928874551
‘Sugar in a cake has several different functions. One, for instance, is to absorb moisture from the butter, or perhaps shortening, and release it slowly over time, keeping the cake moist. Using less sugar than the recipe calls for produces what’s known as a dry cake. Don’t do that.’
973876118
‘Suppose you think along the lines of power, authority. Inevitability. You’ve got your two kinds of people now, when you get down to it. On one hand you’ve got your rebel mentality whose whole bag or groove or what have you is going against power, rebelling. Your spit-in-the-wind type that feels powerful going against the power and the Establishment and what have you. Then, type two, you’ve got your other type, which is the soldier personality, the type that believes in order and power and respects authority and aligns themselves with power and authority and the side of order and the way the whole thing has got to work if the system’s going to run smoothly. So imagine you’re a type two type. There’s more than they think. The age of the rebel is over. It’s the eighties now. If You’re a Type Two, We Want You — that should be their slogan. In the Service. Check out the blowing wind, man. Join up with the side that always gets paid. We shit you not. The side of the law and the force of the law, the side of the tide and gravity and that one law where everything always gradually gets a little hotter until the sun up and blows. Because you got your two unavoidables in life, just like they say. Unavoidability — now that’s power, man. Either be a mortician or join the Service, if you want to line yourself up with the real power. Have the wind at your back. Tell them listen: Spit with the wind, it goes a whole lot further. You can trust me on that, my man.’
917229047
‘I had an idea I’d try and write a play. Our stepmother always went to plays; she’d drag us all down to the civic center all the time on weekends for matinees. So I got to know all about the theater and plays. So this play, because they’d ask me — family, fellows at the driving range — to give an idea what it was like. It would be a totally real, true-to-life play. It would be unperformable, that was part of the point. This is to give you an idea. The idea’s that a wiggler, a rote examiner, is sitting poring over 1040s and attachments and cross-filed W-2s and 1099s and like that. The setting is very bare and minimalistic — there’s nothing to look at except this wiggler, who doesn’t move except for every so often turning a page or making a note on his pad. It’s not a Tingle — it’s just a regular desk, so you can see him. But that’s it. At first there was a clock behind him, but I cut the clock. He sits there longer and longer until the audience gets more and more bored and restless, and finally they start leaving, first just a few and then the whole audience, whispering to each other how boring and terrible the play is. Then, once the audience have all left, the real action of the play can start. This was the idea — I told my stepmom all about it, it was going to be a realistic play. Except I could never decide on the action, if there was any, if it’s a realistic play. That’s what I tell them. It’s the only way to explain it.’
965882433
‘There have been frequent studies. Two-thirds of taxpayers think an exemption and a deduction are the same thing. Don’t know what a capital gain is. Four percent every year don’t sign their returns. Shit, two-thirds of people don’t know how many senators a state has. Something like three-quarters can’t name the branches of government. This is not rocket science we’re doing here. The truth is, most of our time is wasted. The system kicks us mostly shit. You spend ten minutes filling out a 20-C on an unsigned return, it goes back to the SC, a bullshit letter audit requesting a signature, nothing at stake. And then now in Rotes we’re reviewed on the basis of increased revenue from audits down the line. It’s a joke. Most of the stuff we’re looking at isn’t auditable, it’s just rank stupidity. Carelessness. You should see people’s handwriting — average people, educated people. The truth is, they waste our time. They need a better system.’
981472509
‘Tate is a moth at the arc lights of power. Pass it on.’
951458221
‘It’s a fascinating question. The background is interesting, if you delve into it. Type of thing. One of the tenets of the incoming administration was the belief that marginal tax rates could be lowered, especially in the top brackets, without causing a catastrophic loss of revenue. This had been an explicit part of the campaign. Platform type of thing. I’m no economist. I know the theory was that lower marginal rates would spur investment and increased productivity, type of thing, and there would be a rising tide that would cause an increase in the tax base that would more than offset the decrease in marginal rates. There is a whole technical theory behind this, though some dismissed this as voodoo science. Type of thing. By late in the first year, sure enough, the regs are different, the top brackets are lowered. It goes on that way. By, say, two years in, though, it’s fair to say the results contradicted the theory. Revenues were down, and these were hard numbers that could not be fudged or massaged. There were also, I believe, very large increases in defense spending, and the federal budget deficit was the greatest in history. In adjusted dollars type of thing. You have to understand that this was all playing out at a far higher level of government than the level we’re working at here. But anyone could understand the budget problems were a real rock-and-hard-place type of thing, since backpedaling and raising marginal rates again was politically unacceptable, ideologically you could say, as was compromising on the military, and gutting social spending any further would make relations with Congress unworkable. Type of thing. All of this one could almost know just from reading the newspaper, if you knew what to look for.’
Q.
‘Yes, but in terms of what we knew here, at our level here in the Service. Some of it was not in the papers. I know the executive branch had several different plans and proposals they were considering, to address this problem. The deficits, the hard place. My sense is that most of these were not appealing. Type of thing. Understand, all this is filtering down from a great height, administratively. The version we got here on the regional level is that someone very high up in the Service’s structure, someone close to what’s known around here as the Three-Personed God, resurrected a policy paper originally written in either 1969 or 1970 by a macroeconomist or systems consultant on the staff of the former Assistant Commissioner for Planning and Research at Triple-Six. The one that resurrected it was, under this account, an Assistant Deputy Commissioner for Systems, which by that time had absorbed the Planning and Research Branch as now a division of Systems in a reorganization, Systems had, type of thing, although that previous Planning and Research AC was also now the DCS.’
Q.
‘Now meaning in terms of when the Spackman Memo was resurrected, which was in or around the fourth quarter of 1981.’
Q.
‘The DCS is part of what’s known as the Three-Personed God, the [inaudible] term for the top triad of Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner for Systems, and Chief Counsel. The three top spots in the Service organization. The national office of the Service is known as Triple-Six because of the address. Type of thing.’