A Riddle
"Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you?"
It may not, so I am here to help you. They key object is the table. Once you have visualized the table, the remaining objects will all have a place to sit. What I imagine is a trendy red wooden table, a 4-seater. If you prefer another color or a larger size, that’s okay. Even plain-varnished wood is okay. Just get a mental picture.
Since the subject is unstated in the first sentence (“Because the—all which”), it is like a little riddle - and we all know how much fun riddles are! Let’s see if we can figure out the subject given only the information contained in this short paragraph. We know that this mystery subject can “address the big cost drivers,” or at least begin to. You can address an envelope or a golf ball, but without getting too silly let’s assume it is some sort of plan.
Our next clue is in the second sentence - “how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table.” Something else is on the table besides our mystery subject. It’s probably a noun, even though that red herring “how” could get you thinking adverb. The key here is the commas separating “for example,” which clearly parse between subject and verb. The entire phrase “how benefits are calculate” is acting as a collective noun. What could it really be? Maybe a calculator? Actuarial tables? Maybe even something more abstract, something like a process. All we can say for sure at the end of the second sentence is that there is a table and there are two things on it. Well, maybe not. Maybe “how benefits are calculate” could be part of a plan, if that turns out to be the mystery subject of the first sentence.
We can be absolutely certain that this second object is on the table. It is there “whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases.” While there might be other conditions besides wage or price increases that would cause benefits to rise, we know for certain that that the second mystery object will remain firmly on the table unaffected by these two. Note that the benefits will only rise in this construction, and never come down. Think of them as a helium balloon floating above the table. That’s an important clue. There are two unknown objects on the table and one known object floating above it. What keeps it there?
“There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered.” This is starting to sound like a story problem. It would be easy to get hung up on that word “series” and start thinking of a Fibonacci sequence of numbers. It is the subject of this sentence beyond doubt, but “parts” are not numbers. They are like jigsaw pieces and “the formula” is the completed puzzle, but don’t start thinking there is a jigsaw puzzle on the table. Not yet. Whatever it is doesn’t exist yet, it is only “being considered.” It might exist in the future and might even be placed on the table after it exists, but it doesn’t right now. If “Because the—all which” and “how benefits are calculate” are pieces, that would satisfy the implied condition that there are possibly multiple objects on the table that could be considered to be just one object, like a flock of birds.
If you’re the kind of person who hates it when they put the crossword solutions on the same page as the puzzle, you might want to skip this paragraph. Don’t you hate that? Your eyes want to skim over to the answers, sometimes unconsciously if your mind starts to drift as you’re thinking. Maybe you already recognize this quotation, but that’s not really cheating. In that case, like me, you know that President Bush spoke these words on Feb. 4 in Tampa, FL, on his historic whirlwind tour to promote doing something with Social Security. He came here, today, to Raleigh, NC to do the same thing, but that’s not important. The context is “Social Security” and that is important in solving our riddle. When you know what he’s talking about but not saying, it gives you a context – kinda like the table helped us to visualize a central metaphor that has gotten us this far into solving the riddle. What you say, shall we stay the course and solve it?
Okay. Now it’s safe to read again, puzzlers. Let’s dig into that final sentence, which we’d better write down because it’s long:
And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you?"
It begins with a conjunction, sloppy, no doubt, but imagine how long the sentence would be otherwise without it! The clue here is “couple” – again a reference to pairing, a situation where individual items form a greater whole – but this one is recursive in that the coupling is done with that “series of parts of the formula” from the previous sentence.
I visualize one of those fractals from the early days of computing, when you’d type in this complex program, start it running, and when you came back in the morning there would be a picture on your screen of something that looked like a half moon with some moonlike tumors and every tumor had a whole bunch more tumors and so on down – and even the tiniest little half moon thingie you could see would have even tinier moonlike tumors that you had to imagine because your program could recurse right down to the subatomic level even if it only had a VGA screen.
Anyway, if you skip ahead, you’ll read that this coupling is occurring with something called “personal accounts.” Maybe. We’re not sure. Somehow those “cost drivers,” the same ones we addressed earlier, have wormed their way into the mix. They might be the same as the “series of parts of the formula,” but that doesn’t quite add up. The formula is supposed to provide the solution whereas the cost drivers are supposed to be the problem.
Were you tempted to scream “Aha!” when you saw “cost drivers” mentioned again? I know I was, because in traditional story problems you’re almost home when you can somehow equate two unknown variables to the same constant. Algebra won’t help us here, but logic will. When premises lead you to a contradiction, you have a classic reductio ad absurdum, which disproves one of the premises. We can safely say that either our “mystery subject” or the “formula parts” is false. Personally, I hope it’s the mystery subject because I really liked those fractals.
Deep breath. We’re almost there. Let’s look at “the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised.” That is pretty straightforward. There is something on the table and “the idea” is the whole point of it being there. The speaker has made a promise and he intends to make good on it or at least deliver something resembling it. Like the guy at the office who borrows a ten-spot and a month later pays back a fiver and has some story.
You ever notice how those are never happy stories? It makes you fret about all the bad luck you bring down upon people just by loaning them your money. In some ways, the stories are entertaining, maybe something you’d pay the other five to hear under some circumstances. Other times, they just ramble on, even contradicting themselves because they didn’t adequately prepare it. You still listen and, because you’re polite, you don’t point out these obvious discrepancies. You start to get uneasy and maybe even a little mad. “What kind of idiot does this guy take me for?” you ask yourself. “Does he think I’m so stupid that he just blather on incoherently and soon I’ll forget about the money he owes me?” The anger builds up in you and pretty soon you have to make up an excuse to just walk away before you sucker punch him. Don’t you hate that?
Now, back to our riddle. We’ve analyzed all the premises and have come up with some very logical conclusions. You have all the information you need to solve it, and some pretty good clues too. I don’t want to spoil it by giving away the answer in this post. What is the mystery noun on our trendy red table? Is it in pieces, like a jigsaw, in a formula, a plan, a fractal? - or is it all just in one big steaming pile?
6:36:48 PM 
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