Dave Barry - Bad Habits

Government economists are always hopeful, for two reasons:

1. They have jobs.

2. If they aren’t hopeful, the President will fire them.

So government economists go around with big smiles on their faces all the time. For the past thirty years, presidents increased spending deficits like clockwork, and the government economists smiled. Then Ronald Reagan said he was against big spending and deficits, and the government economists smiled. Now it turns out that spending and deficits are still going up, and the government economists are still smiling. Phyllis George would be a good government economist.

The big question, of course, is, What can we, as citizens, do for the government during the recession? Well, for one thing, it would be a big help if we would stop being unemployed in such large numbers. A lot of us have managed to get ourselves unemployed lately, and some of us are guilty of extremely high interest rates. As a result, we are making it very difficult for government economists to remain hopeful. So far they have managed to pull it off, but it’s only a matter of time before they start to feel depressed:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Calculations announced today that the nation’s economy is going to hell in a hand basket and probably will never get better. “I’m so sorry, but I just can’t feel hopeful about anything anymore,” said government economist Elwood Welt, clutching a fifty-pound block of government surplus cheese. “We’ve tried everything. We’ve tried coming up with new statistics, and more recently, we’ve started using more color charts, but the truth is we are all very depressed about the economy and will probably take the rest of the day off.”

What makes international finance so fascinating is that, thanks to the miracle of modern electronic banking, you are linked financially with billions of people you don’t even know, which means the actions of a deranged scum-bucket politician in some country you never even heard of could cause you to lose your home and your life’s savings and wind up living in a cardboard refrigerator carton and licking discarded candy wrappers for nourishment. This has caused some people to be concerned about their banks. The banking industry has responded with reassuring television commercials, wherein a man wearing a reassuring suit says:

“We’re the nation’s banks, and we’re not the least bit worried about anything, which is why we’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to let you know that nobody is worried about anything. Here, for example, is an extremely solid bank. Just look at this momma.” (Here he kicks the bank.) “You’re talking solid masonry construction. And on top of that, your deposits are protected by the full faith and credit of the United States Government, the same organization that gave so many of you shots for swine flu. This means that if anything goes wrong with the banking system, your elected representatives will fly back from Switzerland or France or wherever they are, and they’ll hold press conferences and call each other names, and eventually they’re bound to come up with a nifty plan to get your money back. So there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all. Forget we even brought it up. Thank you.”

To illustrate how you are connected to international finance, let’s look at how the banking system works. First, people like yourself deposit money in banks. The banks put the money in their safes, where the amounts gradually increase thanks to the sound banking practice of never lending money tO people like yourself. Eventually the bankers at the smaller banks get nervous about having all that money around, so they transfer it to gigantic international banks in New York, in return for which they receive very attractive desk calendars. At this point, the gigantic international bankers are sitting around, wondering what to do with the money, when officials of a country such as Poland pull up in a taxi, race into the bank without paying the driver, and apply for a loan:

BANKERS: And just how much money did you have in mind?

POLISH OFFICIALS: We were thinking in terms of one million trillion dollars in small bills. BANKERs: That’s a great deal of money for us to lend to people who have horribly mismanaged their country’s economy for years and whose authority depends on the armed oppression of the Soviet Union. What assurance do we have that you can repay us?

POLISH OFFICIALS: We’re willing to sign our names to several pieces of paper.

BANKERS: Would tens and twenties be okay?

The Polish officials flee back to Poland with the money, all of which immediately disappears into the black market in exchange for Elton John records. After maybe five years, the international bank sends Poland a letter:

Dear Poland:

This is just a friendly note to remind you that, according to our records, you now have a past due balance of $832,674,709,908,772.54. Although we value you as a customer, continued tardiness in payment on your part could force us to precipitate an international banking crisis.

Warmest regards,

Your Gigantic Full-service International Bank

So the Poland officials telephone the bank collect and, shouting to be heard over the Elton John record playing in the background, claim the check is in the mail.

Over the years, this process has been repeated with so many countries that virtually all the money originally deposited in U.S. banks is now in the hands of foreign street vendors, which is why your local bank is willing to give you calculators and toasters if you’ll deposit more money. This can’t go on, of course. Already, some banks have taken drastic corrective action in the form of lending more money to foreign countries so they can make their interest payments. But this may not be enough; we may soon see a day when the United States Government, fed up with the incredible stupidity of the international bankers, finally steps in and gives them enormous amounts of money taken from taxpayers, which is only fair, because the taxpayers were the ones who got the toasters.

The reason that you are not extremely wealthy, of course, is that you do not carefully keep track of your finances. John D. Rockefeller carefully kept track of his finances, and he ended up with so much money that he started giving it away in bales, and many of his offspring became governors. For a while there, we barely had enough states for Rockefellers to be governors of. So if you want your offspring to be governors, you should drive down to your local office-supplies store and get yourself a little accountant-style notebook and immediately start writing down your expenses:

Accountant-style Notebook—$7.97

Gas Used to Get to Store for Accountant-style Notebook—$1.14

Depreciation on Car—$4.34

Parking—$0.25

Beef Jerky Purchased at Convenience Store on Way Home—$0.49

Damage to Fender Caused by Uninsured Motorist While Car Was in Convenience Store Parking Lot—$385.62

Knife Wound Suffered in Argument—$1,830.88

Legal Fees—$12,757.21

See? You’re on your way to riches. Not only do you know exactly where your money is going, but all these items are tax-deductible, provided you were talking to your lawyer when you ate the beef jerky.

When you get home, you should sit down and try to figure out what your major assets are. There are two kinds of assets: “liquid” assets are the ones you have already spent, and “solid” assets are the ones you still have. In our household, our major asset is roughly $4,000 worth of pennies under the furniture. These pennies are a fairly solid asset, because to get them we would have to crawl around and stuff them into those little wrappers you get at the bank, and the bank probably wouldn’t accept them anyway, because of the high floor-lint content. Our other major solid assets are: