﻿T-Bone Slim Hits On Splendid Plan To Balance Budget 

Much how-de-do has been raised lately about balancing the budget. A questionnaire is put to all runners and runners-up, and even to their jockeys. And the substance of their song is “reduce governmental expenses and eliminate waste in relief administration.”
Not it happens, labor too is running on an unbalanced budget, and it blames its government, the employer, which happens to e an autocratic one, for its sorry and dizzy condition.
Workers have been giving relief to the employer for years, and, as is well known, it is like trying to keep a half.wit in spending money. Now the question arises: Shall we continue to keep them on the dole, or make them earn their bread by sweat of their brow?
This is a difficult question to decide offhand and put in execution without a workers’ One Big Union. It will not bring action or final disposition of the matter if each individual scissorbill decided upon it in the privacy of his own chambers—it must be put to a vote so that each and all may know how labor stands.
My opinion, Green’s opinion, Thomas’ opinion, isn’t worth the powder, to blow them to hell. It’s the workers’ union that is final. But, as I said before, it is a matter difficult of “adjudication” as the book-learners say.
The masters can prove they have been crazy since 1929 and before it. The only sign of balanced thought they have shown lies in their knack of getting away with our products—and thievery, itself, is not a sign of mental collapse. So the question arises: Shall we send them to a bughouse or to Congress?
Do not think me flippant in so stating the issue! I protest with good reason. Our masters have not stuck their heads in the factory door, at either end of the plant, or upstairs, since the last generation—they’ve been down in Washington helping making laws (like Green) and, I feel they should be paid for it.
In the shops they have nothing coming, for they have not been there. (But can you imagine halfnuts going down to Washington to make laws and criticize Zion-check?)
Workers have carried on production in the period of the masters’ absence, and it is my firm opinion that they should take the lion’s share of the lemon-meringue and part of the Lion too.
I’m reminded here of a guy who was being escorted to a lynching party outside of town.
“Take it easy,” sez he, “no hurry. There won’t be anything doing till I get there.”
That sentence “Take it easy” is a favorite statement of the grifters big and small; they sure do take, and the taking is easy. I sommend this statement to the workers because I know they will only take what belongs to them—the full product of their labor, past and present—and accured interest.
When labor comes into its own, I hope it will have the manners to remember me with a T-bone steak, barbecued. (There will be those who will argue that I have nothing coming for my 30 years of hard labor at short, cut rates.)
AMERICAN TRAGEDY
You say, had I progressed with Time,
I would be sitting pretty now;
Instead or groveling in the slime
With furrows on my noble brow.
An error creeps into your creed—
No such reward is here entailed,
For how could I, poor me, succeed,
When fifteen million like me failed?