The Ant and the Grasshopper

The Ant and the Grasshopper


CLASSIC VERSION


The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, and dies out in the cold.


MORAL: Be responsible for yourself.



MODERN VERSION:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybodycries when they sing "It's Not Easy Being Green".

Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing "We Shall Overcome". Jesse then has his group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake. Al Sharpton is waiting until Jesse's group is finished, so he can condemn the "system" for what it has done to the grasshopper. Al Gore exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings, that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediatetax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share". Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act", retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire an proportionate number of green insects. The tax hike leaves the ant with nothing left to pay the fine, so his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary Clinton gets her old law firm to represent the in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients. The ant loses the case. The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while his house, the ant's former house, crumbles around him because he won't take care of it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

MORAL: Vote Republican

You have way too much time on your hands.

Amusing stuff (both of you)

The story at my home:

The ants spend all summer storing food and building their house.

The grasshopper spends all summer mating.

The owner of the property pours a gallon of clorine on the ant's home, killing them all. The owner's cat eats the grasshopper.

Moral of the story: Speak softly and carry a big stick.

It amused the hell out of me when someone posted that elsewhere. Maybe it's all the liberal West Wing I've been watching lately trying to lash out at me. The show premiered this week, last night, actually. Great show, but writer/producer Sorkin of the first four seasons left, so I fear it's going to go downhill.

Heh heh.... yea

that was a good story, I have heard it before.

There is another one regarding a group of 10 friends going out to lunch and having to split the bill.... but I have to go find it, pretty interesting stuff

GOT IT,

Tax break for dummies

I was having lunch with one of my favorite friends last week and the conversation turned to the government's recent round of tax cuts. "I'm opposed to those tax cuts," the retired college instructor declared, "because they benefit the rich. The rich get much more money back than ordinary taxpayers like you and me and that's not fair."

"But the rich pay more in the first place," I argued, "so it stands to reason that they'd get more money back." I could tell that my friend was unimpressed by this meager argument.

So I said to him, let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day 10 men go to a restaurant for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If it was paid the way we pay our taxes, the first four men would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1; the sixth would pay $3; the seventh $7; the eighth $12; the ninth $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

The 10 men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until the owner threw them a curve. Since you are all such good customers, he said, I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20. Now dinner for the 10 only costs $80.

The first four are unaffected. They still eat for free. Can you figure out how to divvy up the $20 savings among the remaining six so that everyone gets his fair share? The men realize that $20 divided by 6 is $3.33, but if they subtract that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would end up being paid to eat their meal.

The restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same percentage, being sure to give each a break, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so now the fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid $5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $12, leaving the tenth man with a bill of $52 instead of $59.

Outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. "I only got a dollar out of the $20," complained the sixth man, pointing to the tenth, "and he got $7!" "Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got seven times more than me!"


"That's true," shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!" "Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor."

The nine men surrounded the tenth man and beat him up. The next night he didn't show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They were $52 short! And that, boys, girls and college instructors, is how America's tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes should get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table any more.