The latte-a-day pitch.

Byline: The Register-Guard

It costs little to support charities, nonprofits and essential public services. Why, it costs less than the price of a latte a day. In fact, expressed in terms of lattes, nothing that government or nonprofit groups do costs much.

A property tax levy to support multidisciplinary integration of strategic learning modalities in public schools might sound like something that's not truly essential - but it costs only a latte a day, so what the heck. How about anger management through aromatherapy as a stress-reduction tool for employees of the bureau of departmental coordination? A latte costs more, so do it. Training war-displaced puppies in Montenegro, preserving threatened mudflat-dwelling arthropods in Ecuador, supplying low-emission hybrid-engine graphing calculators to inner-city engineers - for a latte or less, who can refuse?

It's brilliant marketing. There's something decadent about a latte, even when it's made with low-fat milk and decaf espresso. Just about anything is more important. The person who would deny funds to a good cause, or vote against taxes for a vital public service, and use the money to buy a latte instead, maybe with a squirt of vanilla and chocolate sprinkles, is self-indulgent, and should be made to feel guilty. Which is what the less-than-a-latte-a-day pitches are meant to do.

Of course, by the time you've funded bunion research, indoor snowboard parks and music for manatees, you've spent the equivalent of a lot of lattes. At $2.40 apiece, a latte a day adds up to $876 a year - and that's for the smallest size. With organizations of all kinds and governments at all levels clamoring for the equivalent of their daily lattes, people may be inclined to buy a pint of beer instead.

But still the latte pitch persists, because it's effective. And because it works, it's likely to be put to other uses. That $172 million deficit in the state Department of Human Resources is the equivalent of 20 lattes per Oregonian, or less than one every two weeks for a year - no problem. A trillion-dollar war in Iraq? A latte a day for every American for less than four years. The national debt? A little over 10,000 lattes per capita, or one a day for 28 years.

As long as there's a coffee shop nearby, everyone can be assured of having all the money they'll ever need.