Truth or Consequences
For almost fifty years, America listened or watched a show that was designed to make average people do crazy things if they did not properly answer some obscure trivia question. It was called Truth or Consequences in both the radio and TV incarnations. Just to be sure that their plans for zaniness did not get derailed, the producers layered their questions so that they were always more complex and impossible to answer than they originally seemed. For all intents and purposes, there was very little truth and lots and lots of consequences for the eager and very willing participants. Ralph Edwards, the originator of the show, lived for 92 years and during most of that he was either an on-air radio host or then, one of the first game show hosts. His brand of entertainment so hit the mark of the American psyche that his two most famous shows, Truth or Consequences and This is Your Life practically defined a transitioning set of generations in America. The big cultural shifts that occurred in the Twentieth Century seem to be twofold.
First there was the big urbanization shift in America from the farm to the factory. That same shift had occurred earlier in Europe during the first Industrial Revolution. But in America, where the land was far more plentiful, available and welcoming than anywhere in Europe, the rural culture of the farm took deep roots despite industrialization taking place around the land. In many ways, it was the land which gave birth to the American Dream in its first iteration. Even though it was limited to only one part of the country, the Dust Bowl of the early 1930’s that literally and figuratively uprooted the American Dream and an entire generation of American farmers, seemed to put an end to that particular version of the Dream. In reality, many of those hardscrabble dirt-scratchers landed in a much more verdant part of the land as they emigrated to places like the vast and fertile valleys of California.
But the rural bloom was still more or less off the rose and agriculture became yesterday’s life, or more correctly, the life of those who had nowhere else to go like a generation of migrants in search of the next American Dream. I am not a trained sociologist, but I feel like the second big cultural transition of the Twentieth Century was one that involved consumerism. It was during the lead up to the Great Depression and the coincident Dust Bowl that Herbert Hoover promised every American “a chicken in every pot” and “two cars in every garage.” While most Americans had to wade through the Great Depression with its general paucity of everything and then WWII with its guns v. butter rationing of everything else, by the 50’s America really did seem to be the land of plenty and consumerism was on the rampage. I remember an early Andy Griffith Show episode where a guy with a two-door car needs to upgrade to a four-door car because his neighbor outdoes him, only to have to upgrade then to a station wagon for the same reason based on another guy on the other side of the street. And the thing was that everything was available for the purchasing and most Americans, perhaps for the first time, had the disposable income with which to make the purchases.
Those were days when nobody, not even staunch Eisenhower Republicans, seemed focused on the fact that the highest marginal tax rate was 90% (between 1944 and 1963). It was in those heady days of excess that anyone who hadn’t gotten theirs was deemed entitled to try to get theirs through a lottery or a game show or even just a fantasy. Remember the show The Millionaire (1955 – 1060) about a guy who anonymously gave a random person a tax-free check for $1,000,000? A guy named Michael Anthony would hand out this windfall and we would get a sneak peek into how that person’s life would change. That theme has been repeated many times over from Who Wants to be a Millionaire (1999 – 2002 in the U.S.) and even featured prominently in the emerging markets like India, where Danny Boyle gave us Slumdog Millionaire. Well, I think it all began with the game show blitz of the 50’s and for one reason or another, Truth or Consequences seemed to capture the heartbeat of the moment by telling us in its title, exactly what was at stake with these get-rich-quick programs.
While $1 million in 1960 is worth $10 million or so today, that still doesn’t seem dramatic enough by our standards. That much money might improve a life, but to change a life it seems that the lottery has now given us through the Pick Six approach to chance occasional but increasing opportunities to win over $1 billion. We all know how that goes in reality. To begin with, the $1 billion is the amount to be paid out over time as a structured settlement or annuity. If you want a lump sum (everyone does), it boils down to something like $500 million. Then, we no longer live in the Michael Anthony world of tax-free gifting, so we have to apply up to and including the highest marginal tax rate of 37%. It is thanks to Reaganomics and disciples like Bush and Trump as well as the myth of Supply-Side Economics that we have seen that marginal rate go from 90% down to 37%. That means that we as a society (at least as expressed through the voting majority) feel that everyone deserves to keep at least 63% of any windfall they happen upon. I think of that at a vast belying o truth and a distortion of consequences. Yes, that means I am a liberal.
Yesterday I got my latest copy of Forbes Magazine, a vestigial subscription that simply does not seem to want to expire. It was the 400 edition where the wealthiest Americans are listed and ranked based on their accumulated and estimated wealth. The magazine then looks at the arena where they made their money, the degree of difficulty or self-made nature exhibited, and then the extent of philanthropic tendency of the person (they use one to five hearts for this, and some of these billionaires literally have no heart). A common theme among these wealthiest of Americans is that they would rather direct their wealth to good works of their choosing than to have profligate government waste the money through its layers of corruption and inefficiency. Once again, this proves that wealth changes things, in this case it seeps into the brain and makes the rich think that they, not good fortune or, God forbid, our collective democratically-oriented form of capitalism, are the basis of their wealth. That means that they know best how the world should use what they have truthfully accumulated and they alone should establish the consequences of their wealth.
Maybe if I was a billionaire I would feel the same self-righteousness. There is no doubt that wounds one collects over a lifetime of greedy accumulation leave one scarred and twitchy. It is not an accident that the Bible says in Luke 18:25 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”. Getty rich is a nasty business. I know for two reasons. First, I spent 45 years in the realm of finance and nowhere is wealth accumulation more the focus than in finance. Second, I actually ran a wealth business for six years and saw it in all of its forms. I treated it like a professional exercise, but trust me, everyone else treated it like it was life or death. In fact, to many on the path towards wealth, it is the only truth and the consequences be damned.