacrifice their own, and when, like Ms. Steinem, they complain about over-population, they never offer to kill themselves in order to make room for someone else.
My own response is to say: “Don’t tell us Gloria, tell your pals Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They’re still blaming coal.”
Meanwhile, down in Florida, perennial candidate Charlie Crist got the kind of laughs I can only dream about when he said, “I believe Hillary Clinton is steady, I believe she is strong …and” (wait for it!) “I believe she is honest.”
It brought down the house. Damn those amateurs!
A quote Brit Hume shared on his Fox broadcast and attributed to someone named Larry Hardiman, but which I suspect has been around for quite a while, made me chuckle: “The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poli” meaning many and the word 'ticks,’ meaning blood-sucking parasites.“
Finally, I keep hearing that Hillary Clinton is out-spending Donald Trump by a margin of 5-1, in some states by 10-1, when it comes to TV advertising. So why am I getting email from him and his kids six or seven times a day dunning me for campaign contributions?
It leads me to wonder if he’s using the money to get himself elected president or whether, come November 9th, we’ll discover that we’ve financed a new golf resort in Ireland.
