Criminals
run everything. That’s an undisputed fact. Like, 100% undisputed. And that’s
why the American economy is sicker than I get the morning after Tequila
Tuesdays at my neighborhood taco shop. They love me there. The owner always
calls me “Gringo” and “Pendejo” which he says mean “Friend” and “Stellar Guy.”
I love that place…
But
back to the state of our current financial hell. We certainly seem to be up
shit’s creek. And much of the world seems to be right there with us. Somewhat
because of us, in fact. And then there are the countries that aren’t suffering
so badly, but those aren’t great places to live anyway. Look at China, for
example. The chief reason that their economy is doing so well is because
they’re totally fine with cutting down every tree they have just so they can build one more
factory, smog is their number one export, and they haven’t spent any money on
fuel since they discovered that peasants and excess baby girls burn as
efficiently as coal. There’s no way Americans would want to live like that.
Plus, we don’t have that many extra babies.
What
we need to do is focus on our own specific problems, analyze them in minute
detail, and come up with sound fiscal plans. As it stands, though, identifying our
problems is about as difficult as putting your whole fist in your mouth (i.e.
fairly easy), but coming up with a plan is as difficult as getting your fist
back out of your mouth (i.e. “Itth acgualllly wullly hawd”).
You
can look at the situation that’s been going on with questionable business
practices and how that translates to trading on the stock market. Everyone
agrees that there is a problem related to corporations and Wall Street (slide
that fist in the mouth…), but then half the analysts argue that we need more
oversight and stricter regulations, whereas the other half of the analysts call
for no oversight and complete de-regulation. Oh, look at that. Your
fist is stuck in your mouth. Wow. It’s really jammed in there. And since we’re
America, we slathered that fist with bacon grease thinking that would make it
easier to pull out, and now… Hey! Hey, stop that America! Quit trying to eat
your own fist! God damnit, America. How embarrassing.
The baby can get his fist in his mouth. Now you should try it to prove
you're smarter than the baby.
But
I, for one, can’t fix that problem with Wall Street and big business. I wish I
could. I could have gone to business school, studied macroeconomics and the
ever-changing dynamic global capitalistic market, but I didn’t. I studied
English Literature and got an arts degree instead. Sorry mom and dad. Now I can
dexterously discuss Proust and Shakespeare, I can provide an in-depth critique
of postmodern texts, and I can even delve into… wait for it… gender studies.
GASP! But I don’t have the necessary skills to talk about most of the economic
problems we face right now that are all the rage in Washington debates. I
briefly considered going back to school and earning a business degree in
research for this post, but honestly, it takes me long enough to write one of
these articles as it is, so I nixed that plan. Not to mention the fact that
you’d have to be a complete fucking idiot to go back to school in this economic
climate and incur more debt*. (*Note: this author just wasted TONS of money
applying for grad school (Sorry mom and dad. Again))
No,
I can’t help with those problems, but maybe I can still find my own ways to
help with America’s economy. There are things we can all do, really, like
saving our money, buying only practical items and not wasting our pay on
frivolous purchases, making sound investments that help up-and-coming
businesses grow, or eating healthy and exercising so we don’t spend all our money on
doctors bills and shitty insurance plans that really don’t help us much anyway.
But those are all common sense ideas. Anybody could come up with those. In
fact, I’m sure 90% of Americans already do all that stuff. So our economy needs
more than that. It needs some fresh ideas that no one’s thought of yet, and I
just might be the man for the job.
1) Get
rid of the anti-smoking ads.
What
used to be America’s best export? Not cars, not electronics, not steel. It was
Cool. The best thing we gave the world was our Coolness. It started all the way
back when the first travelers came across the Atlantic. They had the balls to
sail uncharted waters in shitty weather and tell the kings and queens of their
old countries, “Fuck you, I don’t need your shit anymore.” That’s the attitude
of a teenager leaving their parents’ house to move in with some slutty
boyfriend/girlfriend. It’s shortsighted and immature, but it worked out. This
spirit continued with the badass pioneers and cowboys, which is when other
countries really started to sit up and take notice of our crazy
balls-to-the-walls method of doing things. We risked our lives to do shit that
hadn’t been done before. Then some drunk hillbillies and blind black dudes got
together and started a kind of music called Rock’n’Roll. There are countless
other examples showcasing how absolutely Cool we were. It wasn’t perfect, by
far, but Cool never is. That’s part of what makes it Cool though.
Somewhere
along the way, we lost that. Now we have people on the left making us look like
wussy babies, and people on the right making us look like cranky scared old
fogeys. Now, when Americans feel that familiar impulse to be reckless, instead
of plugging in an amp and playing a guitar chord so powerful it blows out our
neighbors’ windows, we just Big-E-Size our fast food meals and get fat.
I was going to tag something scathing and political, but I got hungry and forgot.
We
need to start smoking again. Everyone. Men. Women. Kids. Bring back the
Marlboro Man and Joe Camel. Start airing commercials for filterless Lucky
Strikes again. How cool was it that Obama used to smoke?!? We had a president
that smoked. And then we lost that again. Well, kind of. I have a sneaking
suspicion that Obama still smokes on occasion, just not in front of Michelle or
his daughters, or any cameras. Think about it: you know in your heart that when they saw the footage of U.S. troops kill Osama Bin Laden, Barack and Joe Biden
lit up two huge cigars, drank beers, and laughed their asses off all night
until they both puked. My point is, if we get rid of the anti-smoking ads and
get everyone smoking, then the rest of the world will start to think we’re Cool
again. They’ll want to be like us just the way they used to. If they think
America is badass, they will buy all of our other shit so they can emulate us
to the max!
Residual Effects: With the
anti-smoking ads gone, pro-smoking ads will return, along with other reckless,
crazy, cool ads for other bullshit, and after all it’s really advertising that
has always driven the American economy. Also, due to the abysmal health problems
associated with smoking, we will pump all of our money into the healthcare and
insurance industries which can become the new backbone of America’s financial
growth.
2) We
need more Katy Perry music videos.
Hey,
don’t get pissed at me for saying that. I hate her music more than most people.
I hate her music more than your neighborhood pedophile hates it when you’re
being an attentive parent. I’m just the messenger. This is the medicine, and
you’ll just have to choke it down.
Why
will this work? Because, sadly, there are enough people who like her music.
Then, beyond the tendency of masses of people to like horrendous music, lays
the phenomenon that when pop music stars are at their peak popularity, they
attract the attention and energy of Every Other Pop Music Star In The Universe.
Their popularity becomes a type of gravitational pull, drawing more and more
trite music stars into their field of influence, regardless if those other
“artists” are popular or not themselves. Eventually, the force becomes so
intense that a MegaPopBlackHole forms, consuming MTV (all of them),
entertainment/gossip shows, the radio, magazines, the internet, and iTunes.
This is a phenomenon, called the Neal-Einstein Quantum Suckfest, in which the pop
star’s crappiness is exponentially proportional to how massively popular they
can become with the addition of more crappy stars. That’s a real law of
theoretical physics, by the way. You could look it up, but you don’t have a
physics textbook.
This SuckFest briefly formed after a rumor that Lady Gaga and Coldplay would get together for a Hamburger Helper commercial on the Opera Network.
Katy
Perry is nearly at this level of super-stardom. Don’t get me wrong, I know
she’s already huge and successful, but she’s not quite there. Let’s review her
progression to the Quantum Suckfest. She apparently kissed a girl and
apparently she liked it. That’s great. Annoyingly catchy song sure to piss off
parents, make teenagers giggle, and then add to that the irony that she’s made
ignorant homophobic comments in the past. Then she has some dumb and over-sexed
song/video with Snoop Dogg in it for some reason. More pissed off parents, more
giggling teenagers, and more pop culture paradoxes. Next, she marries Russell
Brand (and is now probably divorcing him). Finally, we’re getting to the point
where the pop gravitational forces are sucking so hard that I’m getting
light-headed.
What
we need now to push this mess over the edge is for Perry to come out with a
song/video incorporating Rebecca Black and Justin Bieber. The song can be
titled, “Saturday: the follow-up to ‘Friday’ because Saturday comes after
Friday.” Timbaland can produce it, then Weezer can show up for some reason, and
the video will have some of those “I Can Has Cheezburger” cats in it. The
media will go nuts. The video will stream on the internet and play repeatedly
on Fox News around the clock. Rumors of a Perry/Black/Bieber threesome will be
so shocking and titillating that it will boost digital sales of the song, and
the scandal will revive the printed newspaper. Finally, the porn industry will
make countless movies of the “Saturday Threeway,” hiring so many “actors” that
the unemployment rate will drop to negative numbers.
Residual Effects: Russell Brand
gets jealous of all the attention his (ex-)wife is getting, so he continues to
star in and ruin remakes of more classics like “Arthur” which keeps dumb people
going to the theater. Or the world completely fucking ends.
3) We
need a tax on Douchebag Words.
Okay,
so I already said that I didn’t have a solution to the complicated and troublesome
relationship between corporations, the stock market, and government regulation,
but this idea comes close. I know I’m not an analyst, so my idea can’t really
rely on math and statistics. I can’t even use the knowledge of the past that a
historian might utilize to predict and ultimately control the flow of future
financial market trends. Rather, my idea has to do with holding our leaders
accountable.
In
the political arena you can see a lot of people standing on their soapboxes.
I mean, what are they doing up there on boxes of soap anyway? And this is even worse now
that it’s election season. Yet, for all the yelling, all the hot air, and all the
finger pointing, these politicians have no real answers or substantial
solutions. There's just a lot of that Fist In Mouth Disease going around. Like I mentioned earlier, half of them want stricter rules and the
other half want looser rules. And maybe they want more soap too? I'm not sure, I'm still trying to figure that one out. Regardless, the people in government, and even the citizens
of this country, are so evenly divided that neither side can
out-vote the other. It’s a stalemate.
But
what seem to be of agreement are the words. Both sides use the same tools, the
same rhetoric, the same vocabulary. And it’s all god-damned fucking terrible!
Each time I hear one of these sacks of shit say, “Main Street versus Wall
Street,” it makes me vomit blood. Every single time one of these POLITICIANS on
the election circuit tries to blame “those people in Washington” for the mess
we’re in my testicles scrunch back up into my abdomen. This goes double for
Obama since I actually kind of like that dude. But when he uses those same
buzzwords to try to rally his political base, he sounds like a twat.
Oh Holy Shit Bile Just Shot Out Of My Eye Sockets!!!!
That’s why we need to institute a tax on Douchebag Words.
We
keep arguing about taxes. Do we need to tax the rich, or the banks? Are there already too many
taxes? Should there be a flat tax? Do we need the Estate Tax? Should the
wealthy and privileged Americans pull more economic weight than people who
don’t have any money? Stop asking these questions. I propose that instead of arguing about whether to tax the rich, we tax the politicians who make our mess stickier than the green-brown blob in my fridge.
Who
runs for office? The wealthy. But not just any type of wealthy. They are the
people who have so much excess money and time, and such an urge to tell other
people how to act that they go into politics. They make Lex Luthor look like an adorable kitten who donates millions of dollars to charity. Poor
people can’t afford to run for office. And decent/sane people are afraid to do
it because some opponent will come out with an attack ad claiming that the
decent/sane person may have had sex with a dog while performing an abortion to
fund lesbian Islamists from Mexico.
We
don’t need to just tax the rich. We need to tax the Douchebag Words used by the
people who happen to be rich, crazy, and full of bullshit enough to run for
office. “Main St. vs. Wall St.” Oops, Douchebag Word Tax. “Our nation’s REAL values…” Oops, you just got Douchebag Word Taxed! “I think what America really
needs…” Oh, you just cost yourself $400,000. Wait, you just made some speech in Iowa
where you compared/contrasted the Tea Party in any way to Washington Fat Cats
twenty-three times? Ah, I’m sorry, that will cost you a hundred bucks each.
The
Douchebag Word Tax will force politicians to do something they haven’t had to
do since long before the McCarthy Hearings: think before they speak. Before
they regurgitate the same hack lines they think voters will respond to, they
will have to check their wallets. The other bonus is that, unlike any of the
current plans to fix the American economy, the Douchebag Word Tax has a
legitimate chance of passing a popular vote.
Residual Effects: Rich douchebags
go broke for talking out their asses, simultaneously paying off America’s
absurd debt. Also: some goddamned peace and quiet for a change.
Disclaimer: This article is satirical. I
have a PhD in Economics and in my expert opinion there is nothing that can save
us from ourselves.
