Thanks, Dick

$600 and free dope is even better than 40 acres and a mule

by Jerry Fraser

I don’t know about you, but the party’s already started at my house, now that Congress has passed a $1.35 trillion tax cut. Mind you, it’s not the tax cut that’s got me dancing in the street.

Phasing out the estate tax exemption, now at $675,000, is unlikely to do me — or my heirs — much good. It’s too late for me to cash in on the increase in the child tax credit, so there’s $50 a year I’ll have to live without. The increase in deductions for married couples will mean but $2 a week in my household, I’m told, and the bump in permissible 401k and IRA contributions kicks in just about the time I plan to retire.

No, it’s the $600 rebate check that will be coming our way this summer that has me high-fiving myself (I’d high-five my wife but I haven’t told her about it). As any Mainer will tell you, it hasn’t been an easy winter around here, and the money will come in handy.

The first thing I’m going to do is get the cable turned back on. That will use up half the rebate, but we couldn’t survive without the digital package. I know, $99 a month is a lot to pay for 35 salsa music channels, but sometimes you have to pamper yourself.

Next I am going to buy a new jet ski. There’s a sale in Portsmouth: $200 down plus no payments for six months. I probably should hold off until I can pay for it outright, but it’ll be cold weather by then. What are you going to do with a jet ski when it’s snowing out?

I’m not sure what to do with the last $100, but I’m thinking of opening a savings account.

Meanwhile, the best may be yet to come. “This is only the beginning,” President Bush said when the tax cut passed. Bush probably wanted to keep things hush-hush, but the House Majority Leader, Representative Dick Armey of Texas, may have let the cat out of the bag when he hinted that free marijuana might be in the offing. “We’re no longer going to get stoned on other people’s money,” he said.

It’s only been a few months since the people of this great state voted to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes, and already Washington seems ready to do Maine one better. Dirigo! my friends, and then some! This is what leadership is all about.

And to think that some people in the media have labeled Armey an arch-conservative.

Granted, it is to Armey’s advantage that the Southwest is fertile country for marijuana growers. And there can be no doubt that Texas’s neighbors south of the border will appreciate Armey’s reefer advocacy. But you’d have to be pretty cynical to hold these things against him. Clearly, Armey is a man who hasn’t forgotten that he was once a young academic.

Besides, as a nation we can afford free pot. By trimming the tax cut from $1.6 trillion to $1.35 trillion, Congress left itself $250 billion in surpluses to play with. Even a small portion of that — say 25 percent — would put enough ganja on the street to make Helena, Montana, look like Kingston, Jamaica.

I can see Capitol Hill now: Look! There goes Jesse Helms with a new bong for his office. Hey! Here comes Ted Kennedy! Damn if he don’t look fine with those dreadlocks! Why yes, Senator Thurmond, certainly you can have that roach clip.

Of course, this assumes the cranky Democrats don’t ruin things, which is a pretty big assumption. After all, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois wants to invest the surplus in cold cuts and give the dividends to California to buy power. “If baloney were electricity,” he said, “this tax bill would solve our energy crisis.”

I think he’s making a big mistake. Most health-conscious Americans are reducing their intake of lunch meats, which are loaded with nitrites, sodium, and fat. To invest billions of tax dollars in these products even as America’s medical community is working night and day to raise our awareness of the risks inherent in diets high in salami, pimento loaf, and the like, to say nothing of processed cheese, flies in the face of common sense.

If Durbin has his way, working Americans like you and me will pay not only with our health, but with our wealth. An infusion of billions of dollars into the cold cut market will drive prices sky high as butcher shops and delicatessens go digging for gold in our lunch pails.

And for what? You and I both know that the power shortage in California will end the minute the price of electricity goes up. There’ll be so much juice around you’ll see lightning bolts shooting out of the street lights at Hollywood and Vine. Remember the “energy shortage” of the 1970s? Gasoline was 40 cents a gallon but you couldn’t get any. Now — three decades and a jillion gas-guzzling SUVs later — it’s $2 a gallon and there’s so much around the oil companies don’t know what they’re going to do with it all.

Still, I tip my hat to the president and Congress: $600 and all the dope we can smoke. It’s about time a working guy caught a break.

Jerry Fraser can be reached at cfraser@maine.rr.com.