Who's Doing What With Your Money

We are reliably informed that the typical playboy reader pays very close to $2500 each year in Federal income taxes. Some pay more, some pay less and some (the very rich) pay nothing at all. But on the average, $2500 a year is the figure, and this is a lot of money. Many of us don't realize we're paying so much, due to the deceptive way in which the income tax is both collected and spent. There is deception going in, because the tax is extracted from our pay checks a bit at a time, in a manner deliberately calculated to minimize pain. (The man who designed the withholding system, Milton Friedman, has seen the error of his ways; when we were taping our February interview with him, he said, in effect, that if he had to do it over again, he wouldn't.) The deception going out is even more insidious, because the Government spends money in sums so large that nobody can visualize them. We think this is bad. Taxpayers ought to be able to visualize how their money is blown. To help you determine where yours is going, we've unearthed instances where the amounts spent are small enough to be comprehensible to the man footing the bill. That's you. Now that April's here, imagine your $2500 paying its share of any of the projects described on these pages. Take your choice, sign your check---and eat your heart out.

Your $2500 paid for one day's operation of President Nixon's much-publicized Heroin Hotline program: up to 41 long-distance phone connections manned by interviewers and narcs---all of them sitting around recording anonymous dope tips. According to the General Accounting Office, the first four months of operation cost $260,000 and garnered 28,079 obscene and/or crank calls. It also unearthed four and a half kilos of marijuana, 3300 tabs of LSD, two guns and two grams of heroin. An ad agency has been hired to promote the program.

Adjacent to the chamber of the House of Representatives is a hallway called the Speaker's lobby, which Congressmen usually pass through on their way to the chamber itself. When the Speaker's lobby needed redecoration recently, our Representatives ordered a new rug: 87 feet, 10-1/2 inches long, 9 feet, 5 inches wide, hand-cut 3/4-inch pile surface, 100 percent virgin-wool face, 100 percent cotton back, permanently mothproofed and made in the U. S. of A. The rug cost $31,650 delivered (the pad was extra), which boils down to about $340 a square yard. Your $2500 paid for just over seven yards of it. Not enough for a 9' x 12', but it would still look nice under a coffee table, or maybe on the floor of a car.

A gourmet quartermaster in Washington suffered an apparent attack of gastric oculitis, a common disease among purchasing officers, wherein one's eyes get bigger than one's stomach. Result: U. S. military commissaries in Europe wound up with an 82-year supply of Kellogg's freeze-dried tuna-salad mix, of which your $2500 covered four years and three months. But not to worry; at least you won't have to ante up for this one next year. Unless the stuff spoils, of course.

Your $2500 maintained the 13 Government members of the Interdepartmental Screw Thread Committee for almost four days. This august body, which now costs an estimated $250,000 a year, was originally established by Congress, after an hour of debate, on May 31, 1918. Its purpose was to hasten the conclusion of the War to End All Wars, by helping nuts and bolts come together. A complex task, of course. We shouldn't expect results overnight. Maybe in another 55 years....

According to a Congressional report, the Defense Department in just two years produced 12 different films showing military people how to brush their teeth. We have been unable to verify the accuracy of this report, but we did learn that shortly after January 1, the Navy began work on five five-minute shorts on the broad subject of plaque control. Cost: $35,000, which means that your $2500 buys one minute and 47 seconds of a tooth-brushing movie. All together now: up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.

In the northwest quadrant of the District of Columbia, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is in the process of constructing 54 two-story town houses for low-income residents. The town houses are mostly small (a three-bedroom model comprises 1058 square feet) and lack the frills (washing machines, air conditioning, etc.) usually found in private-home construction. Nevertheless, they're costing $76,000 apiece. Your $2500 builds 1/30th of one of them: about 35 square feet---the size of a small walk-in closet.

Science marches on, with time out for a potty break: Your $2500 paid about eight tenths of one percent of the cost of a prototype toilet that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is building for the new space shuttle. Going to the john in a zero-gravity bathroom is no cheap trick: The prototype cost $80,000 for design and $230,000 for "environmental testing," whatever that is. The device will provide an element of privacy (thus permitting females to join the astronaut corps for the first time) and will employ air currents in an attempt to compensate for the lack of gravity. According to one of its architects, engineer Joseph Swider, the gadget will resemble an ordinary earth-bound commode, "except that it will probably be draftier."

At Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, the Air Force runs a fancy hotel named the Alaskan Chateau, whose facilities are available to everyone in Anchorage who happens to be a lieutenant colonel or higher or a Government bureaucrat making over $22,000 a year. According to the GAO, an average of eight persons daily stay at the Alaskan Chateau. For three dollars a night, these fortunate few have full run of the facilities, including the steam room, the sauna, the sunrooms, the massage rooms, the gym and the cocktail lounge. They are waited on by 17 sergeants, one airman and a captain---acting as cooks, waiters, wine stewards, room clerks and cleaning ladies. The salaries of these semipublic servants average $7727 a year. Your $2500 pays for any one of them (take your pick) for almost four months.

If you're making a pilgrimage to the fabled north-country fair, stop in at Eveleth, Minnesota, 20 miles east of Hibbing. There you will find the Hockey Hall of Fame, nearing completion thanks to a Federal grant of $666,400 (1/267th of which is yours) under the Public Works Impact Program, designed to create jobs in high-unemployment areas. Construction of the Hall of Fame created 27 such jobs; each will last 14 months.

The Navy spent $375,000 (your share: 1/150th) trying to find out if Frisbees can be used to carry flares over battle-fields. Alas, they can't. Learn the reasons by reading the 216-page report that your money subsidized. It's called "Aerodynamic Analysis of the Self-Suspended Flare," available for three dollars from the National Technical Service, Springfield, Virginia 22151. They have a lot of other books there, so ask for number AD740117.

Your $2500 paid a good eighth of the cost of a $19,300 study, commissioned by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, to find out why children fall off tricycles. The study, done by Calspan Corporation of Buffalo, New York, found "unstable performance, particularly rollover while turning." Or, as an HEW official put it: "Tricycles have an unsafe design configuration." The study was needed to inform the Bureau of Product Safety, a subdivision of the Food and Drug Administration, in the task of writing safety standards for velocipedes. The Product Safety people are touchy about this study, feeling it's received adverse publicity that fails to consider its child-protection merits. "If people think we're spending too much money," a spokesman told us, "then they should go to Congress and change the law." Up against the nursery wall, thumb suckers.

Your $2500 paid for almost one fifth of the $13,500 it cost to put a new heating system in President Nixon's villa in San Clemente. The Secret Service declared the old heating system a security hazard. As an SS man put it: "You wouldn't want the President of the United States living in a house where the heating system could cause a fire, would you?" Not us.

This silver-and-ebony mace, 46 inches long, symbolizes authority in the House of Representatives. It rests on either of two marble pedestals flanking the Speaker's chair, and signals whether the House is in full session or meeting only at the committee level. Etson White, assistant sergeant at arms, sits close by the mace and moves it swiftly and expertly from one marble pedestal to the other, sometimes as often as four or five times a day. Your $2500 in taxes paid his salary for two and a half months.

Way back in 1911, the U.S. Naval Academy decided to establish its own herd of dairy cows, so that midshipmen could enjoy a continuing supply of pure, fresh milk during outbreaks of typhoid fever. The threat of typhoid has diminished during subsequent generations, but the herd has not. At last count, it was 500 strong. The General Accounting Office estimates that if Annapolis were to buy pasteurized milk like the rest of us, taxpayers would save $84,000 a year; so your $2500 bought milk for the middies for 11 days.

Which weighs more, a 3,000,000-pound steamship or 1500 tons of feathers? Answer: They weigh the same, and both would make a big mess if dropped from a tall building. Fifteen hundred tons of feathers happens to be the amount currently stashed in the Government's stockpile program, a marvelously anal attempt to assemble "a sufficiency of strategic and critical materials to fulfill national requirements in the event of an emergency." The feather stockpile is deemed sufficient to warm our troops in the event of a major land war in Saskatchewan, so the Government isn't buying more. Still, there are storage costs: $59,000 a year. Your $2500 pays one year's upkeep for 127,118 pounds of feathers, Cheap.

To beat the drums for a new cost-cutting program, the U. S. Postal Service made up an audio-visual presentation, including 2000 15-minute cassettes, for postal officials the nation over. The mails being what they are, the Post Office decided to deliver the cassettes by courier. This little message, including extraspecial-delivery service, cost $27,000, so your $2500 paid for and delivered 185 cassettes.

Over at the Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service division logged a $15,000 expenditure studying public attitudes toward Smokey the Bear. Your $2500 underwrote one sixth of this, but don't despair. Smokey can afford it. He's one of the few figures in Government who actually make money for taxpayers: $212,000 last year alone, from sweat-shirt royalties, books, games, dolls, etc. Needless to say, his keepers zealously guard his commercial integrity. In Reseda, California, the Government came down hard on a saloon called the Smokey Bar, for taking the ursine image in vain. Another Government money-maker is Mr. Zip, the Post Office caricature. Stamp collectors like him so much that they save his picture, with stamps attached, when it appears in the margins of postage-stamp sheets. For every stamp that goes into a collector's album, rather than on an envelope, the Postal Service makes eight cents. There's no way to compute Mr. Zip's earnings, but the moral is obvious: We need more cartoon characters in Government---and fewer real ones.