Cab Driver

I went to the dentist Tuesday morning. The cabdriver was listening to some right winger on the radio, and we got to talking. He was seventy years old, still working while collecting Social Security, and a Trump supporter. He was not an extraordinarily learned man, but he had a certain shrewdness, and argued for requiring the unemployment to work as a condition of collecting checks; they should put in forty hours or something doing whatever the city assigns them to do.

He was skeptical about the mainstream news media, and while he realized that Trump lies, his view was that other politicians do as well. Toward the end of the ride, he was talking about the national debt. If I understood him correctly, he thought that there had been twenty trillions of dollars of debt, but Trump had paid off or gotten rid of several trilllions of it. I told him that Trump had no done so, but was running a deficit and adding to the debt. This was not an anti-Trump opinion, or an endorsement of Elizabeth Warren or anyone, but just the fact of the matter.

And then I paid him fourteen dollars and change, and went upstairs to have my teeth examined and cleaned.