And In This Corner...
The big news today was the evening news announcing that a large financial company that recently partook of the big bailout section of the Stimulus Package was spending somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven million dollars in a redecoration program of senior executive offices. The news halted for a moment allowing public outrage to bubble up. After a short pause while viewers were scraped off the ceiling the news continued.
Realizing that there could be no news following that was going to be as earth shattering as finding out that there were people around who enjoyed a more comfortable life style than me I turned off the news and checked to see if additional nourishment had found its way into the liquor cabinet. I pondered over eleven million dollars and measured it against the make believe figure of one to one and a half trillion dollars that the Stimulus Package supposedly represents, the figure depending on which doom and gloom merchant you are listening to at the time. I have no frame of reference to eleven million dollars or a trillion and a half dollars, the figures I commonly deal with have to do with making the thirty six dollars I show in my checking account agree with the figure shown on my bank statement. I only know that compared to a trillion and a half dollars eleven million dollars is pocket change.
I did take a minute trying to visualize a Wall Street executive looking at the worn linoleum on his office floor, his army surplus green metal desk, his computer desk with a telephone book propping up one leg, and thinking he needed a little work on his executive image. I doubt if it was that bad, more likely than not it had been at least a year since his office suite was upgraded and he was bored with looking at it. Regardless of the reason the decision was made to refurbish, redo, upgrade, and do the TV thing of a "makeover". I don't know how many offices were involved in this eleven million dollar expenditure and it really doesn't matter.
I reached the point of considering exactly how something like an eleven million dollar expenditure is mechanically handled. Obviously the first step is to hire a design staff who says things like, "Oh, this just won't do at all, it's all totally wrong! That desk must go and the carpet does not say today. That paneling is gauche and the paintings send entirely the wrong message." You can fill in the rest.
The result is a crew comes in and takes everything out for resale to a lower level executive in Des Moines or Cleveland. Another crew comes in and rips out the carpet, all the while the gauche paneling is removed from public view. Electricians rewire, just for the heck of it, and plumbers re-plumb for the movement of the concealed bar and do whatever it is they do to the private bathroom. Now comes the new paneling with the carpenters, the carpet installers, the bar re-doers (is there such a word?), and they all do this while dancing around the painters. Last are the heavy duty workers heaving the new furniture in and out of freight elevators to get it up to the stratospheric heavens that house the executive personnel.
All this goes on and eleven million dollars is spent and now the executive can think executive thoughts in the proper atmosphere. Where did the eleven million dollars go? Almost every penny went to paychecks. To the designers, to the carpenters, to the electricians, to the plumbers, to the painters, to the carpet installers, to the heavy duty workers, eleven million dollars went into the pockets of the people who actually upgraded the offices. And to the people who built and sold the new furniture and fixtures in the offices.
Then where did the money go? Well, the electrician went home and paid his mortgage, makes a car payment, put some money aside for his son's tuition, bought new tires for his wife's car, bought a new piece of equipment from Home Depot for his business, and took his wife to dinner.
So did the plumbers, carpenters, designers, painters, carpet installers, and the heavy duty workers. They paid bills, bought stuff, went out to dinner, and blew the rest.
According to my twenty pound dictionary STIMILUS is: something that incites to action or exertion or quickens action, feeling, thought, etc.
The question here is what could a mere eleven million dollars do for a company that is billions upside down financially? Not much. What can eleven million dollars do when it is put directly in the hands of people who would immediately spread it around? A heck of a lot.
This all sounds to me like someone has a pretty good idea on how to spend Stimulus Package money. Instead of the money disappearing into the nebulous caverns of financial gobblely-gook it is actually going directly to people who need a paycheck. The reason the money is being spent means very little, justified or not, what is important is that every penny of the millions is going to someone who worked for it. That is indeed an admirable fact.
Maybe the Stimulus Package is going to work after all.