Much ado about nothing
– a mere $55,000,000,000,000
by Robert LaFrance
As we speak, our country, that we call Canada and Quebeckers call ‘them’, has a public debt of $563 billion, while the Congress of the United States of America and the president are wrestling with their national debt of about $55 TRILLION. We don’t seem to be panicking about ours, but they sure are in a tizzy about theirs, which is ten times ours, just as their population is. For weeks we have been hearing news reports that, if the Republicans or Democrats over there don’t soon agree on spending cuts and tax increases, the U.S. will ‘officially’ be in default of its loans.
I’ve been in default of many things in my 63 years, but in 1968, when I hadn’t made a student loan payment for a year, bank officials sent me a long and eloquent letter that used the words ‘default’ and ‘jail’ several times. Six months later I was still 'in default', but also still out of jail, so maybe there’s hope for the U.S. of A. to stay out of the crowbar hotel a while longer.
The bright side is that six months after my second ominous notice that loan enforcers (A pair of menacing professors? Two elderly bank tellers?) would soon be paying me a visit, I had the whole $1400 paid off. I had found a job--driving a van and delivering laundered baby diapers in Hamilton, Ontario. Back then, the word 'laundered' didn't mean quite the same as it does today.
If President Obama and enough influential Congressmen read this column—and I’m sure they will as usual—I hope they read the following: I have two solutions to their dilemma.
They should pay attention to the fact that I had found a job. And no, I didn’t invade Iraq because my daddy hadn’t taken out its dictator and I wanted to be Cowboy #1 in the family. Besides delivering cleansed diapers, I was working in a factory in Burlington, Ontario and saving every cent I could for paying off that loan.
I’m not suggesting that the president of the U.S. send the wife and kids out to work at Canadian Canners; there’s the problem getting work permits and all that. I am saying that the U.S. should invade another country; that always stimulates their economy, and this time they should invade a country which is agriculturally based, so that as soon as the troops get in there with their Coke machines and get the local citizens calmed down, the soldiers can start working on farms instead of patrolling the streets of hellholes like Baghdad where friend and enemy are interchangeable.
Which country should they invade, you ask? Quite obvious I would have thought—the Netherlands. The Dutch people are hard working, peaceful, intelligent and without a religious fanatic every two metres. I am thinking that they work very hard on their farms and could use the help. No shooting please, and don’t wear your uniforms to the invasion. Just think, within months those U.S. soldiers would be trained in farming and could go back to the Bronx and Watts, the ‘Combat Zone’ in Boston (where the late Richard Hatfield often wandered), or Idaho and show them how to farm. Maybe build some dikes in Death Valley. Then, when the first ones were trained, another invasion by the U.S. would train more soldiers to farm, and so on. The overworked Dutch farmers could sit back and relax once the U.S. soldiers were trained, and the U.S. would finally invade a country where the people appreciated the help. Instead of hearing news reports about the ‘prosecution’ of the war costing the U.S. economy five billion dollars a day, we would hear that, like their Los Angeles Olympics, the U.S. would finally make money on what was once a cash sewer.
Now let us go on to the second solution to the U.S. problem of debt. Their television news readers always emphasize the word TRILLION when they talk about it, but is it really a trillion? Here in North America, we refer to a trillion as a thousand billion dollars; that’s a number one followed by twelve zeroes, but in Europe a trillion is a one followed by eighteen zeroes.
You see my point? Overnight, the U.S. debt becomes $55 BILLION instead of $55 trillion and, as a wonderful bonus for us above the 49th parallel, we would then owe just over half a billion dollars. Of course I could be wrong.
On a side note, I found it interesting when I looked up Canada’s Debt Clock on the Internet (http://www.davemanuel.com/canada-debt-clock.php) and saw that the ones who run the website had felt it important to inform us they were calculating this in Canadian dollars. What else would the Canadian debt be recorded in? Rupees?
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment