WHEREIN I SOLVE THE DEBT CRISISThe deadline to raise the debt...
WHEREIN I SOLVE THE DEBT CRISIS
The deadline to raise the debt ceiling is almost here. On August 2nd, if we haven't increased our limit on the great big credit card in the sky, also known as China, the world as we know it will end and everybody, including you reading this, will die.
Just kidding.
Some of the things that will happen, though, include drastic, forced budget cuts, a disruption of Social Security and Medicare, and difficulty paying all those soldiers fighting all those wars to keep our country so free. Our credit score will plummet and it will be difficult in the future to borrow money, which will be terrible beyond words for a nation of consumers that no longer generates its own wealth.
Right now, very important people wearing very similar clothing are trying to hammer out a deal to borrow more money so that we can keep on borrowing more money.
The Democrats want to raise taxes. They call it "closing loopholes" or "letting tax cuts expire," but it's really just raising taxes.
Economists will tell you it's a bad idea to raise taxes when the economy's tanking. Rich people, you see, create new jobs by their investments and spending.
And, golly gee, just look at all those jobs they've been creating!
Republicans, in keeping with their philosophy of "I got mine. Screw you," want to cut a bunch of programs that help people instead of raising taxes. They say we need to control spending, which is pretty hilarious when you realize that there's no money to spend, much less control how it's spent.
In short, our government is working feverishly on both sides of the aisle to go further into debt.
But there is a solution, and it comes from the most unlikely of places: Wisconsin. Apart from cheese and being located next to Canada—America's hat—the only thing Wisconsin is known for is union-busting.
The governor up there, Scott Walker, successfully dismantled collective bargaining, rendering unions who work for the government essentially toothless. Most notably, this affected the teachers of Wisconsin, who were operating under the misapprehension that their jobs were somehow important.
He also got rid of the unions' right to claim work as 'union-only', meaning the state and county governments of Wisconsin can now use prison and jail inmates to do work they previously had to pay people for.
The union-busting law went into effect at the beginning of this month and already Racine county is taking advantage of its new labor market, using inmates to do landscaping, painting, and other basic maintenance once done by county workers.
"Scott Walker: Genius," it must say on his business card.
America's greatest untapped resource is not its children, who, let's be honest, are pretty stupid and don't do much besides play video games and text their friends. It's our prisoners. As the land of the free, we have the largest prison population on the globe, all of it going to waste. Even our creditor, China, with a national population four times greater than the U.S., has fewer prisoners. We're not even talking per capita either. They have fewer prisoners, period.
Nobody incarcerates like America.
It's a vast labor force that could be put to work essentially for free. They could catch all the stray dogs, clean up the garbage, build the roads, everything. Best of all, we wouldn't have to pay them dime one. Sure, we'd still have to give them baloney sandwiches and beat them with billy clubs when they get out of line, but imagine the money we'd be saving!
The government (federal, state, and local) could even rent their prisoners out to corporations and businesses, thereby EARNING money. Instead of buying all our plastic crap, gizmos, and gadgets from overseas, we'd make everything right here at home. At gunpoint.
Our national debt would swiftly become a thing of the past. Rather than trying to figure out how to increase the amount of money to borrow, the very important people wearing very similar clothing would be free to do what they were hired to do: think up more laws.
Sometimes the obvious is the hardest thing to see, isn't it?
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