Davidson: Cleaning up can pay

Column photo

By Todd Davidson

Friday, May 1, 2009

Is your kitchen sink an orgy of dirty dishes and mushy, moist, black, green, puke-smelling mildew? If you walk through your kitchen barefoot, do hardened crumbs tickle your toes? If this sounds like your residence, you probably live with a few roommates. Your kitchen is filth-ridden because you, as a rational person, don’t clean it. Why should you forgo valuable time in front of the TV to scrub a few dishes? Your roommates are probably thinking the same thing, so the cladosporium colony is free to grow into a man-eating monster. You don’t listen to your roommates when they tell you to clean and, likewise, they don’t listen to you. The solution to your nauseating nightmare of a kitchen is a well-designed Dirty Dish Tax.

Putting a price on dirty dishes will clean up those cookie crumbs faster than Martha Stewart. If you and your roomies agreed that every dirty dish, from forks to frying pans, could be left in the sink at a cost of, say, $1, everyone would think twice before culturing a habitat for malodorous mold. If you were to leave three spoons and two bowls of corn flakes unattended and roommate Rodolfo shined them up, he could tax you a hefty $5. Under the Dirty Dish Tax system, the external cost of dirty dishes on your roommates would be borne by your wallet.

This system is much fairer than the traditional method of putting off the cleaning until Marvin Moldy emerges. Let’s say cleaning the kitchen takes one hour per week. If you have 17 hours of school, while Rodolfo plays Mob Wars, then one hour of cleaning the kitchen incurs a much greater cost on you than it does Rodolfo.

If cleaning the first pot takes one minute and that minute is worth more than $1, you’ll go ahead and clean that pot, but if your plate takes two minutes to spruce up, and you’ll be late to work if you don’t get out the door, you’ll forgo that dollar. Rodolfo doesn’t have to worry about getting to work so he’s happy to clean up your leftover hashish for a buck. So each roommate cleans to a level that benefits himself. The result is no more living organisms in the kitchen sink.

In some cases, the Dirty Dish Tax may not work. Implementing a Dirty Dish Tax will be more difficult with more dish-dirtying dudes in the hacienda. If you live with 10 roommates and only three want to play the game, you will not escape the fragrance of moist, week-old pizza crust or fusty old beer. And you might also want to implement some sort of exchange rate. If all dishes cost $1 to clean, odds are you will have plenty of clean spoons, but the great tower of “Pot, Kettle and Pan” will be built for all who enter the kitchen to marvel at.

If the repulsive aroma of putrefied peaches and moldering mashed potatoes is not enough incentive to turn you into Mr. Clean, try implementing the Dirty Dish Tax and maybe the almighty dollar will push you and your buds to keep the foray of fungi at bay.

— Davidson is a Tonganoxie senior in economics.

Comments

Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.

Advertisement