Tube City Almanac

February 14, 2005

Earl Muntz for President

Category: default || By jt3y

After writing Thursday's Almanac, I got to thinking about Madman Muntz.

Some of the folks who read this drivel know that I collect old radio and TV junk ... er, I mean, antiques ... from the era when electronics were actually made in the United States. One of the most colorful figures in TV manufacturing back in the 1950s was Earl "Madman" Muntz, who started his career as a used car salesman in California.

He got the nickname "Madman" for doing late-night TV commercials in which he'd come out wearing long underwear, a straight-jacket and a Napoleonic hat, bragging about how ridiculously low his prices were. "I wanna give 'em away, but the wife won't let me. She's cr-a-a-a-azy!" he'd say. Politically correct, he wasn't.

When TV took off, Muntz decided to get a piece of the business. In order to compete, he had to sell his sets at a price as low as possible. Nowadays, TVs are largely machine-assembled from microchips, but in those days, TVs were still largely hand-assembled from individual components. If you could eliminate a lot of the individual components, you could save money both on parts and labor.

So Muntz set up his factory out in California and started making TVs. Legend has it that whenever his engineers were working on a new design, he'd pop into their offices with a pair of wire cutters. And with the set on, Muntz --- who wasn't an engineer --- would cut components out of the circuit, one by one. Chop! There went a resistor. Snip! There went a capacitor.

Eventually, Muntz would cut a component that made the picture or the sound go out. "Put that back in," he'd demand. That way, supposedly, his sets had the minimum number of parts necessary to work --- and could be sold much cheaper than the sets that Zenith or RCA or Motorola were selling.

Pretty clever. And a Muntz TV worked about as well as an RCA or Zenith or Motorola set, for a much lower price.

As long as you lived in an area where there was good reception, that is. But because Muntz had clipped the circuits down to where they were working without any margin for error, his sets didn't work so well in fringe areas.

And some of the components that he chopped out didn't cause immediate problems when they were removed, but they had been put into the circuits by previous designers to prevent long-term damage. Those resistors, for instance, might have been designed to prevent other components from wearing out too fast. Eventually, of course, those other components would fail from too much voltage or too much heat.

Consequently, although Muntz sold a lot of TV sets, they eventually got a reputation for being "junk." So despite the fact that Muntz TVs were very heavily advertised in the Press and Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh, I've haunted a lot of radio shops and swap meets, and I have yet to see a Muntz TV. I find lots of RCAs and Zeniths and Philcos and Motorolas and some Westinghouses, but no Muntzes. That leads me to believe that the owners of Muntz TVs got disgusted with them breaking down, and pitched them rather than fixing them.

On the other hand, some of those RCAs and Zeniths are ridiculously overbuilt and overdesigned, and yet they still work pretty well, 30 or 40 years after they came off of the assembly lines.

Our government is a lot like those early TV sets. For 200 years, "engineers" have been adding components to the various circuits. So many components have been piled on top of others that people have forgotten why they were installed in the first place.

That's left lots of room for amateur engineers to chop things out of the circuits. Snip! There go some Pell Grants. Chop! There go some veterans' benefits. Crack! There goes some public education funding. And now, the clippers are poking around in the Social Security circuit.

Just like Muntz and his TVs, eliminating components here and there doesn't make the entire picture disappear or malfunction. The other components in the circuit can carry the load ... for a while, anyway.

We don't know when the damage to the other components is going to become evident, but it's going to happen sooner or later.

An interesting thing about Earl Muntz: His TV business eventually went bankrupt. Stock in Muntz TV that had been worth $6 million dropped to $200,000.

Is it any wonder that when I hear that the President's plans for Social Security may add $4.5 trillion to the deficit, I some how imagine him dressed in long underwear and wearing a Napoleonic hat, running around in front of a row of used cars? "I buy 'em retail and sell 'em wholesale," he's saying. "It's more fun that way!"

It was funny when Earl Muntz did it. It's not so amusing right now.

...

No, there was no Friday Almanac because I was out of town. I know, try to contain your sorrow.






Your Comments are Welcome!

Nice analogy, and a good story. It was a thoroughly engaging read, despite its disheartening message.
Jonathan Barnes - February 14, 2005



When I drove through some small town in Illinois about five years ago, a painted “Muntz TV” sign was still visible on the side of a downtown building.

For more than you’ll ever want to know about Madman Muntz (who named his daughter “Tee Vee”, by the way), go here:

http://www.ce.org/publications/hall_of_fame/muntz_e_01.asp

Yes, he’s an inductee.
A. Lert Reader - February 14, 2005



I ask again, why do you hate the ownership society? And why do your comments section never remember my personal info, no matter how often I check the “yes” box?
Jonathan Potts (URL) - February 14, 2005



“I ask again, why do you hate the ownership society? And why do your comments section never remember my personal info, no matter how often I check the “yes” box?”

I love the ownership society. I just wish we didn’t also have to own crippling deficits and a very ugly geopolitical situation which finds Islamic radicals being elected in Iraq.

As for remembering your personal info, you’ll need to talk to the Department of Homeland Security about that. I’m sure they remember all of your personal info. In fact … there they are behind you! Look out!!!
Webmaster (URL) - February 14, 2005



You’ve got to be kidding, right? Are you actually traying to say that Social Security is just fine and needs to be left alone?

That’s like a doctor trying to say “Hey don’t worry about that little aneurism. It’s too small to kill you” when he doesn’t bother to tell you that left alone, it will just continue to grow until it DOES get big enough to kill.

Even the great savior of the masses, FDR himself was in favor of creating personal accounts and his well-pulicized writings on the subject make this point very clear.

The Senate minority leader, a.k.a. the obstructionist-in-chief is on record as having been in favor of allowing individuals to create personal accounts with a SMALL portion of thier Social Security withholdings. Of course this was in 1999 long before anyone actually conceived that “moron” with a Harvard MBA could be elected President.

Every single civilian employee on the Federal government’s payroll has the option of contributing to a Thrift Savings Plan, from the lowest pay-grade GS-3 clerk-typist to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But that’s not good enough for the rest of us?

Many, many states have exercised their options to allow their civilian employees to contribute to TSPs as well, but again, that’s not good enough for the rest of us?

If the personal accounts are good enough for the Democratic member of the House and Senate, why not the rest of us? These same holy Democrats who swear to just be looking out for us common-folk aren’t relying on Social Security, nor are ANY of their staff members. I guess they’re right, we’re all too stupid to handle it ourselves. After all, we keep sending them to Congress, and Pittsburghers kept sending Tom Murphy back to City Hall while he was making back-door deals with firefighters union that would lead to the city being bankrupt.

It is lucidrous to suggest that Social Security isn’t headed for serious shortfalls right up until the time it goes completely broke, which is a certainty given the actual facts as they exist today.

The money in the Social Security Trust Fund isn’t invested in anything, good or bad. It doesn’t grow a penny, ever! The only way the money increases is when the payroll taxes we pay are deposited. It’s like the government simply putting it under a giant mattress.

As the commercial says: “this isn’t rocket surgery.” As more & more people take out their hard-earned retirement income and less and less workers are available to pay into it, it becomes insolvent very quickly.

By hey maybe you’re right. It’s probably better to just do nothing, rather than have a constructive dialogue work with the first President who has ever had the guts to try and fix it. After all, in 4 years ol’ GWB will be gone and then we’ll get a Democrat in there who will gladly raise our withholding taxes, decrease our benefits and raise the retirement age. Surely if we get the retirement age high enough, it will stay solvent.
Reality Check - February 14, 2005



The reason Social Security is going bankrupt (and Medicare, too) is because we’ve aborted 40+ million unborn children in the past 30+ years, and there’s no younger generation left to pay for the rest of us.

There, THAT oughta start a firestorm.

Hey, did you know that Madman Muntz invented the forerunner of the 8-track?
A. Lert Reader - February 14, 2005



I leave you kids alone for a few hours, and do you see what I come back to?

A. Lert: Go to your room. Yeah, I knew about the 4-track, which as an obsolete and clunky format could be an interesting metaphor for Social Security, too.

Reality: Thanks for posting, and I appreciate your comments, but do you jump to conclusions often?
Webmaster (URL) - February 14, 2005



And why do your comments section never remember my personal info, no matter how often I check the “yes” box?

I bet the fact that I have Movable Type running on top of a simple database and not MySQL or something built more like an RCA TV has something to do with it, but honestly, I never tried the feature.

Oops.
Server Guy - February 15, 2005



Update: It’s funny how Reality Check seems to be working from Fox News’ talking points. FDR’s grandson, a former associate commissioner of the Social Security Administration, calls these claims an “outrageous distortion.”

Via Media Matters for America, here’s a transcript of Keith Olbermann’s Feb. 15 interview with James Roosevelt Jr.:

OLBERMANN: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, at minimum, midwife to the Social Security system, would have endorsed President Bush’s plan to partially privatize it. Our third story on the Countdown — that is the claim, anyway, of at least three conservative commentators and several Republican congressmen. But it turns out those guys pretty much just made it up. In a moment, FDR’s grandson, himself a former associate commissioner for Social Security, joins us to discuss the fraud.

First, the background. It began on television with Brit Hume of FOX News, taking quotes from the three principles of security for our old people that FDR expressed to Congress on January 17, 1935. Not all the quotes, mind you, just some of them, and out of context. I’m reading from the transcript on the FOX website of Mr. Hume’s newscast of February 3rd. “It turns out,” Hume said, “that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it. In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plan should include, ‘Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age,’ adding that government funding, ‘ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.’”

As promised, I’m joined now by James Roosevelt Jr., now senior vice president of Tufts Health Plan, formerly associate commissioner for Social Security, and, of course, grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Great — thanks for your time tonight, sir.

ROOSEVELT: Nice to be with you, Keith.

OLBERMANN: The argument is that Mr. Hume more or less twisted this entirely around. Can you explain it in layman’s terms?

ROOSEVELT: I think I can. And it’s really quite an amazing distortion. What they did was that they took a very simple statement that my grandfather made, which said that Social Security, when it was enacted almost 70 years ago, ought to first of all have a part that took care of people who didn’t have time to build up a Social Security account. And the government should fund that out of general revenues.

Secondly, Social Security should have a self-sustaining portion that was funded by contributions from both employers and employees. That’s what we know and have known for 70 successful years as Social Security.

And thirdly, those who wanted and who needed to, as many — almost everybody — did, to have a higher income and retirement, should have accounts where they could pay in voluntarily, in addition to the guaranteed Social Security benefit.

And then my grandfather said that eventually, the self-sustaining portion of the guaranteed insurance would phase out the government-paid portion. That’s because we would have a fully functioning Social Security system as we do today.

What Brit Hume and others have done is take portions of that paragraph and rearrange it so that it says something entirely different from what he intended.

OLBERMANN: At the risk of doing a little too much reading, just to put it on the historical record, let me read the entire quote from which those quotes were pulled. The ones Mr. Hume pulled, only that he wanted to pull:

“In the important field of security for our old people, it seems necessary to adopt three principles: First, noncontributory old-age pensions for those who are now to old build up their own insurance. It is, of course, clear that for perhaps 30 years to come fund will have to be provided by the states and the federal government to meet these pensions.

“Second, compulsory contributory annuities which in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations.

“Third, voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age.” That’s one of the Hume quotes there. “It is proposed that the federal government assume one-half of the cost of the old pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.”

So, where he raised the prospect of self-supporting annuity plans — that was not to replace Social Security, it was to replace the money the government was contributing to Social Security for the people born in, say, 1870 and earlier. Is that about it?

ROOSEVELT: That is exactly it. And he rearranged those sentences in an outrageous distortion, one that really calls for a retraction, an apology, maybe even a resignation.
Webmaster (URL) - February 17, 2005



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