It is a slow day in the small South Dakota town of Pumphandle, and streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and nearly everybody is living on credit. A tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night. As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Co-op. The guy at the Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit. T he hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner. The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $ 100 bill and leaves. No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looks to the future with a lot more optimism . And that, folks, is how a Stimulus package works. |
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I like the ending, but I think the story needs an overhaul:
One day a travelor stops in town, and offers the unemployed hotel clerk $100.00 for being unemployed. He thanks the stranger, and asks where the money comes from, and receives this reply: "Its money I printed up, but don't worry, you can pay me later." The clerk thinks about it for a minute, he has bills due, he has been layed off for a couple months, what is there to loose? and takes the check. Every other person in town is in the same straights, except the local prostitute. It turns out that prostitution is the one occupation that gets better with downturned economy, and this has always been historically true. Why? Because as people loose hope, they stop saving, and start rebelling. However, very soon the community realizes that because they cashed the "free" checks, they now are in dept approximately $42,000.00 for every citizen in the US. It was only $33,000.00 last year.
The unemployed clerk is alarmed by this news. He decides to follow the trail of this IOU. He discovers that the government prints the money in the form of treasury notes. The notes are sold to investors, but mostly by the Chineese and Japaneese. While this is unsettling, he pursues it further. Turns out the treasury turns to the federal reserve in the financing of these notes. They collect interest based on the size of the US debt. The clerk then tries to figure out who exactly is collecting the interest, but is thwarted by a wall of inaccessability. Turns out the recipients of the interest don't wish to be named. Which raised a question in the mind of the clerk. Since the congress and president were the ones authorizing the stimulous that increased the debt, exactly who were they working for? The prostitute knew who she was working for, they paid her face to face. No money, no service. The clerk took the government money because he was being paid for not working,...not working was easy. But he wan't sure he wanted to be in debt to unknown people. His experience with unknown bill collectors wasn't that great.
One day later the clerk watched television. He watched as the Greeks finally realized they had no more money. Their country was officially bankrupt. He watched the riots which ensued as Greeks finally got message, the gravy train had ground to a halt. Greeks were told life would be difficult. The people blamed the government, but surely they knew there was a price to be paid.
The clerk turned off the tv. He could not believe the ending of the story. After all, this was as easy as kitchen table economics. Don't spend money you don't have, pay the bills before buying new stuff, and regard credit cards like the plague they are.
