12/9/97

How Do We Do It?

And then he came to the onion vendor, who revealed how to get by without even crying.

    As I figure it, we're either poor or rich, but somehow, no matter what we do, it can't get any better -- or worse. Don't ask me how this can be, because, as far as I can tell from speaking to experts in the field, it can best be described as the Principle of Perpetual Hovering Poverty. And apparently, the entire Israeli economic infrastructure depends on it.
    We have no money but we're allowed to spend money we won't have next month. The more I earn, the less I have. According to my net worth I can't afford to buy a can of beans, but I could up and go to Bermuda for a week.
    It's life on the verge. Every month we just make it. Once a year we hit a bonanza of one miraculous sort or another -- and within 24 hours the property tax bill arrives, the car insurance expires, the fridge dies and the kids need new shoes. I know -- I just know -- if I were to win a million in the Lotto some madman would take my family hostage and demand 1.1 million. That's why I never buy Lotto tickets.
    I do not understand why we can't earn more than we spend. One month, my wife and I decided, once and for all, to challenge this law of nature. We didn't spend a single grusch. Our overdraft shot up.
    I wanted some answers. So I went to my bank manager.
    My bank manager talks to me like I'm an armed bandit, while siphoning off money I haven't yet made to pay for management services on money I don't have.
    I asked him to explain how a typical family earning the national average with basic expenditures could manage to spend double its annual income on only half of the basket of essential goods and services, year after year. The best advice he could give me was to buy life insurance and then get killed.
    I have long suspected that my particular bank branch keeps some Marxist on staff just to manipulate my account, to keep me hovering near perpetual poverty. I mentioned this matter-of-factly to the bank manager one morning and he immediately raised my interest rate.
    I suggested that if the bank were to stop advertising how happy its customers were, they wouldn't have to take so much from its customers to say so, which would make us, in fact, happier. He responded by reminding me that the advertisements he places in the newspaper where I work are paying my salary. I countered by suggesting that if I stopped working and he stopped advertising, we'd come out roughly even. That's when he confiscated my credit card. I threatened to close my account and stick the bank with my overdraft. He chuckled. I said at the very least I'd freeze all interest payments. He chortled. I saw red. I vowed to someday get in the black and then take my business elsewhere. Oh, he loved that one, all right.
    I'm no fool. I realized that action speaks louder than words, so I took a second job. Then a third. I wuz gonna show him.
    The next month I made a huge deposit. The bank promptly installed a new marble floor. (They could have had the decency to affix a donation plaque in my name.) I began working overtime at all three jobs and took on some freelance work. On the first of the following month I put in a vast sum. On the second of the month the bank opened a new branch. I sold my car. The manager got a raise. Then I started padding my overtime claims until I was working a 40-hour day. Did I make a deposit! That week the branch was featured in Fortune 500.
    After four months of this I checked my balance. You'd have thought I was on unpaid leave all that time.

"HOW DO Israelis do it?" I asked a legendary economist to explain the phenomenon.
    "It's not so complicated," he told me. "It's the conundrum between consumerism expenditures today vis a vis tomorrow, when current earnings  contrast to projected profits, wherein if, theoretically, you could prognosticate assets, revenues, earnings or other intrinsic forms of pelf, consumption upon acquisition will be necessary. This, of course, is the last thing you'd want to do: estimated equity in the aforementioned future timeframe that overweighs that of the present day, could result in hunger now and gluttony later. The thrust of which is that the capital market precludes both plethora and privation. Or in a nutshell, if you can buy two apples today, save one for tomorrow."
    "Uh-huh," I said.
    I could do worse than to ask my rebbe. "Why," I asked the wise old man, "should a Jew buy two apples on credit today, just to  be sure he has an apple when he's hungry tomorrow, and then have to pay the bank for three apples plus interest?"
    He stroked his beard. After a momentary mull, he spake. "You like apples? Eat apples. God will take care of the rest."
     Clearly, he thought I was talking, strictly speaking, about apples. "Let me put it another way, rebbe. Four years ago I bought an apartment for $160,000."
    "Mazel tov."
    "Two years ago I sold it for $240,000 and bought another for $160,000, which is today worth $240,000 based on what Greenberg next door got for selling his. So I'm richer today than four years ago by $160,000, which sounds even better if I say half a million shekels. Then why am I as poor as a church mouse, as it were?"
    "So what's the mystery? Reb Yidl, a disciple of Hillel, relates to Reb Shmil, from the House of Shamai, the following story: A cobbler from the town of Tomsk didn't have a kopek to buy challa for Shabbos. It was already an hour before sunset. He runs to the rabbi and wails, 'Rabbi, what should I do?' and the rabbi says to the cobbler, 'am I a baker?' So the cobbler runs to the baker's house and throws himself on the floor and begs. The baker gives him a kopek to buy challa, and the cobbler races to the bakery which is, naturally, already closed for Shabbos. So he runs home, gives his wife the kopek, and, out of breath, tells her excitedly: 'We won't have any challa for Shabbos but at least we'll have this kopek to remind us that we could have had challa.' And the wife tears her hair out and screams at the poor cobbler: 'Idiot! Are you going to make a blessing on the kopek? It's going to feed the children? You call yourself a provider?' And with that she throws the kopek out the window just as the sun sets."
    "Uh-huh," I said. "So what should I learn from this?"
    "The moral of the story is," he said with a shrug, "whatever you do, just don't tell your wife."
     That gave me a lateral thought. I called my mother. "Serves you right," she said. "You should have listened to me."
    I should not have called my mother.
    "When I say do your homework, you go out and play hockey with your friends. When I say it's bedtime, that's when you decide to do your homework, which means you go to bed at some ridiculous hour and then when I wake you up to go to school, to get an education, to make something of yourself and give your children a comfortable life, you're too tired to get up, you have no energy because you don't eat the supper I serve you -- God forbid you should eat liver -- and then you wonder why you end up a lousy journalist with no education instead of a doctor. And now you have to come crawling back to ask me why you can't make ends meet. Your children should only listen to you like --"
     I was talking to an answering machine.
    "Ma, I'm 39 years old now, this is long distance, I did my homework and I still don't eat liver, and I must be crazy to think you could give me some advice."
    "You want advice? Do without."
    "Uh-huh," I said.
    My boss is wealthy, so I figure he must know something I don't. "The more I work," I explained, "the more I make for everyone else. If I work twice as long at time and a half I pay three times the taxes but still come out with the same bank balance. Last month, as soon as I got my payslip, the government announced they could suddenly afford to build a new yeshiva. But I had to take out a loan to pay for the interest on my overdraft."
    He eyed me suspiciously. "Sales are down, costs are up, productivity is lagging, inflation has cut into profit margin and the competition is provoking a price war so no, you can't have a raise at this present time."
    I thanked him for his considerations, but I wasn't exactly asking for a raise. "Just an answer to Mankind's most enduring mystery: How do Israelis do it?"
    My boss breathed a great sigh of relief. He smiled, leaned forward and in his most executive manner looked me square in the eye, thumped his desk  and said: "Simple. Earn more."
    Uh-huh.

I MIGHT never have got the answer had I not stopped by the shuk the other day.
    "Ten kilo onions," I commanded one vendor, and pulled out my checkbook. He growled Neanderthalically. "Cash!"
    I dug into my pocket and pulled out all I had. I sighed. "One onion, please."
    He gave me a dirty look, one very small onion and no bag. He took my coin and, with an air of haughty nonchalance, flipped it into the gutter. He hauled out an amazing wad of 50s and 100s. "Yalla, uncle, how much change ya want?" He laughed raucously.
    We got to talking. Turns out he's got a villa, a black Mercedes and four kids, each with a villa and a black Mercedes.
    "From selling onions?!" I said incredulously.
    "No, I perform heart transplants on the side," he answered, not without a tinge of sarcasm.
    I asked how much he pulls in after taxes.
    "Taxes?"
    So it goes right into the bank, I marveled.
    "The bank!" he howled. "I'm so stupid to put my money in the bank?"  
    I blinked. "Aha!"
    Enlightened at last, I picked up my coin from the gutter and raced home to my waiting wife. I might never pull away from the verge, but at least now I knew how it was done.