Makes you think...Author Unknown

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner.

The bill for all ten comes to one-hundred dollars. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men, the poorest, would pay nothing;
The fifth would pay one dollar;
The sixth would pay three dollars;
The seventh seven dollars;
The eighth twelve dollars;
The ninth eighteen dollars.
The tenth man, the richest, would pay fifty-nine dollars.

That's what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, 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 twenty dollars."

So now dinner for the ten only cost eighty dollars. The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes.

The first four men were unaffected. They still would eat for free. But what about the other six, the paying customers? How could they divvy up the twenty dollar windfall so that everyone would get their "fair share"?

The six men realized that twenty divided by six is 3.33. But if they subtracted 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, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

The fifth man paid nothing, the sixth man pitched in two dollars, the seventh man paid five dollars, the eighth man paid nine dollars, the ninth paid twelve dollars, leaving the tenth man with a bill of fifty-two dollars instead of his earlier fifty-nine dollars.

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to eat for free.

But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare savings.

"I only got a dollar out of the twenty." declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth. "But he got seven."

"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 seven dollars back when I only got two? 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 and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man 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 fifty-two dollars short.