for 21 February 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Revolting Acts I would like to kick Tim Eyman in the head. Then I would bitch-slap all the weak minded or greedy suckers that voted for I-695. Only the rich with their obscenely expensive SUVs and large corporation with their massive fleets of automobiles benefited from the biggest scam ever in Washington politics. I don't own a car and I will be paying MORE now. How fucked up is that? I pay more for the ferry and bus when some 30ish bitch gets to drive her Excursion by HERSELF to work everyday for $30 a year. My friend's tabs went up... Now Tim Eyman wants to divert nearly all of the states transportation budget to roads. Forget Salaries, or ferries, or buses, let's just build roads. Hey look at L.A., it worked fine there...Give me a fucking break. guedo espedia <espedia@hotmail.com> The conflict between road services and public transportation has been a fundamental regional political battle for years. I'm with you -- I've never understood why the ability to live an hour or more away from one's workplace was considered a right for which people should tax me. At the same time, I'm more than happy to have these people live far away from me. Maybe it's how you look at it. 40th Street Black  Without a doubt the best essay I've seen on Suck to date. I look forward to more. You have set the bar very high. Steven P. Sanabria <diegodeigh@pikeonline.net> Thank you, Steven. I look forward to doing more, even though the thought of any bar makes me flash back to the horrors of the "track and field" unit in sixth grade gym. Dick Fosbury has a lot to answer for. 40th Street Black Back in the days when computers were time-sharing behemoths, the Internet was a DARPA project and the hottest user interface you could get was a DecWriter, Professor Arthur Laffer drew what can best be described as a crude outline of the female breast on a cocktail napkin and called it economics. That level of thought appealed not only to arguably the most idiotic person ever elected President of the United States, but also to droves of clueless dupes who voted for him not just once, but twice and screamed for the opportunity to do so a third time. Never mind that Ronald Reagan's first and only attempt to actually use Dr. Laffer's theory resulted in disaster. Reagan simply spent the rest of his two terms in office prostituting traditional Keynesian principals, borrowing trillions of dollars to pump the economy and calling the results the fruit of supply-side genius. The Laffer curve is pure bunk of course, because it is based on the fallacious assumption that government revenue is a univariate function of tax rate, when in fact government revenue is a highly complex multivariate function of tax rate. Raising or lowering the effective tax rate therefore entails movement along a multi-dimensional surface, and if you don't know the all the partial derivatives that determine the gradient, you don't know what government revenue (or inflation, or employment, or interest rates) will do in response. Martin Gardner dubbed the actual multivariate function the "technosnarl" in an extremely insightful and witty deconstruction of Laffer and his ilk. It was read, unfortunately, only by people who regularly followed Gardner's column in Scientific American, which is to say by damn few people at all. So, strange as it may seem, lowering taxes does not necessarily bring us prosperity and raising them does not necessarily deprive us of it. And the same Americans who bellyache the most about paying taxes are often the first to line up and demand government spending, be it on farm subsidies for the burly husbandman, an AIDS cure for the pierced and tattooed, or new houses for those cretins who insist on building their homes in flood plains. A government that collects no taxes also does absolutely nothing for its citizens. And with the exception of a few lunatics still camped out in their Y2K Armageddon bunkers, the citizens do not, by and large, actually desire a government that expects them to fix their own potholes, organize their own protection from criminals, and keep the chemical plant down the road from dumping poison in their water supply by themselves. If you scratch below the surface on the issue of taxes, you'll find out that what pisses people off about them is not so much the money, it's the way the taxes are collected and how the taxes are spent. But politicians never go past the superficial on taxes because doing so means confronting organized special interests, snugly entrenched government bureaucracy and, worst of all, the twisted, nasty, incompetent and vindictive tax collectors themselves. Few, if any, politicians have that kind of balls. So enter into the resulting moral vacuum the citizen-demagogues, equipped, perhaps, with some doodle-festooned cocktail napkins of their own, each vigorously thumping the tub to pass a proposition restricting this or that tax. Such guileless folk at least have their ignorance as an excuse. What Dr. Laffer's excuse might be, God alone knows. Walter Bauer <BauerW@DynCorp.com> Having spent more than a few cocktail parties drawing breasts on napkins, I can hazard a guess. Maybe this is all Virgil Partch's fault? At any rate, I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis, with the possible exception of your characterization of citizen-demogogues as "guileless." 40th Street Black Letter from the Editorial Director Nice Homer Simpson reference. But shouldn't the line be about losing your hair, rather than letting it down? Just nit-picking, Meri Brin <meri@idiom.com> Dear Meri, If you are referring to "Mr. Microphone," you should know that it wasn't invented by The Simpsons but was a popular novelty product advertised on TV during the friendless childhoods of key Suck writers. The highlight of the Mr. Microphone TV commercial comes when a convertible full of Jimmy McNichol-type yahoos out cruising passes a "fox" on the street, and one of the young men broadcasts "Hey, Good Lookin', be back to pick you up later!" — thus coining an immortal catch phrase for an era when immortal catch phrases were hard to come by. Hope this helps, The Boob Subject: Very unfunny, Yogi. Tell me this is just a sick joke. I don't know what else to say — I don't feel like I know who I'm speaking to anymore. Surely you have mistaken the sauce for the salsa and have been hitting it indiscriminately. Otherwise, to quote one of the great usurpers, "Oh the pain, the pain!!" A loyal has-been (fan), Joanne Dear Joanne, It's no joke. Suck is going mainstream. Why don't you get with the program and come on board for the big win? Yours, Yogi Okaycola But I'm an English professor. I live for that "heady mixture of smarmy pseudo-erudition and reflexive scorn"! Without the old Suck, I'll have to go back to reading the MLA Profession and Stanley Fish! Dr. Johndan Johnson-Eilola Associate Professor of English Purdue University <johndan@purdue.edu> To get the full effect of a Suck article, you should always follow the links. In today's issue the first link, http://www.word.com/ yhome/artdirector11500.html, would have made it clear that we were writing a parody of Word.com's recent "letter from the art director." We thought our use of absurd statements and funny names would make it even more clear that we were joking, and I apologize for any confusion or discomfort this may have caused you and, apparently, countless other readers. Yr pal, Tim Actual Editor, Suck.com Yearly Updates: An Update Regarding Yearly Updates: An Update, I just wanted to point out one glaring error in the mock family updates. All three letters had the word 'millennium' spelled correctly. I'm sure you would agree that realistically, the chance of this occurring in three real family updates is minimal. Chris Hilton <chilton@scci-ad.com> You make a valid point; however, most of today's word processing software allows everyone the ability to produce perfect spelling and punctuation. Without it, I never would have spelled it correctly myself. the Camel Alice: So, let me get this straight: Those family-doings letters people send out at the end of the year are just as pathetic when email is the medium? Is that the joke? Or are we just supposed to be reassured that salespeople and the elderly are still lame and don't know how obvious the purposelessness of their existence is? Which, I suppose, is a kind of reassurance. It's evidence, after all, of the comforting immortality of certain kinds of humor. Like those cartoons in The New Yorker where businessmen all wear hats. I realize that by writing this I leave myself open to a shattering rejoinder, but I think I'll take my chances. Bill <tipperw@stjohns.edu> Bill, Fear not. I haven't dished out a shattering rejoinder since my days as a halfback at the Canterbury Prep School. Oh what happy times! Kip, Carleton, and myself would run through the freshman dorms issuing Bloody Franklin's to anyone who couldn't sing the school anthem to our liking. Then in the night, we'd steal away to the Lafayette Girl's Academy to steal kisses from our best gals ... Wait a minute, where the hell am I? Oh yeah, your letter. In answer to your question, the joke was meant to be that no matter how many times you wash your trousers, sometimes they still smell like horse shit. Sorry if this was unclear. the Camel Subject: What is DAR? Hayden Thomson <Hayden.Thomson@ird.govt.nz> In answer to your query, DAR has been used as an acronym for many groups. While the most well-known is the Daughters of the American Revolution, there is also Dentists Against Racism, The Society for Diphthongs, Alliteration, and Rhyme, and my favorite, "The National Coalition of Christian Midget Jugglers. Your guess as to Dottie's affiliation is as good as mine. the Camel |
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