Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob who wrote (215006)	1/5/2002 4:26:52 PM
From: Bob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

For all the liberals on the thread, this guy has taken it upon himself to rewrite the parable: Every night for as long as they can remember, 10 men of various financial means meet at a restaurant for dinner. At the end of the meal, the bill arrives. They typically owe about $100 for the food that they share. However, the men take an unusual approach to determining who pays what for the meal. The each pay a set amount based on a percentage of their income. Exactly what percentage each one pays is periodically determined based on a popular vote of the waiters in the restaurant. That decision holds for years at a time. For many years now, the wealthiest of the ten has been required by the waiters to pay a large percentage of his income towards the dinner bill and he is growing a bit weary of it. Despite the dinner bill, his income has grown significantly and he is living quite comfortably. Last Friday night, they lined up in their usual order at the cash register. As had been determined several years ago, the first three men paid $2 collectively because they made the least amount of money. The fourth, paid $3 because he made slightly more. The fifth, paid $4 as he made more than the fourth guy. The sixth man paid about $6. The next two men paid $17 collectively. The ninth man paid roughly $17. The last and the wealthiest man was required to pay the remaining balance, $52. He realized that he was forced to pay a highly lopsided amount for his meal in relation to what the other nine had paid, but he was happy to be going home to a nice 2,500 sq ft home in the suburbs with two cars, three TVs, a home theater system, a stairmaster, three weeks paid vacation, health care coverage, and a good school system for the kids. He also knew that several of his friends in the group were going home to tiny 700 sq ft apartments in the trashy part of town with crappy schools where they had to ride the bus every day to get to their job cleaning the office building where he worked. The 10 men were quite settled into their routine when the restaurant threw them into chaos by announcing that it would did not need to charge the men $100 any more to cover its costs. Now, the restaurant said dinner for the 10 men would cost less. If they used the payment formula they had been using for the past several years, they would end up paying the restaurant more money then they owed. The next time they went out together, they asked the waiters to figure out how to divide up the dinner bill again. The waiters all gathered round to discuss the issue, but the recently hired head waiter already had his own idea about how to change the system. He suggested the following plan: Everyone would pay a lower percentage of their income so that the ten do not put more money in the kitty than they need to pay the bill. He figured that they needed to pony up $20 less than they had in the past. The first four men would pay about $4 collectively instead of $5 (a $1 reduction or 5% of the $20). The fifth man would pay a dollar less as would the sixth man. The seventh and eight men would also deduct $4 from their collective bill (about 20% of the $20). The ninth man would take $3 off and now pay $14. The last man would take $10 off his payment (50% of the total savings), leaving him with a $42 tab. The head waiter went on and on about how fair and beneficial this plan was for all of them. After hearing this plan, the men began to compare their potential savings, and angry outbursts began to erupt. The first four men pointed out that they would get virtually nothing yet they are the ones struggling the most to make ends meet. The seventh man yelled, "I would only save $2 out of $20, and he would save $10," pointing at the wealthiest man. The fifth man joined in. "Yeah! I would only get $1 too. It is unfair that he gets ten times more than me when he gets a 5% percent raise every year plus a salary bonus and I am barely making minimum wage?" The sixth man cried, "Why should he save $10 when I save $1 when you know it is a struggle for me to afford new school clothes and school supplies for my children." Some of the waiters participating in the discussion offered a compromise in which the wealthiest man still paid significantly less, but that gave a just a little bit more to the remaining nine men. However, the head waiter was adamant and arrogant about his proposal and refused to budge even though part of the reason he was given the job was that he promised to try and be a unifying force at the restaurant rather than an uncompromising ideologue. Instead, he chose to bully and pressure those waiters who did not support his plan, which caused many of them to dislike his plan even more. Many of them felt that this new head waiter was behaving a lot like the old head waiter. A group of angry waiters carried the new head waiter up to the top of the hill and lynched him. The next night, the ten men met at the restaurant for dinner and the waiters quickly hashed out a compromise that still provided a significant amount of savings for the wealthiest man, but also gave back a little bit more to those who need it the most. Alan Balch