Too often we use needless complexity to obscure the truth from ourselves. Sometimes, it’s because we need to be numb to the truth.
An example of this at the personal level is those who don’t balance their checkbooks because they know they won’t like the result. Ignorance is bliss. But at least we can point the finger of blame at the guy in the mirror. Not so when the books are scrambled to disguise reality.
What is your answer to these two questions?
- How much do you make in a year?
- How much do you make in a pay period?
If you’re normal, you probably answered the first question in terms of your base salary, and your second in take-home dollars. There’s a disconnect. You ought to be able to divide X by either 24, 26, or 12 and come up with Y. But you don’t, because you’ve been conditioned by payroll deduction and withholding taxes to never consider that money “yours” to begin with.
This is what we call a “cognitive dissonance.” One part of your brain acknowledges a fact while the other denies the logic conclusion that results. I “know” that’s my money, but since I never get to spend it or see it, it isn’t really.
Other Peoples’ Money
When Congressmen run for re-election, they like to tout all the Federal dollars they brought home for local improvements. Everyone likes smooth roads, and new parks, and museums, and money to expand the community centers where the senior citizens go to dance. That’s admirable, but it’s deceptive. It was our money, we just never thought about it that way because we used convenient accounting to block it from our memory.
The net result is we feel happy because projects get built and we didn’t have to pay for them. Since no one is apparently attached to those individual dollars as producers, we don’t have the traction to claim ownership. Yet every one of those dollars came from someone who may have had a nobler purpose for them.
It’s so easy to spend Other Peoples’ Money, because there is a seemingly limitless supply of it. The hidden evil is that you never really spend Other Peoples’ Money as responsibly as you do your own.
Health and Wealth
There’s on other area we obscure the truth on our paystubs. It’s on that line for health insurance. For those that have some sort of employer-negotiated plan, there’s a significant expense that goes into adding that benefit. Again, we never see it. We just blindly assume that it’s the best deal we could get, and don’t consider what we might have done with the same money in our pockets. Also, we ignore that money when calculating what a new hire will cost the company (unless you’re in management, and actually do the budgets, but even some of those are obscured or added in later en masse by accounting.)
If you think all of the above make taxation and government more convenient, you’re absolutely right. If you think they are worthy ideas and make for acceptable accounting, then please do the following:
The next time you go to a restaurant, tell the server up front to decide what percentage your tip ought to be. Tell him to add that tip onto your credit card receipt, but only give you a slip showing the pre-tip amount. Then order a dessert from a very limited menu with that has no prices listed. Pick the one that sounds the best, tell the server to only put the part to the right of the decimal to your visible tab, and never consider for a moment that you’d have been just as happy with an ice cream cone outside for a fraction of the cost.
Sometimes, the best transparency we can provide is to remove the blinders from our own eyes.
